There seems to be a group of people in the Internet marketing niche that are intent on finding and exploiting every conceivable ’shortcut’ to make an income online – ranging from shortcuts to getting backlinks, to increasing traffic, to generating more subscribers, to converting customers. And the list goes on.

While looking for shortcuts is just plain smart (who wants to reinvent the wheel?), there are some shortcuts that are, in the long run, misguided and just don’t deliver any worthwhile results.

Want to know what they are?

Before I list a couple of shortcuts that I think are, at best idiotic and, at worst, unlawful, let’s put the discussion in context. Let’s agree, for example, on what is the ultimate business goal of an Internet marketing entrepreneur.

In my opinion, the ultimate business goal is two-fold: to build a business that generates regular, sufficient income (whatever is sufficient for you) and that, over time, increases in value so that it can be sold for a good amount of money (again, whatever ‘good’ means to you) if and when you sell the business.

If building a profitable, valuable business is your aim, then everything you do in your business should be calculated to bring about that result. So too, any given tactic should be considered in terms of how it contributes towards that goal.

With that in mind, let’s consider two shortcuts I’ve recently seen advocated and why they’re ill-advised:

Dumb Shortcut #1: Creating numerous blogs based on scraping other people’s blog content.

Firstly, unless you have the permission of the given blog owner, scraping someone else’s content (and I’m talking about entire blog posts, not the intro paragraph along with a link) and displaying it on your site is just plain illegal. It’s a breach of copyright and if you try it on with someone who’s litigious… watch out.

Secondly, do the people who do this really think they’ll develop a long-term, loyal, buying audience for their blog (let alone business), without offering that audience anything of real value?

People aren’t stupid. They can work out that someone is just scraping other people’s content.

So, ultimately, this shortcut is unlikely to yield or maintain any decent level of traffic. There goes the plan to get loads of traffic and make a lot of money from Adsense!

What’s more, if Google finds out what these ‘marketers’ are up to, it will de-list their sites from the index.

Whatever you think of Google, it holds the power when it comes to search engine optimization and it has said in no uncertain terms that there are penalties for sites that scrape content off other sites. See ‘Google Debunks The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth (Part 2)‘. There goes the plan to get backlinks!

This is not to say you can’t create a winning site based on aggregating news or even links to news. Consider The Drudge Report or TechMeme.

But those sites don’t scrape entire blog posts. And they offer a whole lot of value beyond displaying the news headlines. A lot of value, for example, lies in their selection of stories.

Dumb Shortcut #2: Mass-following Twitter members

Yes, it’s true. Twitter is proving to be a significant source of traffic for some websites. So although I have reservations about how Twitter really fits into Internet marketing, I can’t deny that it CAN be a powerful tool.

Recently, someone in a popular Internet marketing forum raised the idea of having a tool that would allow them to mass-follow Twitter members. Apparently a few marketers either had, or were working on, such a tool.

You can probably see the benefit of such a tool. By mass-following others you would get mass-followers in return. Followers to whom you could send an automated ‘thanks for the follow, check out my offer’ message, and who would now see all your (promotional) tweets.

But here’s why this kind of tool – and this kind of ‘gaming’ – is doomed to failure.

Firstly, if it catches on, Twitter’s utility will go down very fast.

As previously discussed in Kikabink News, the real benefit of Twitter for an Internet marketer (or for anyone) is to have your tweets read by your followers.

But the greater the number of people that any given follower is following, the less likely are your particular tweets likely to be read. This is the ‘negative networking effect’ at work.

Even if you manage to recruit 5,000 followers… if each of those 5,000 followers, in turn, follows another 5,000 people, then at any given time, and all things being equal, your tweets will have a one in 5,000 chance of being read.

So, do you really want to see people hawking mass-follow tools?

Then there’s the risk of Twitter finding out about such a tool and doing something about it… and you.

You can bet Twitter does not want anyone undermining its service and will be quick to ban people who attempt to do so.

Shortcuts such as scraping blogs and mass-following Twitter members are just not sustainable techniques for generating traffic and building a profitable, valuable business. If they work at all, they are likely to do so for only a short while.

And perhaps the worst thing about using tactics like these is that you end up wasting time and energy… time and energy that could be better spent on investing in strategies and tactics that ARE both effective and sustainable.

Consider one of the ‘daddies’ of the blogging world, TechCrunch. TechCrunch is a blog worth an estimated $25 million and, based on Compete data, generated about 2 million unique visitors in January 2009 (up from just over 1 million in January 2008).

According to Compete data, TechCrunch’s third largest source of traffic behind Google and Facebook was Twitter. Twitter contributed about 3.72 percent of TechCrunch’s traffic in January 2009.

And that’s understandable when you consider how many followers TechCrunch has… 153,565 at the time of writing.

Guess how many people TechCrunch follows?

At the time of writing, it was… 571.

Source: Anna Johnson, “The 25 Most Valuable Blogs,” Kikabink News, February 25, 2009

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Feature, Internet Marketing Niche. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.