Do you ever read a post on the Internet and say to yourself, “Who writes this stuff?”
I’m talking about posts with bad grammar that are chock full of typos and have a bland robotic tone with no human personality. And the post has a vague by-line like, “Admin” or “Contributing Author” with no information in the bio footer.
Chances are, the crappy robo-posts you read were written by some lazy content marketers someplace.
[Tweet “Robo-posts are everywhere because their posters scrimp on the writing and invest in SEO. “]
You’ve seen them. Robo-posts are everywhere because their posters scrimp on the writing and invest in Search Engine Optimization. Their aim is to make the content help their site rise to the top of the search engine results page knowing that Google doesn’t know great writing from crap, even with all the social signals it watches.
I have a few Google alerts set up for “blogging” and “WordPress” and I’m always surprised when a robo-post shows up in the mix. It’s infuriating and insulting that a search giant is feeding crap to readers, but there it is.
This issue of robo-posts really hit home recently after I put out a call for guest posters on this site and on my wine site. I was contacted by two people from the East Coast who expressed enthusiasm and offered story ideas. To both I said sure, I’ll take a look at what you can do.
The tech writer sent me a listical about social media that seemed to be churned from a million previously published posts. Bland, boilerplate and completely link free, the post contained little of benefit for the reader. And a typo in the first sentence!
This post appeared to be a clear case of robo-posting, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt and wrote back with revisions suggestions.
A few days later she sent apologies and another version that was 99.9% the same as the previous! The first sentence typo remained.
And this is a gal who currently blogs on a social media website!
The wine writer had a similar tack. A collection of bland, generalized factoids repeated over and over using different words. She was more upfront with her keywords though, but she used them inappropriately. Worse, she presented the most basic, old-hat concepts about wine as if they were somehow new.
Clearly, neither of these writers had read either of my blogs in an effort to make their writing fit. These were obviously novice content marketers writing post like they were robots.
Or, they were using writebots.
Rise of the Writebots
It’s hard enough getting your freshly conceived, entertainingly informative blog posts to stand out among the gazillions of web sites online today without having to compete with writebots used by lazy content marketers. But that’s the situation.
There are way too many tools out there that create content that’s passable to the human eye. All the robo-posts need is a little tweaking and a lot of SEOing and they can grab ranking you and I only dream of. All the content marketers do is enter a few keywords and a story gets spat out.
Don’t believe me? Give these tools a try.
Article Generator
ArticleCreator is the best article generator tool to generate SEO friendly unique articles from your keyword. Tool will fetch articles from various content sources: Bing, Yahoo or Google News. Our tool will automatically grab fresh new article, blog or news which then will be rewritten to make them unique and better for SEO. It‘s completely free to use, just enter your keyword, select the article source & click submit button.
This writebot is arguably the better tool since it mashes up a bunch of real articles based on the same keywords. A little scary to think the orginal author might notice it.
Link Collider
Writing and creating unique articles can be time consuming but it’s often a necessary evil for boosting your search visibility and your social rankings. The Link Collider Unique Article Generator makes creating unique articles much easier. Simply use the this tool with existent content to recreate articles.
This site takes a story you feed it and churns out unreadable gobbledygook. My paragraph from above comes out like this:
Writing and creating unique articles can be times absorbing but it’s often an indispensable evil for boosting your search visibility and your social rankings. The Link Collider Unique Article Generator makes creating unique articles much easier. Simply use the this tool following than existent content to recreate articles.
Maybe it’s not different enough to fool the original author, but it would fool most of the people most of the time.
Smart Article Generator
SAG is a content generator tool, designed to help you create unique articles on any subject within minutes. With this tool, You just enter some keywords related to the article that you want to build, just make some clicks and you are done! Want To Modify PLR Articles? Great! You can also use SAG to Add New Content to your PLR articles. Just remove some paragraphs, add others and done! SAG is a Must for any Serious Internet/Affiliate Marketer that produces content on a regular basis and really wants to skip the tedious process of article writing.
Oh, how tedious it is to actually write a sequence of thoughts! Here’s a verbatim example of SAG’s brilliant work:
Forex trading is defined as the simultaneous buying of one currency and selling of another, and the whole beauty of forex trading is the chance to make a lot of money within seconds but If you are currently looking to make a living online, you need to be cautious when considering this activity.
