Auto Blogging Makes a Pretty Pile of Crap

It feels like it is 2004-05 all over again. Back then people were spraying the web with keyword niche portals. Scraping the search engines for directory listings and building a huge vertical portal full of bullshit keyword listings. The money was fast and the fall was even faster. Today many of us are doing the same thing but now the means of delivery is with a blog. The kids call it auto blogging.

I have no problem with either method. Screw Google. If I can make a buck before they shut me down then I will. I am thrilled people continue to click on shitty Google ads. Actually I still have a couple Niche Portal Builder sites still raking in daily coin from Google. I built them in ’05 and still get clicks.

I get more offers for auto blog software than anything else these days. Some are plugins. Some are full blown site builders. And yea, I use(d) some. Hell I even tried out the mack daddy of them all, WP Mage. All these tools scraping feeds and videos and Amazon crap and Ebay junk and Yahoo Answers and Crapbank garbage all in a pathetic attempt at fooling Google engineers that the last post is “fresh” and “unique”. Whatever. It’s still simply a scrape of somebody else’s content. Just because you mix 137 modules together doesn’t make the resulting content unique. It’s like eating a hamburger, fries, pickle and cake and calling the resulting vomit fresh and unique.

No doubt it works. People are getting rich selling software to build this crap and there are dudes spraying hundreds of sites onto the web a day. If you have the time and motivation, why not? Thousands of crap blogs averaging a dollar per spam load is some real money. A fucking nightmare to manage and maintain but the money flows.

As I have mentioned I am pretty much done with self hosted blogs. I am reverting back to XSP static sites. I am sick and tired of managing blogs. Too much to go wrong. Every day there is a new version to install on WordPress. All those plugins need updating. Yea there are tools that you can use to manage your fleet of blogs from one console, but at what point did this become normal? And I despise the problems involved with databases at the hosting company.

I make some decent money in this racket. But honestly I feel like I am drowning. I see what I am fighting against. WP Mage. WP Robot.  EZ Empire Builder. WP Tweet Bomb. ReviewAZON. The list seems endless. People are using these tools to builds thousands of spam blogs every day/minute/second. Believe it.And think about all the traffic pulling tools used to drag some dipshit to your spam site. SEnuke. Brute Force SEO. And holy shit look at all the Twitter tools to advertise to all the other fake profiles that follow you.

This means to an end is madness.

My contribution to web spam is via free hosted blogs. For whatever they are worth. Blogger is basically useless unless you wring every ounce out of SEO as you can. But they are easily built. You might get lucky with Bing visitors. Maybe it’s worthwhile to build 5 on an account and figure you might make a dollar a day. Monitor the stats and see what keywords are worthwhile. I use MAR to post PLR on these. I use MAS to get them indexed. Easy and boring. Worthwhile? I dunno. Doesn’t seem like it is much anymore. But you gotta play the game.

I’ve spent the last few posts whining about the effort required to make money online. Keyword research is enough to make you want to poke your eyes out. Throw in backlink building and you might just find the white coats circling your position. Now you have content delivered by ingenious systems creating your basic pile of crap.

It’s really sad. There is no doubt you can make money online with a great idea. You can even do it for free. But you have to understand that you are going to be smothered by a mountain of shit that you are going to have a hard time digging out of.

I can appreciate you folks that have a money site that is making $3K a month with 500 visitors a day. I’m glad that your site selling butterfly poop has discovered it’s niche and is making money. Unfortunately until I find a niche that I can flog to greatness the “easy” money is to spray and pray. The problem is that it isn’t really easy. It’s time consuming. It’s a house of cards. I would never quit my full-time  job on the back of spam blogs, Hubpages and Squidoo lens.

I wouldn’t recommend half-assing auto blogging. You either go big or not at all. Assuming you want more than play money out of this deal, of course. And of course you can utilize auto blogs for satellite sites to support your money site. It can be worthwhile.

Auto blogging is the latest tool to wring out a few coins from the Google teet. It’s amazing to me that our normal is to build and build and build and build… I just don’t really know a way out of it. It works. The tools do help you make money. The tactic of spamming does make money. But it’s at the expense of your sanity.

