One of the most thankless tasks in website or blog management is sourcing the articles that will become the site’s pages or posts. I have previously written about ArticleBuilder, a very good tool that we use all the time in creating automated blogs. Another tool that I use and recommend is Orwell a free content research and formatting tool and its paid version OrwellPro

Orwell is a content research tool based upon the ContentRover database. ContentRover spiders many article and press release sites and stores meta data about the content it finds so that users can then find the content they need. Orwell and Orwell Pro give a nice interface to ContentRover and then adds some very useful tools to enable webmasters and content researchers to check, edit, format articles then and export the content to one’s PC or directly to several applications.

When you fire up Orwell you simply use a search term - keyword and ContentRover will research the content and provide basic stats from the articles, keyword density, word count etc.
Then Orwell gives you tools to very rapidly work on the content. You can check the keyword density for any keyword/phrase that you choose, not only the ones that ContentRover has in its database. Then you can do a, limited, check for the number of times the article has been used elsewhere; in general the more an article has been used elsewhere the less use it is in trems of search engine rankingsalthough the article may well be worth publishing becasue it benefits your readers and adds to their experience on your site.

If, after checking, you decide to use the article then you can edit the it. Orwell automatically parses the article into seperate boxes for title, author, body and resourcebox - obviously any editing should be done within the terms of use of the content.
Then you can add a commentary of your own to add your own spin and context which will, at the same time help to make the resultant page unique in the context of SE’s and any duplication filters.

When you have done all that you can recheck the keyword densities and fine tune your copy to hit the log-tail keywords for which you are hoping to rank and then save the finished article as an HTML or text document ready to drop into your page builder. Often page builders can take the created files as a complete folder and make your pages up without any further work from you. Or you can export direct to ContentComposer, if you are using that tool for content management.

OrwellPro
If you want to then you can export directly to WordPress, XsitePro or PortalFeeder as well as the basic HTML and txt formats. To do so you’ll need to pony up a little money for OrwellPro. You also get better support for checking for the amount of use that an article has had.

I have quite a few clients using Orwell in free and pro versions. Pro really comes into its own if you are making lots of sites and use the tools it supports. If you only make a few sites and/or don’t use the supported tools then Orwell free is all you need.
I think that you will know if, or when, you need to buy OrwellPro so don’t think about it until you keep wanting to press the ‘Post to WordPress blog’ button.

With OrwellPro you have the facility to build your own page templates for whatever kind of site you want. You can lay out your template with ‘tokens’ that tell Orwell where to put content. That way you can easily personalise the pages you make and upload to your site and once you have made a template then you can keep on using it. This has potential in automated blogs where you can easily add banner ads or other items to your articles, newsletter signup pages or other tools to your posts.

It is perfectly possible to do all the above operations with other tools, it just is less convenient and easy.
What I liked about Orwell when I got it a couple of years ago was that it gave me the tools I needed in a single interface. I no longer had to copy/paste content from one place to another to simply check keyword density and I could now work in a structured manner, doing the tasks in a sensible order. This was, for me, a big time saver.

Orwell is NOT an automated content scraper. It is designed for site builders who want to take control of the process of content research and ensure quality; hence the ‘hands on’ nature of Orwell’s operation.

I downloaded Orwell when it first came out. I think it is a great tool for those seeking to research content and place it into websites and blogs. If you are a automated blogs user/blogger wanting to post the freshest content that fits your log tail keyword needs then Orwell is the way to go but I suggest that you don’t buy OrwellPro until you have used the Orwell free version first.