Followup to my SEO scam post

In I think SEO might be a scam, I talked briefly about my disgust with SEO and marketing blogs. Here’s an example of what I mean.

In How to make a fortune blogging for others — I’ll pause while you snicker at the title — author Jean-Baptiste Jung has a links post where he provides a list of sites that will pay you for writing blog posts for them.

Link Bait

If $2000/month isn’t a fortune (as he writes in the post body), why is “fortune” in the post title? To me, the word “fortune” is being used as bait to get clicks and backlinks. I guarantee that you will not be able to write enough articles to make anything close to a fortune, and even if you find enough blogs to pay you to write, they won’t let you post often enough to make a lot of money.

Lack of details

It’s a lot harder than it looks to get paid blogging jobs. Unfortunately for us readers, in the post there’s no mention of the hiring criteria for any of the sites. To me, that is misleading because it makes the post readers falsely think they have a chance to get those writing gigs. It doesn’t matter to the author, because by the time you figure that out, he’s already got your click, so the actual chance that you’ll be writing $100 blog posts is irrelevant.

This is why I’m upset with SEO blogs. They craft post titles intended to generate hits and include generic content that doesn’t really help me in my niche.