I recently saw a listing at Flippa.com where the sales page talks of creating content for your blog without you having to do anything. The blog on sale was creating content based on an automated tool.
The sales pitch for the blog was as below:
“With this service you can create targeted blog posts, without writing. You can start hundreds of blogs on every possible topic and you don’t even have to know a single thing about it. You can generate the craziest amount of traffic to these blogs, while you sleep!”
Sounds great except that it does not do any good to your readers or to your blog. These blogs have built in auto blogging software that creates blog posts based on RSS feeds from other blogs. You don’t need to create any content for these blog as it pulls in the auto feed each time a new blog is posted.
Why you should avoid automated blogging
Below are six reasons why you should avoid automated blogging:
- No unique content
- Useless Content
- Building Trust
- The Google slap
- Blog shut down
- Short term success
If you a want to be successful at blogging, you need to create unique content. Every successful blog has unique content.
If your blog isn’t unique, you wont have a personal voice, you wont gain any trust from eventual readers, which means you probably will have to rely on Adsense with those 9 visitors you might be able to get.
Useful content is something that every successful ‘how-to’ blog is delivering. Successful blogs solves people’s problems.
When these automated tools import posts, they will most likely import posts from all over the blogsophere across all niches. So your blog will have posts from across all blog niches. Example: One post from a health blog and another from a gambling site.
When you have “no unique content ‘ and ‘useless content’ you will not be able to create a community or a readership following. There will not be any trust for your blog.
Google hates spammy Google views most of these automated blogs as spammy, they provide no value to the user and have tons of duplicate content. Duplicate content is content that appears on more than one website on the web. Domains that are classified as duplicate content domains will never be seen as an authority by Google.
You will not increase your page rank and if you have a page rank it will eventually drop.
Your host can eventually shut down your blog. If you republish a blogger’s content, that blogger could contact your host and get your blog shut down in a matter of minutes.
You may have heard or seen an automated blog claiming to make good money via ads or Adsense, but its only temporary, these blogs have a short life span and can make only a few dollars before they are shut down or banned.
Have you used any automated blogging tools?
What you as a real and a clean blogger can do is to create worthwhile, useful and unique content. You can make readers come back, because of your extraordinary content. I would rather create something that is long-term and not happens overnight, than something short-term that happens overnight.
Have you used any automated blogging tools? Or just though about using it?
A guest post by ZK who runs a web marketing blog. He generally does not guest post but if given an opportunity makes the best of it. You can also follow him on Twitter. Want to guest post on HowToMakeMyBlog? See more info here.
Image by Jurvetson.
Join thousands of bloggers and get all my blogging tips for FREE! Subscribe to HowToMakeMyBlog via RSS or via e-mail.
If you liked this article, you may also like:
Why I run my blog on Thesis Wordpress Theme
Thesis theme gives my blog a professional, clean, easy-to-read layout and SEO friendly design. Thesis makes it simple to make your own blog unique. See more details and get your own Thesis today.
{ 22 comments }
I have, and still do, use a similar software tool. I use it for blogs that I’m using to monetize of off using Adsense and affiliate sales. I check all content that’s posted before it goes up on the blog to make sure that the content will provide value to anyone who’s reading it. I do write some articles of my own, which I make sure is known in the posts.
With all of that being said, on personal blogs that I’ve had in the past, there’s no shot in hell that I’d use this software. All of the points made in the article are dead on, and exactly why I wouldn’t use them on my personal blogs.
I don’t know which software you’re referring to, but it’s also important to check out the software before you buy an use it.
Great article, points an blog.
- Joey Goodman aka Joey Buddha
Hi Joey,
Most of these automated blogging software are used to make money from adsense, I am not sure if it will work for affiliate sales as that requires a personal review to sell the product.
ZK,
It’s worked out pretty well for me with the affiliate sales. I use the banners and 125×125 ads provided to me in Commission Junction, and individual affiliates. The software does its job and drives the traffic to the site, and the ads are mixed into the site in different areas.
Again, I would NEVER think of using it for a personal blog, but for the purposes that I’m using it for, it gets the job done.
Rock on,
Joey G. aka Joey Buddha
I hate auto blog – that’s it. I would close down my blog if I can’t write than taking the help of some bots stealing others content.
