Can you just take another article reword it in your own words and lay it out in a different structure? Or will Google notice the connection? Also, will sites like ezine ban you if you just reword another article already on your site? I'm not referring to article spinning either. Right now, my method is to use two articles as a reference and combine both contents in my own words/structure. The question is, exactly how lazy can you be with this? Right now it's taking me way too long to write articles.. 90-120 minutes per 1,000 word article.
Most lazy graps articles from another sites and publish to his site without modification. Second buys article from another writer. Third lazy uses rewriter tools. I am at third ...
If you want to be as lazy as possible, you are going to need to outsource your writing. It can be pretty cheap and is very effective if you don't like to write. Otherwise, writing a good article will take around your timeline, 1-2 hours.
Outsorucing may be your best bet. This way you can have a unique artucle which you have full rights on. It is however costlier tha writing your own content.
You can hire a writer on elance which can save you lots of time. Then you can turn one article into many by spinning them with software like TheBestSpinner. The more unique your articles are the more of them will stick.
I'd outsource it before taking either of the other available options. But, yes outside of the human edited directories you can certainly republish the exact same article elsewhere. I usually link back to the original ezine article though since that's what a blog owner would normally do. Plus, that seems to help the original ezine article rank really, really well.
Usually reading a portion of the story or a paragraph (sentence if you're extremely lazy) and then rewording it into your own words is a good bet to get past any alarms that might be sounded by Google or eZine. Just don't write anything in the same fashion as the original, be creative. If you have to, do it in reverse to the original. Or completely remove a point being talked about to a different section of the article. Mix it up, but don't sacrifice quality. Quality counts. It has to be readable, understandable to the person reading it.
It depends for what purpose I need the article., Generally for ezine submissions and writing for my clients I used to read 5-6 articles and then write completely unique article on it. But for building backlinks to my site I just take an article and rewrite it to make 100% unique and then submit it to various article directories except ezine and other web2.0 properties..