Are You A Robot? Does Automated Internet Marketing Software Work?
Are You A Robot? Does Automated Internet Marketing Software Work
?Marketing a business online can be very time consuming...
Manually submitting content, bookmarking, growing social media numbers, communicating with people in Web 2.0 and creating quality links will all take plenty of your valuable time.
And this is not even taking into account writing massive amounts of content to submit to directories.
A lot of very smart software developers are continually finding ways to create shortcuts to eliminate this lengthy process (and make a pile of money at the same time!).
But does automated internet marketing software work?
We all know how it feels to be inundated with spam through our email in-boxes, our blog comments, our social media messages and anywhere else badly trained marketers can infiltrate.
These are the ones we take delight in deleting and reporting or blocking.
Spam has reached epidemic proportions online and it adds unproductive time to all of our working days!
Anyway I digress...
Software in online marketing? Yes or no?
Here are a few guidelines from my experience.
Any software that spins content to create multiple, keyword rich articles should be avoided at all costs. This produces synonym based nonsense which damages your credibility and will be punished by the search engines.
Always create content for human readers not search engines.
It is the customer you should be focused on. Top page rank is pointless if you look like a half-wit.
Software to submit to hundreds of directories?
Avoid! If it is a one button, automatic system you will have your account banned by many of the sites immediately and permanently. Watch your presence plummet!
Software to get views, friends, followers, likes, clicks etc?
There is some variation here, anything auto on YouTube is very risky. Get identified by YouTube for abusing the system and lose all your videos when your account is banned. Inconvenient if your YouTube hosted videos appear on other sites.
Try and use anything software related on Facebook? - I don't think so! Facebook is like a fortress. So tight are the systems that sometimes it is hard to add a friend you have known for twenty years.
Twitter is a bit of an exception. Free services that add followers, remove followers automatically are shut down within a short period of time. But the paid services seem to be tolerated and these can be a massive time saver. This is obviously not generally known here, in New Zealand, as the follower numbers, messaging and effectiveness of NZ Twitter accounts for business is way behind the international standard.
So you can use software for limited purposes such as automating tweets or following and un-following - for now!
Any software that builds links to other sites to improve your site rank - avoid! You will be dropped down the search results like a stone.
Any software that automatically comments on blogs to build site rank? - Avoid for the same reason. Most blogs have Askimet or some other spam filter anyway. This is rife on the Internet at present and does not serve your business at all.
You will have found that most directories, Web 2.0 and other content sites have a "Captcha" form to stop software abuse.
This is a "reverse Turing test" which means it is a machine setting a simple test for a human...
(Captcha is a contrived acronym - Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart!)
"Are you human? Type in the barely readable letters in the box"
This is a great filter.
So in most cases software will damage your online marketing campaign but there are a few exceptions. Steady, manually submitted content is the best practice when combined with SEO NZ based techniques to substantially improve and speed up the results.
Of course people are constantly trying to find ways around this and to stay one step ahead of the famous Google Algorithm.
A new wave of very smart submitter sites have found a work-around by using outsourcing on a global level.
By paying a subscription your content can be syndicated by hundreds or thousands of outworkers earning a living from their own computers - totally manually, and importantly, from many different IP addresses. The costs are low because most are from developing nations and the brilliant thing is that it appears completely natural.
The next time a site asks you "Are you a robot?" I am sure you will find it less irritating as this process is one of the key defences against the many unethical marketers destroying the essence of the Internet.