In the last week Ive had 3 emails from makers of Automated Blogging tools,
scripts and plugins (or RSS to Blog tools) asking me to promote their
plugins and systems.
These tools all claim to be able to help you create content for your blog
without you having to do anything except set it up, choose a keyword/s for
your blog to be about.
The tools sales pages usually make claims like:
create targeted blog posts on any topic without writing anything!
start hundreds of blogs on any topic and never have to lift a finger to
keep them pumping out as much content as you like!
generate traffic, money and blog posts while you sleep!
Achieve Higher Search Engine Rankings And Massive Affiliate Revenue With
Self Updating Blogs
You get the picture - the list of the hyped up claims that the developers
of automated blogging tools make goes on and on!
The fact that these people are asking me to promote these kinds of tools
scares me a little as Ive been pretty anti them in the past and dont want
to be associated with the in any way.
However it also makes me wonder how many bloggers are innocently signing up
for them without knowing the dangers of doing so. After-all the sales copy
on many of these tools sounds too good to be true - blogging made easy,
lots of money, no work.
As a result I thought Id put together a list of reasons why I would avoid
auto blogging tools at all costs.
Reasons to avoid Automated blogging Tools and Services:
1. Non Unique Content - at the heart of every successful and profitable
blog that Ive come across is unique content. Auto blogging tools all take
content from other places on the web and automatically pull them together
on your blog. They replicate what others are doing. They create duplicates
of other peoples work. Its not unique, its not original and it creates
clutter.
Many of the automated blog tools sales pages say you can add to the content
that these auto blogging tools use to add uniqueness to your blog but Id
argue that if youre creating hundreds of blogs its pretty unlikely that
youll be adding unique posts to many of them.
Blogs that are not unique, that dont have a personal voice, that contain no
original thought dont tend to get links from other blogs, dont tend to
attract subscribers, readers or comments and dont generally rank well in
Google or other search engines.
2. Useless Content - the other main factor in successful blogs is that they
create useful content - the type of content that solves peoples problems,
helps them solve a problem and makes their lives better in some way.
While some might argue that automated blogging tools can help people by
finding this type of information my observation of most of them in action
is that they are very hit and miss. Most rely upon you identifying keywords
that you want your blog to be about and they then go searching for all
kinds of content on those keywords.
As a result you can be publishing who knows what on your blog. Some of it
may be useful but some of it might be completely irrelevant and even
potentially harmful to readers. Many automated blogs that I come across are
a step up from being gibberish.
3. Personal Satisfaction - early in my own blogging I created a number of
blogs that I called link blogs. They looked at what others were writing
online and manually (no tools) collated some of it onto one site. I added
some of my own thoughts and it did provide usefulness to readers because it
was high quality and all in the one place for readers - but the process
almost killed my passion for blogging. It was an empty process for me with
no real sense of satisfaction. I stopped doing these kinds of blogs (even
though they did make me money and readers complained that it was useful to
them).
At its best - blogging is an exciting, interactive and fun experience that
can give you inspiration, ideas and energy. This kind of blogging (ie using
these automated tools) is about none of that.
4. Risk - all of the sales pages on these tools talk about how you can use
these tools with all kinds of content legally by using content from sites
with APIs, open source content or creative commons content. However almost
every time Ive come across a blog using automated blogging tools they have
been scraping content from other blogs without permission from their RSS
feeds.
Some blogs allow you to use their content but most do not. Theres real risk
in using content from other sites in this way on a number of levels:
Breaking Copyright - use the wrong persons content without your permission
and you could end up on the end of legal proceedings.
DMCAs and Risk to Your Hosting and Ad Partner Relationships - when I catch
someone scraping my content I generally give them a warning but follow that
up by issuing DMCAs to them, their sites host and sometimes their
advertisers (like AdSense). This can lead to you losing your hosting and
being banned from ad networks (for example AdSense dont allow you to put
your ads on pages where you dont own the copyright of the content). I know
a lot of bloggers who issue DMCAs without warning and push a lot harder on
these issues than I do - it can be a nightmare to have to work through
these kinds of things.
Damage to Your Brand - many bloggers skip the DMCA process and go with a
name and shame approach and publically call out those who steal their
content. This can have a lasting impact upon your brand and personal name.
Theres nothing worse than doing a Google search for your name and seeing
the #1 result being a post an angry blogger wrote about you stealing their
content.
Google Penalties - ever heard of duplicate content? Its what Google calls
content that appears in more than one place on the web. I dont know exactly
how they treat this content but do know that they try to weed it out of
their search results. They dont get it all but they do get a lot of it and
I suspect that a site that is largely classified as duplicate will never be
seen as an authoritative site on Google.
5. Create Something Worthwhile - my take home advice for bloggers is to
create something online that is worthwhile, something that matters,
something that inspires, informs and educates. Do this over the long haul
and youll create something that not only means something but that has every
chance of having lasting success.
Ive heard from a few bloggers that theyve had some success with automated
blogging tools (although most of these were a couple of years back) but in
every case they tell me that its usually temporary. They start blogs, see a
bit of Google traffic before being banned from Google.
Their blogs never really amount to anything, they never build their own
profile or become known as authorities in their niches, they never create
useful sites that become niche leaders and to make money they have to keep
starting new blogs over and over again.
To me this seems like an empty existence.
Me - Id rather create something worthwhile that will not only survive but
that will grow in momentum, build my brand and mean something to people.
What are you experiences of automated blogging tools?
from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
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