Today we have a guest post from Nathaniell Brenes, owner of onemorecupof-coffee.com. Nathaniell's content gorilla review is sure to give you a great insight into this plugin and also teach you a thing or two about online business ethics as well.
Product Name: Content Gorilla
Product Owner: Andrew & Chris Fox
Advertised Price: $97
Fake Discount Price: $27, then $17
Rating: 25/100
What's they're selling:
This is a WordPress plugin that pulls titles, content, comments, and other data from sites like Amazon, Yahoo, YouTube, and other sources to post on your blog.
One Sentence Review:
Content curation will not make you consistent sales, and this plugin is a waste of your time and money.
What is Content Curation
The idea behind content curation is that you collect the best of the best from the internet and show it to your audience. In a sense, you are an information connoisseur for your niche. Millions of blog posts, product reviews, videos, and comments are produced every day, across all industries. It can be overwhelming for the average user.
Enter the content curator.
You are an expert. You know your stuff, and people look to you for answers. Because you are so super smart, you know what's good, what's bad, and what's worth looking at. You read 100 articles, and pass on 1 to your faithful readers. You watch 50 videos, and share two with the people who care about the same topics you do.
A content curator consumes several pieces of content and presents the best of the best to his audience.
Have you ever heard of Ray William Johnson? Oh man, that guy is annoying, but this is basically what he does. He spends his days watching YouTube videos, then brings the best of the best to his viewers, and offers commentary on them.
Why Should I Care?
Content curation is a real way that you can make money online. This is the idea behind content Gorilla. I'll get into why Content Gorilla is not worth your money in a bit, but understand that what content curation is and what content Gorilla does are two different things.
So what's easier? Creating your own blog posts, or reading other stuff and then commenting on it?
The issue here is that even though this sounds easier, curation is just as hard, or maybe even harder. It takes a very long time to establish authority in any niche. No matter who your audience is, and no matter what industry or market you're in, it's going to take time to get yourself known.
So what's easier? Writing a blog post about your opinion, or writing a blog post about someone else's opinion?
And now we see why it's so hard to become a ‘curator' – or at least a curator that people care to listen to. Writing your own content is as simple as having an opinion or idea on a subject. Being a curator means you need to analyze information from hundreds of different sources, organize them in a meaningful way, and present them to an audience in a manner that they find insightful, interesting, or entertaining.
Becoming a respected, trusted, and well known curator of any type of media is going to take you twice as long as it would to just have your own voice and relay that to an audience.
Why Doesn't It Work?
Let's get back to Content Gorilla.
So now that we've established that becoming a curator of content is difficult, let's say you still want to go that route. OK, fine. Fair enough. You still shouldn't buy Content Gorilla.
Strike 1: Low Quality Content
First off, the content that this WordPress plugin pulls from the sources is very thin. In the three examples given in the sales video, Yahoo! Answers, Amazon, and YouTube, there is very little content to speak of. There is also generally very little structure to the content, meaning what you pull from these website to put on your own is going to look like a mish-mash of technical jargon, poorly written and random comments, and maybe some sparse product info.
Strike 2: Moral Issues and Business Ethics
This might not resonate with everyone, but for me, this is huge. Do I really want to base my entire business strategy on a new WordPress plugin that takes other people's work and automatically pastes it to my blog? Is this what I want to do with my life and is this how I want to make money on the internet?
Hypothetically, lets say you can sneak in a couple of sales via Content Gorilla. Think of your business 10 years down the road. Where will you be? Can you really envision yourself holding thousands of blogs in hundreds of niches, essentially copying and pasting content from other places in the web? I can't.
I want to build something strong, something I can be proud of, and something that can provide me with some income that I can count on – not just some sneaky sales when Google's algorithm accidentally ranks me well for the rubbish I'm posting.
Strike 3: No Traffic
So after all this, the question still stands, how are you going to get people on your site? Google does not rank duplicate content, plain and simple. If you copy, pull, or otherwise duplicate information from other sources, the pages you create will NOT rank in Google.
This MIGHT work if you already had a faithful following within your niche, because people would return to your site just by name, instead of searching for product information in Google. However, you are not in that position. How do I know? Because anyone that has some authority in a niche got there by providing high quality info to their viewers or readers. Chances are you are just starting out and looking for an easy way to make sales, which is why you are interested in Content Gorilla.
Who Is This Product For:
If you have extra time on your hands, some extra money to buy some practice domains, and want to experiment with various forms of blogging, then Content Gorilla could be fun to play with. If you are serious about building a business and creating a sustainable source of income for yourself, then this product is a waste of your time and money.
Final Review
What Now?
The main issues with this particular product were that it created unstructured, low quality, duplicate posts. This is clearly not something that you should use if you care about your business, website, and the visitors to that site.
If you are looking to create an online business based on your personal interests, I suggest you do 3 things.
1) Research some niches you are interested in
2) Find some products and services that fit into that niche
3) Create a website, (or buy one here at HPD) and write about those things
That's just a very broad overview of only one type of online business, but it's a start, and a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
So Bryon,
With the opportunity to use AI software to do this content writing that is both readable and unique, which do you recommend
Very much in favor of your point of view, the content gorilla has been promoted very crazy recently, I think he violates the original principle of google, the original content should be natural rather than machine generated