You may be a fresh spammer ready to make the easy money.  But you’ll burn out soon enough. Your charred remains will be blowing across the scorched surface of the web while some tool builds a new tool to further the exploits of the next eager spam generation. Old hands that have survived the portals, Bum Marketing, PPC-X-Factor ShitStorm, Blogging to the Wank, etc. are simply addicted to the IM crack. Chasing a bigger and better high. Now it’s this auto blogging nonsense.

Auto blogging works right now. Guberus are loving that they can cash in on this trend. From WP Mage to support products like MAR, it’s all to build more, faster.  There are so many auto blog systems and plugins. Ask yourself how long this lasts? Google will render all these bullshit blogs inert one day. You can pretend that mishing and mashing all this content together makes it a better pile. But it’s still just a pile of shit. Google and Microsoft spends countless dollars and hours in shitty meetings with fat head engineers figuring out ways to make search better. Do you really think creating a franken-blog with plugins and shit makes for a better visitor experience? Stacking stolen content on top of an Amazon ad and review on top of a stupid video on top of Ebay products on top of a Crapbank offer on top of an RSS feed does not make an authority site. It makes a pile of shit. Even if you put it on top of a crystal plate with whipped cream. It’s still shit. And yes I KNOW it makes money. It doesn’t make it any less smelly.

I got an email today from The Keyword Academy. Apparently folks are trying to run spun or duplicate content through their traffic system. That doesn’t make Mark and Court happy. They call it laziness. I say they couldn’t be more right. I’m no longer sending TKA monthly dues so it affects me not. But it is like the canary in the coal mine. At some point using that content will not make anyone happy. But for now you can bet I’m going to contribute my load of spun spam to wherever I can fling it. I would also argue that because I start out spinning my articles with very good content, you wouldn’t know that my submission was spun. I mention this because I’m not done rambling and because it’s just something else to deal with for your shitty niche and auto blogged sites. I laugh at the thought of TKA clamping down on spam submissions while the links distributed in the allowed prose is to spam generated sites. The irony…

I remain on the same path. I gather keywords from MNF. I analyze them with MS. If I think I found something with great potential I will create an XSP site with as many pages as I can create. All manual. All original. All unique. If I don’t feel like buying a domain or I’m dubious about the potential I will build Hubpage, Squidoo lens or Blogger blog. I’ll write a long initial post. With any site I’ll spin content with MAR and submit it to directories using MAS and AMA. I’ll do a few BMD runs. Pure laziness. NOT! Just time efficient. If my keyword selection was good I should start to see traffic. I’ll analyze the stats and see what I need to write about on subsequent posts. If Squidoo or Hubpages are doing good then I may buy a domain and use the keywords that people are using to find those to write fun and exciting content.

I’m not auto blogging. I don’t want to buy thousands of domains. I don’t want numerous hosting accounts. If that is what it takes to stand beside a Porche or blog from my boat then I’m cool doing without. I’m annoyed at the sheer number of offers for this tactic. I wonder how long it will continue to last. We are already seeing a ton of courses being offered to learn how to auto blog. Usually when that occurs, my experience is that we are seeing the end of the wave. Nobody is going to teach a tactic that is working for them. Who wants the competition and added attention from Daddy G?

I begrudge nobody from flogging this method. The competent marketers will roll a lot of coin. The concept would make it seem like a real time saver. Autoblogging allows you to go to the beach everyday and make easy money. It’s on auto, right? Funny thing is, the method is so low rate that you have to spew hundreds if not thousands of blogs to make it worthwhile. So you need an auto blog system for your auto blogs. Otherwise you will be sitting in front of the LCD creating  auto blog after auto blog. Seems like the hassle is a continuation of the pain you are trying to escape. You are trying to make things easier only to find yourself trapped in another circlejerk. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are magic marketers that got these tools online, set up 20 blogs and are living it up in Tahiti. Auto blogging away.

It’s funny to me that nothing has really changed. Keyword generated mass sites. Auto blog. The dung beetles simply moved from one shit pile to another.

Tagged as: auto blogging, Blogging