Thankfully, most of my blog spam is now stopped by Akismet, but it never ceases to amaze me how many people there are out there who think they can make money on the Internet by spamming other people’s blogs. The worst offenders must be those automatic script generators which create a new post on the spammer’s blog and basically just copy the first 100 words also of a legitimate blog post somebody else has written. Now I’ll freely admit that making money on the Internet is nothing like as easy as some people would have you believe — I’m not trying to sell any kind of Internet moneymaking tool, so I’ll just tell it as it is; but why even bother trying to create websites which just steal everyone else’s content?
The bottom line is that if you want to make money from the web, you will have to be doing something unique yourself, otherwise you might as well not bother. The Internet is not like the High Street, where you can just repeat somebody else’s franchise model, or open up another branch of the store using the same formula that worked in another town. On the web, you are potentially competing with every single other website around the world to get attention to your product or service. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t get your foot in the door, as there are so many opportunities out there to explore, but you do have to make sure that you are providing something unique, otherwise you can never seriously expect your site to either rank well in the search engines, or to be able to generate any worthwhile inbound links.
But why bother getting worked up about this? Maybe it is because I’ve always worked on the basis that I will only put up content that has at least had some element of processing by myself or one of our writers — but I suppose that there are always going to be some areas of a website, such as news, where there will be many close similarities between different online portals. However, this exception only applies to small areas of the site, and I still think that if you can’t put together your own opinions, then you really shouldn’t be on the web.
Here endeth the soapbox sermon.