SEO Article Generator
Create Unique Articles for your Sites and Blogs. It takes 5 seconds per article.
This tool takes perfectly good writing and spins out pure junk. I tested it with the first 70 words of this post and here’s the verbatim text I got:
Do you ever read posts on the internet and beauty, ‘Who writes this stuff?’ possibilities are they have been posted through some lazy content entrepreneurs someplace. I’m speaking about posts with dangerous english grammar that are chock filled with typos and have a bland robotic tone with out a human character. And the submit has a vague by-line like, Admin or Contributing writer and not using a knowledge within the bio footer.
Low-paid blogging gigs
It’s no wonder crappy robo-posts proliferate on the Internet as bloggers are notoriously low paid by content marketing agencies. A glance at the ProBlogger Jobs Board illustrates my point.
Our base rate is $10/post for a minimum of 500 words.
Starting Rate: $0.03 per word
The rate is fairly low at $7/500 words although for certain assignments this can increase depending on how much the client is paying to have the website built.
At least that poster is honest about the low pay.
And, of course everyone knows posts can be had on Fiverr for five bucks.
You have to wonder how anyone can write a 500 word blog post for $7 and not produce something that sucks. If I were writing for 3 cents per word, I’d probably use one of the above mentioned writebots too.
No Robo-posts here
By contrast, everything you read on this blog is original and opinionated.
I write whatever strikes me as important at the time, week by week. It takes me about 4 hours to write, photograph, post and tweak a blog post.
I don’t consult with Google to figure out what trends people want to read about at any given time, although I probably should. I write from experience about events and discoveries that happen to me, which is why I tend to sound like I know what I’m talking about.
And I don’t stockpile posts weeks in advance. I write one post every week and give it my full attention.
If I don’t already have an image to use for my post’s featured image and I can’t find a free one to manipulate, I shoot it myself. Even a picture of my cat can illustrate a point.
Why do I do write everything instead of using a writebot to create posts, or worse, “curating” other peoples posts? Because unlike lazy content marketers, I respect my readers. I’ve got a list of subscribers who would unsubscribe in a minute if I threw crappy posts at them.
Besides, I’m here to help people blog better, so modelling lazy behavior is contrary to my mission. It’s bad enough I make readers suffer my occasional typos.
Don’t be one of those lazy content marketers
At this point, some readers may say to themselves, “Great idea! I’m going to give one of those writebots a try.” (Not my subscribers, of course!)
As much as I hated to link to all these writebot sites, I wanted to show you what exists to help lazy content marketers be lazy. Linking to them should by no means be taken as an endorsement.
Please don’t be a lazy content marketer, use a writebot, or post robo-posts. The Internet is being ruined by the proliferation of robo-posts, so just don’t do it! Please!
[Tweet “The Internet is being ruined by the proliferation of robo-posts, so just don’t do it!”]
What do you think? Is there a place for robo-posting on the Internet? Do you know it when you read it? What’s the worst robo-post you ever found?
Great post Mari. I have received spam with offers to use tools like this. I also have received a lot of emails from “writers” asking if they could post guest posts of any topic of my choice. The samples they sent of their work made me think my dog could write better. Now I know why! LOL!
Thanks Teddy. Yeah, sometimes I can’t believe what people think passes for blog writing. There ought to be a law against robo-posting! 🙂
I too write about things I have experienced or read about. I do it because I enjoy the creative nature of it. Since a lot of my blog is about technical things I can’t imagine that a robot could conjure up original tech speak that would make sense and fit together with the photos I include.
I use Akismet to filter spam from comments and I get to see many strange adverts in that spam which must be made by robots. That junk really does not make sense and sometimes includes ‘Chinese’ characters. I can’t understand why anyone is bothering to do it. Where is the profit in it?
Thanks Mari for another interesting post brought to my attention by a tweet scrolling down my monitor on Tweetz.
Thanks Colin- Good point about the comments. Here’s what’s funny: people commenting on robo-posts, as if a real person wrote it. And, robo-comments on robo-posts.
I’m not sure where is the profit source for robo-comments, but you can bet there is money in it somewhere.