Honestly, the closest someone can come to automating a blog is to batch-write a bunch of articles and schedule them for publishing.
A program might belt out loads of content, but if people don’t stick around, who cares?
Hi Marko Saric,
I am sorry for this off-topic comment. Would you mind telling how to split all posts into two columns? This makes my morning mess. I’ve researched thesis 1.7 two hours but I still get no any clue.
Take care,
Jesse
Hi Jesse,
Go to Thesis > Page Options > Home Page Display and make the value 0. Then in Design Options, Teaser > Teaser Display Options, please check “post excerpt”.
It should be working fine, otherwise drop me an email hasan[at]hasan-online.com.
Cheers!
Thanks for helping out Hasan!
Lol, I’ve solved this stupid problem so please delete the previous comement.
I’ve found some people create beautiful autoblog and owned pr 5,6 while others stuff with adsense or other ads in the autoblog and makes it like a mess. But I have to admit that those guys are so smart because they know how to rewrite or translate article using php code. In order to prevent scraping, I am going to use tynt.com service in my new blog.
Regards,
Jesse
With Google constantly changing it’s search code, there will come a day when sites will also be ranked on their bounce rate and average page view times. This will hopefully bring a swift death to autoblogging!
You are right, these sites are not ranked high by Google and may not even appear in the search results. Article marketing is one way by which these sites pull in traffic
Jeez, automated blogging, what a disgrace – I totally agree with you. You should never even think about doing it – it’s horrendous.
Pour your unique soul into your blog, craft mind-blowing and unique content and promote your stuff – that’s how you become successful. Because is you care , your readers will care !
Forget the spammy stuff, and start being remarkable with your blog !!
If you use automated blogging tools, you may be able to fill up your site with Adsense ads but as I keep reading lately, that one source of income can run up in an instant. Because ads are usually the only source of income for these ‘copy and paste’ websites the option to say, publish an E-Book that will be purchased by loyal readers just won’t be there.
Tried autoblogging once on a throw away, testing site. It just didn’t work. I needed posts in a particular sub-niche, and 90% of what I got were posts from the much larger, more general parent niche. So the content rarely matched what I wanted, no matter how much I tweaked the settings.
Thanks for sharing such a great tips, which will be help to stop automatic blogging. Through this process not only we will loose our customer but also unique identity.
Really you have given right thinks to do blogging.
I’ve never used an automated blogging tool. Well, I did write a review for a content generator last summer (I was young, stupid and the company offered me a sweet affiliate deal) and wow did I get called out for it.
My readers don’t even appreciate me reviewing a tool like that on my blog, so I think a lot of them would flip if I actually used one. After that experience, I know these tools aren’t right for me. Great post, ZK.
This is what people call as splog that stands for SPAM BLOG
I have seen these automated blogging programs before. i looked at them and I thought that it was basically stealing. I know that I am fairly new to blogging but I have been writing articles for a while now and if I found someone that was literally stealing me content, I would be ticked.
Create good content that is valuable. That is what I think is important.
Steve
These tools seem counterproductive to me. You are going to spend a ton of playing games with it when you can just write unique content.
The most important of all is, this system of autoblogging actually promotes plagiarism in an automated manner. The WP Plugin wp-o-matic is also same thing. It is simply content theft.
Google official blog says there’s no penalty for duplicate content though! Google will still value duplicate content if there’s some more or extra useful content added to the duplicate portion. In that case, these plugins can be used to grab the main content, then put those posts to draft instead of publishing, then a blogger can modify portions and/or add some more views into it. But still, ethically it is not acceptable.
Really good post and it’s clear the subject evokes some strong feeling! I agree that quality matters and unique, hand crafted, genuine content is important (and is in many cases vital) but it takes a lot of time and isn’t always scaleable – and scalability is what some bloggers need in order to make a living and carry on what they are doing. (Of course some might argue that the purpose of blogs is not to make money and that is true for some people). Full automation meets the needs of some bloggers, 100% hands on work suits others, but a magic blend of automation and personal input can also work wonders. Imagine automating all the time-consuming tasks like managing datafeeds or tagging your blogs so that your personal input goes onto the more valuable tasks of crafting your thoughts, opinions and reviews. Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking you have to be ‘all’ automation or ‘no’ automation. Consider a happy blend. And yes, really look into any tools you do decide to try before handing over your cash!