A little heat between Rosalind Gardner and Ewen Chia last week has raised an interesting topic, and I would love to share my thoughts with you – and also hear yours.

I’m not interested in who’s right and who’s wrong, or opinions about either of these well known online marketers.

What really piqued my interest was the term “content leech”.

We’ve discussed this before. You may recall my tongue-in-cheek post awhile back: I’m a scum-sucking content thief. Not everyone agreed with my delivery there, and not everyone is in agreement on either Ewen or Rosalind’s posts, which means there is still a lot of confusion about what’s right and what’s wrong…

What is a Content Leech?

A content leach is someone that uses automated programs to syndicate content from a variety of sources, and publish that syndicated content on their own website.

The purpose is to generate traffic and revenue, generally through Adsense or affiliate links. It’s often called auto-blogging.

Most people that develop these types of sites rarely write any content of their own. It’s more of a “set it up and forget it” type model. Not a very successful one, mind you. Certainly not a long-term passive income generator as they may have believed, as these sites rarely last long in the major search engines OR with human readers.

leech, noun /lēCH/

An aquatic or terrestrial annelid worm with suckers at both ends. Many species are bloodsucking parasites, esp. of vertebrates, and others are predators

A person who extorts profit from or sponges on others

The point Rosalind was making was the hard work put in by the people who are actually “in the know”, working in the trenches, being stolen by those who simply want to profit from it without doing any real work themselves.

These “content leeches” basically piggy back off of real bloggers by syndicating (stealing?) their content in full on their own domain.

Right or Wrong?

The debate that interested me most in the conversation between Rosalind & Ewen (and their readers) was whether that was ethical or not.

Some believe it is ethical, some believe it is not.

The argument in favor of syndicating content from other blogs seems to be that if you have an RSS feed, and make that freely available, you obviously want people to syndicate your content.

I disagree.

Having an RSS feed is not an open invitation to republish that content via auto-blogging on another domain. Having an RSS feed is a means of allowing your readers to easily subscribe to your content.

It’s a misconception brought on by all the auto-blogging supporters (those creating products for it). But content developers do not agree with that line of thinking.

I know I don’t. Which is why I had a little fun with the content leeches awhile back when there got to be an overwhelming number of them publishing my entire blog posts on other domains.

Rosalind made a point about this in the discussion at her blog, which I agree with. She suggested the appropriate way to share a blog post you like is to publish an excerpt, with a link back to the original post, and add your thoughts to the topic.

Two Examples: Blogging Ideas and Content Marketing Tips from Jason Falls

In both of those examples, the posts were inspired by someone else’s content. I shared the source, and also added my own thoughts to the topic.

This can make for a great blog post, and a great discussion starter with your own readers. But publishing a full blog post with no additional thoughts is just duplicate content. And it’s pointless, in my opinion.

Sharing Content vs Creating Content

Ideally you should be creating more content than you are consuming. And the majority of the content that you share should be your own original content.

Regurgitating everyone else’s content is not ever going to make you a market leader. You’ll be hard pressed to build a readership or a following in your niche if you don’t come up with original, thought-provoking content of your own.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share content. I do it all the time. It’s the ratio that matters. And whether you are adding anything of value to the discussion.

If your content streams consist mostly of links to someone else’s content, how long do you think it will be before your readers stop following you – and start following the source?

Sharing is GOOD. Don’t get me wrong. And it’s part of your job as a market leader in your niche to point out great posts, threads, newsletters, videos, etc.

But the “quality share” is MUCH different than auto-blogging or RSS-scraping…

Your thoughts?

Best,

p.s. Want to learn how to easily put out lots of high quality, unique content without stressing yourself out? Check out Easy Unique Content