If blatantly taking a blog’s RSS and republishing on their domain, plastering the post with adsense wasn’t enough, sploggers (spam bloggers) have started using a new WordPress plugin to do their dirty work.

Enter the “Related Blogs” plugin, an otherwise somewhat useful plugin that works like a “Related Blog Posts” plugin, except that it will point outside the blog to other blogs in the blogosphere, attempting to fire off a trackback in the other blog’s comments section in the process.

While writing a content-filled post and looking for related blogs using relevant keywords/keyphrases can provide value to the reader and help create an inter-blog conversation, merely throwing in high traffic keywords into the plugin and accompanying that with little or no blog content does not create any value for your readers.

Take a look at these examples:

The example above shows the classical layout of a MFA (made-for-adsense) blog with a Google adsense block, followed by content below. In this case “content” was generated by doing a keyword search for related blogs containing the keywords “affiliate id”, “special thanks” and “CBS affiliate” among others.

In another example:

Attempting to cast the net far wider, this splogger decided to republish content containing the phrase “home business”, “finance”, “education” among others.

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While these methods of “blogging” might get you the odd click and you might think that the claim of making $0.10 a day from 10,000 automated blogs is the path to internet riches, you’d probably be the fool laying his hopes on a pipe dream.

Instead, you’re better off building a blogging business that is based on a solid foundation, can provide consistent and sustainable income.

Some of the ways to achieve this are:

• Ensure that your niche/topic is something that has appeal to internet users: – use tools like Google News, Google Trends, Google Insights – your interest in Imperial Stormtrooper battlesuits, movie props or World War II medals might have a great audience out there.
• Be willing to become an expert in your niche: This might involve shuffling over to the bookstore or library and finding books relevant to your topic and becoming an expert/authority. If you don’t know your subject matter, how’re you going to write about it?
• Find or create a way to monetize your niche: Everything’s a hobby until you find a way to generate income from it – unless you live near a couple of really great soup kitchens. If you can’t generate sufficient income from advertising or affiliate marketing, consider producing your own books, courses, products to serve that niche. In the automative industry, you could find workshops willing to do small scale production runs of your products if you have a ready audience.

For more tips on building a blogging business, you can also check out Secret Blog Weapon.