How Content Generators Work and Why You Need One

Recently, I’ve been spending more and more time in our design department. Rewrite, edit, proofread. That’s what they need me for. See, Zara, our UI/UX designer, was struggling with sample content for our new website templates.

“Lorem ipsum” wouldn’t work because we wanted our templates to look as authentic as possible; we wanted users to understand what this or that block was designed for.

So the designers took on the responsibility to generate content as well, and needed some help from the content team with editing and rewriting.

But it somehow seemed wrong to me that this type of work took so much time from the designers. And then once, when Zara asked for a sample testimonial, I saw her generating the name of the client with an online tool.

That’s when I remembered how I once heard about website content generators that can compose articles. And if generating articles is a thing, any kind of content must work this way. So why spend all the time and do it manually? We decided to try some generators, and here’s what we found out.

Online tools can generate any type of content for you. It’s just you can’t be sure about the quality before you try.

So, what is a content generator?

It’s software that allows you to create content automatically without having to put in creative work. There are numerous types of content generators and you can get nearly any type of content with them.

What can I create with a content generator?

1. Article generators
2. Idea generators
3. Testimonial generators
4. Audio content generators
5. Automated video generators
6. Flipbook generators
7. Random name generators
8. Address generators
9. Comment generators
10. Story generators
11. Keyword generators

There must be many other types but these are what we came across during our research. Whatever you need, just google “content type + generator” and you’ll find a tool for that.

1. Article generators

As writing articles is the most time-consuming part of my job, my first question was if I could find high-quality raw material for them. I asked the bloggers’ community to see if anyone is using this approach. Here’s what Becky Beach, a lifestyle blogger at MomBeach.com said:

“I use article generator to get started when I create blog content. It does require heavy editing, but I use it more like an outline if anything. I was trying to save time because I work a full-time job and have a family. Every time I make a new blog post, I use the generator.

What I do is put in a keyword such as saving money, then the generator gives me an article. I then put some personality into it so it doesn’t sound like a robot.”

I decided to try this tool first. It offered several options: I’d either get a free article that’s just an exact copy of an existing one or I’d use the paid version and get a “rewritten” copy which means getting the same text with some parts shuffled and some words replaced by random synonyms.

None of these worked for me. I had to put even more effort into editing those than writing an original article from scratch.

Google can easily recognize auto-generated content now. It doesn’t approve of website content generators, and if you don’t edit and polish those articles, not even the best SEO solution can help you rank.

I tried several other generators and got the same result. Check out this rewritten article preview of Article Generator Pro. Besides the fact that it would take longer to edit and “humanize” this text than to write it from scratch, I would never get anything close to what I would’ve written myself.

For sample text in website templated, an edited version of this would be fine. But when you’re writing an actual blog for actual readers who come for the content, not just for the looks of it, generating an article would be a waste of resources.

Abhijith VM, Digital marketing team lead at ClaySys Technologies was brave enough to test and learn it the hard way:

“Here is my experience with content generators.

I remember doing this back when I just started doing SEO.

The website I was trying to rank got a couple of hundred visits per day by posting some unique articles. Then I wanted to scale the process by adding more articles on a daily basis.

The solution that came into my mind was to use content spinners and article generators. Right after the day I published the content generated using such tools, all the traffic went down.

It was a lesson learned the hard way. I would never recommend anyone to use these tools if you are trying to genuinely grow a brand online. Google was smart 5 years ago when I tried it for the first time. It’s even smarter now.”

So if you want to publish auto-generated content, you still have to take your time and do some heavy editing. I prefer the old way.

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2. Idea generators

It would be fair to call idea generators the broadest, yet the most practical type of a content generator. It’s like having an extra teammate at a brainstorming session. You enter a keyword or topic, and the tool suggests lots of ideas and titles.

Articles, lading page content, ad copy — you can find ideas for anything. And no one’s expecting you to use a horrendous copy apparently written by aliens.

I’ve used Hubspot’s blog idea generator multiple times for monthly blog content planning. You still have to modify the titles you get, let alone optimizing it for search (SEO), but at least there’s something to work with when you’re exhausted from writing for the same niche for months or even years.

WordStream has a handy list of 8 blog topic generators here.

3. Testimonial generators

I don’t know why people even delegate this part. Honestly, it feels so good when you write how a tool or a simple service changed your life for the better. If it’s for your product or service page, ask the clients for authentic testimonials.

There are are two cases when generating a testimonial is acceptable:

1. If you just need a sample, e. g. for design;
2. If the client says “I loved it, just don’t know how to put it. Please write the testimonial instead of me, I’ll read and sign.”

Here’s where you may need a testimonial generator.

This one’s the top search result for “testimonial generator.” It offers generic words of gratitude and admiration. They sound nice but taking 4 minutes to tell how exactly a product/service changed your life is always preferable.

4. Audio content generators

Podcasts, voiceover for videos, and all other types of audio content require a lot of resources. Some do it themselves on their own tome, others outsource. It’s pretty affordable, and some freelancers offer fully edited, final versions.

