Bloggers Festival Guru

Guest Post - Our host is David Lazar, here David takes a look at the autoblog trend that we have seen online recently.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

If you do a Google search for “automated blog posts” you will mostly find a bunch of tools that perform this function and a number of websites that promote automated blog posting as a great way to make some easy money quickly. While this type of practice could be able to yield you some money in the short run from Google AdSense, it’s generally not that lucrative in the long run.

Even though making a quick buck online always sounds tempting, here are some reasons why using automated blogging techniques for your personal blog is not a good idea overall.

Success is temporary

There are systems by which you can make money with automated blogging, but you will find out quickly that it is not worth the effort in the long run. The way that you make money is that you have some sort of tool that will either spin content for you or literally post duplicated content from other blogs onto yours. Keeping this type of high-volume content coming in will be able to garner you some money from AdSense for a short period of time, but it won’t last long.

The reason that automated blogging does not work is because it goes just about every ground rule of owning and operating a successful blog as a long term source of income. The first rule – and probably most important rule – of running a good blog is to make sure that your content is original and of a very high quality. When you are doing automated blogging, you are getting neither of the two.

You’ll get sandboxed

The reason that these automated blogs are not profitable for long is because Google is finding them and kicking them out its search database at a faster and faster pace. Thanks to the Panda and Penguin updates of the Google search algorithm, these auto-blogs are getting penalized faster than before. Google is simply doing a better job at detecting them now. The truth of the matter is that duplicate content cannot fool Google for long. And once your auto-blog is sandboxed, you can no longer rely on organic traffic. The traffic you will be getting from social media links or other avenues will be nowhere near as profitable as the traffic you were getting before your automated blog got pulled by the Google police.

Realistically, if you were really adamant about making money by doing this, you could literally create dozens of these blogs and sites a week and then keep relying on new ones for income as your older ones get shut down - but what’s the point? All the time you spend on doing this is more time than you need to run a “real” blog with original content - and probably less profitable as well.

You’re on your own

Another aspect of promoting a blog that is important is getting links going from other reputable sites to yours. All chances of doing this are pretty much tossed out the window when you delve into automated blogging. The automated content might be able to fool search engines for some time, but it can’t really fool real people. Bloggers will be able to tell that your content is duplicate or just spun, and it’s easy to spot these blogs. Therefore, there will not be many reputable blogs that will want to link to you. You might be able to fish out some links and recommendations from people who own similar automated blogs, but as you know, those blogs are just as prone to getting sandboxed sooner than later as are yours.

So what’s the bottom line? Can automated blogs be profitable? Sure, they can. However, because of the fact that they are so susceptible to being shut down and so difficult to promote in any way that is generally viewed as healthy and favorable by Google, it really seems that trying to sustain a profit from this type of blogging would really take more effort than it is worth.

And as Google continues to hone its algorithms, it will only get worse for these types of sites. So it really is better, in the long run, to work on maintaining a proper blog and abiding by the generally accepted rules of conduct when trying to get your blog to rank and become profitable for you on a consistent basis.