Internet Marketing Blog

I’m Not Impressed, Jon!

Posted by peter on April 7, 2008 |

I first need to start this post by saying I respect Jonathan Leger and listen to what he has to say, I think he’s one of the few people in the industry that cares about the success of others, and this is more than obvious in his blog where he posts tonnes of free information.

However, with that said, I also consider myself to be a straight up marketer and will give my opinion on things that I think are bad as well as good.

Now, Jon has launched a new product called Instant Article Wizard Pro 2.0 which promises to take the pain out of writing articles yourself. and I will tell you now, from the videos I have seen, it’s really true, it does make article creation a snap.

Sidenote: Just incase you are not clear, I have not purchased this software for reasons laid out below.

I’m all for tools that make menial things more exciting or easier to manage, but I’m also for ethical marketing, and in my opinion Jon’s new software blurs the line between ethical and unethical.

You see, the software has a huge database of pre-written articles - articles written by other people which they are using to market their own products and services.

The software scans the articles based on the keywords you enter and builds articles by taking sentences from related articles. Don’t get me wrong, the way it does this to create good readable content is amazing and hats go off to the programmer, but is it really ethical to use content from other peoples articles to automatically build your own articles?

Update: Thanks, Jonathan for pointing out to me that the results are pulled from search results, not from articles.

There’s nothing wrong with getting a collection of articles written by other people on a subject you want to write about and re-working different parts from the collection you have made. But there are ethical issues with simply using entire sentences in an unmodified form.

Legally I think you are OK if you use this software, as copyright laws don’t apply if you use only a small percentage of someone elses work (but even then it’s considered good form to reference or cite the source you have used). From what I can see, there’s no opportunity to reference or cite your sources.

So in effect, you are creating articles by ’stealing’ other peoples content - even though it’s legal in the eyes of the law, can it ever be considered ethical?

Disclaimer: This opinion is based on the video tutorials provided on the Instant Article Wizard Pro 2.0 website, I will retract my comments if anything I have stated as fact is incorrect.