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Automated blogging has been around for a long time. I remember one of the first tools I used to create content was called Traffic Equalizer. There were probably blogs then but they were nothing like the easy to use content management systems we have today. But that tool worked like a charm to trick Google into thinking it was a valid niche site. The program created content with search results based on keywords you entered and because the results naturally contained a high concentration of the targeted keyword and a good mix of related one they started ranking really easily and I made a lot of money with Adsense in those days. It worked for a while and like all systems designed to trick Google, it started not working as well.

Then along came blogs with feeds that you could ping and rss directories to pick your links up and spread your auto blog posts even further across the internet. Blogs could be posted to remotely or you could find scripts or WordPress plugins to grab content from anything imaginable. Reposting feeds was an easy process and many auto blogging warriors started with feeds. There are endless supplies of feeds on the internet. If you found a niche set of keywords that showed a high cost per click in Adsense, all an aspiring auto blogger had to do was search for feeds related to his target keywords at one of the many feed directories and copy and paste those links into his feed posting plugin . He had just started a brand new business for himself.

But this didn’t stop at feeds. Google had been warning people for years that duplicate content would not rank as well, so people simply reposting other blog posts from feeds were no longer showing up on page one for those high dollar keywords. Some of these automatic blog guru’s resorted to building hundreds of these blogs to make up for the lost income. Some added other content sources like videos, articles from article directories, plr articles and Yahoo Answer results. Again, automated content worked for a while and as Google started filtering out even more duplicate content, article spinners and content generators were being used more and more often as tools in the automatic bloggers toolbox.

If Google was going to stop the rise of more spam content sites in it’s results, then those in the automated niche blog business would just use article spinning software to mix up the words and phrases of one article to create dozens or hundreds more. These then can be posted all around the internet on article sites and blogs for even a bigger network of content. After all, search engines were dumb. They might be able to tell what duplicate content was, but they had no idea what real English looked like. If the keywords were in the right place and proximity and the blogger had built enough links, the posts would rank. You may have run into a few of these posts or articles. They look alright while you glance over them, every word in English. But if you read the article, some parts just didn’t make sense. It was almost as if the previous slap by Google had opened a whole new horizon to content spammers.

Some spinners working as simply as using Google itself to translate one article into another language and then translate it back to English. Other replaced synonyms. Either way, the articles read like ads for Chinese fireworks. But Google never stops. They eventually adjusted their algorithm multiple times this year so that is could recognized and unindex spun, unreadable content. Yes, you now may actually need to know grammar in order to get a better rank in Google now and your sentences may have to make sense. After all, it is Google’s job to present useful content for readers and it’s not useful if you cannot read it.

So content is king again but I have no doubt there will be another generation of automatic content blogs that infects our Google results with spam. It really will be an endless cycle. Because as soon as Google comes up with algorithms that read text like a human, the reverse will also be possible, algorithms that write text like a human. For me, it’s just not good for my health, trying to keep ahead of Google. It can give a a person a stroke. I can’t say I don’t play around with automated blogging, but I never trust that anything done the easy way will last forever. But it is fun, so I will always experiment.

But the best long term plan is unique useful content monetized correctly. You can write or have it written. And the cost of quality content for the internet is going up. Which is a two-edged sword for me. I write. It is good to see a new market for the written word open up that is worth investigating. I would love to be paid just to write, to tell you the truth. But I also run sites that run on content and sometimes, I have to say, content I would rather not write. I have my interests. So to get well-written content, I have to wait for guest posters who aren’t spammers or pay well for good content.

Which has me lately looking at options like Auto Power Blogs which gives you automated blogs and real written content for a monthly price. I just can’t get my words around some topics at times. Oh, I can rehash my research but it ends up flat and lifeless. So open up your blog for guest posting, maybe even pay a bit to attract better writers. Because content is once a against king and while not demanding a kings ransom, it is good to see that Google changes benefit real writers. Unless of course, you study a lot of Natural Language Generation techniques which is beyond the abilities of most people.

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How To Create Content Series – Part I

I have fought with content for a long time online. It is hard to come up with content. And writing it is a weird thing. When you are in the groove, you can do a lot. However, one day you stop, and then it is hard to get things started again.

I have tried many tools to help me jumpstart the process but tools aren’ writing. And here are times when writing just does not work. So what other options do you have for content at these times?

One type of content you can use is free reprint articles. The only problem with this plan is that everybody and his brother knows about using freely available articles. Which meansthat the same article that you post to your site or blog could be posted on hundreds of other sites across the internet and search engines don’t like duplicate content.

If you were a company expected to provide perfect results for millions of searchs a day, would you? Think of it. Why be bombarded with he same article for pages and pages of results? Instead Google and others use an algorithm to determine which of those articles will continue to be in the search engine results and which will just never make it.

So whatever time you saved using a free reprint article is mainly wasted because your chance of getting your article indexed is lowered. So essentially, we are back at square one again, writing your own articles, at least using a free route to content.

The thing about duplicate content is that is taken as a whole. It’s a percentage. I am not going to give you an exact number but if your article is above a certain percentage different than other similar articles online, then Google let’s you in and counts your content as unique. The exact percentage is unknown, but I have heard anything from 40% to 60%. And that gives you another, let’s call it a loophole.

But written content is only one type of content. There are videos, images, audio and various subtypes like PDF’s, slide shows, etc.

I hope to make this article first in a series of articles on content because links are great and have written a lot about them, but for the most part, once you learn the concept of link building and social media optimization, you pretty much get it all. However, you have to have something on your site when they get there.

And I am assuming that most of you are an army of one, which makes content hard to come by. Well, let’s explore that aspect of affiliate marketing, shall we. And by the way, I am not quite sure how many parts there will be in this series. That part I’m playing by ear.

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