To make this easier, Miguel Piedrafita, who calls himself a “17-year-old maker”, has created Blogcast — a text-to-audio converter. He uses it himself for his own content.

“I normally use Blogcast to generate audio content.

It’s a tool you can set up automatically, and generates audio versions of articles as soon as you publish them. It’s great to generate, for example, a podcast with zero extra work.

The recordings generated sound near-human and often require zero editing.”

There are lots of voice generators, and every new one outperforms the existing ones. Blogcast charges $4 per article or $99 per month (500 articles).

5. Automated video generators

It’s been over 5 five years that every week I stumble upon a new article saying how video is the most popular content type. We’ve even written about in on 10Web blog, in the article about 10 top-performing content types.

Now that video editing is becoming easier over the years, everyone tries to use videos in their communications. The simplest tools just require you to throw in the raw materials to generate a nice video clip.

Check out 50wheel’s list of auto-generated video creation tools.

6. Flipbook generators

A flipbook generator helps you transform a PDF into an interactive document. You can update an existing document, or create a flipbook from scratch. 

You can upload your PDF document in a flipbook software like Flipsnack and then customize it, share it online and track the content.

You can add images, videos, links, or buttons on the flipbook pages. You can also add audio that starts when flipping the pages.

In this way, documents and magazines are more attractive and easy to read. By adding buttons, links, and pop-ups that open when you click on specific elements from the flipbook, readers can find more details about the product or service they are interested in.

Flipbook generators are used by students and teachers for school documents and books, by marketers that want to promote e-commerce businesses and their products, by HR representatives to send internal documents, by big companies for announcements and product catalogs, and by many other professionals.

7. Random name generators

Writing a novel with too many characters? Creating a fake user account? Forging your identity? Just joking, never do this last one. But there are so many cases when you need a random name and feel stuck.

Here’s when you might need a name generator.

https://www.name-generator.org.uk/ was my first search result for “name generator” and it’s fantastic! You can use it to generate a:

• Quick Name
• Character Name
• Pen Name
• Band Name
• Baby Name
• First Name
• Middle Name
• Last Name
• Female Name
• Male Name
• Nickname
• Twin Names
• Rapper Name
• Cat Name
• Pirate Name
• Fantasy Name
• Username
• Blog Name
• Hero Name
• Villain Name
• Couple Name

Woah! This is a lot. Makes you feel like anything in the world can be auto-generated.

8. Address generators

If you need a random address — again, I can’t come up with any other reason than creating a website template and writing fiction — you have two options:

• Type an address familiar to you, like your former work address or barber’s address.
• Go to Google Maps, drop the pin at a random spot and copy the address.
• Use an address generator.

There’s one on https://www.fakeaddressgenerator.com/.

It also generates a full profile with your name, race, gender, birthday, and social security number. It works best for the US. If you ever need a random address generator for a specific country or city, Google-search for “address generator + country” for better results.

9. Comment generators

And here we are, with my least favorite point.

You would hate content generators as well if you had to filter dozens of randomly generated spam comments on your blog every day. Every. Single. Day.

Some of the auto-generated comments look perfect at first sight. They use a text with keywords similar to the original posts’ ones and even insert quotes from the original post.

Spammers use these for adding backlinks to their websites to random blogs.

If you want to try this, I have to warn you: it’s black-hat SEO, often causing Google’s bans to spammer’s website, and generally frowned upon by webmasters and website users.

So I will only mention tools for innocent comments, unlike the bulk comment-spamming tools.

If you just want to say something nice, here’s a comment generator for commenting visual content: https://commments.com/

And of course, there’s a great tool for generating sample comments. Here it is: http://www.melovewebdesign.com/comment-generator/. Its funny comments make your work seem easier.

10. Story generators

Remember Name Generator with its endless name types?

It also has a “sister” — story generator.

You have to fill in a lot of variables to get the story you want. But you can minimize your input by clicking “suggest” to fill in all the fields randomly.

At the end, you’ll get a story that makes sense grammatically and stylistically. It may not be the greatest fiction you’ve read but is actually funny and is certainly better than a “lorem ipsum.”

Some use these stories for homework at writing classes and I’m not the one to judge, but hey, I’m sure you can do better than this.

11. Keyword generators

You always start writing with keyword research, don’t you? When you come up with the topic, there are tools to suggest you the best of the related keywords.

Stacy Caprio, the Founder of Growth Marketing is one of those who use these tools all the time.

“I’ve used automatic keyword generation when creating ad copy on Adwords and Bing before. It’s been helpful because it makes the ads more relevant to the exact keywords people are searching which makes them more likely to click the ad.

The negative is if you don’t target the correct keywords carefully enough, you can end up with ads that don’t make sense to your audience or aren’t even targeting the right audience. Sometimes the ad text gets cut off when the auto-keywords are too long as well.“

Now, how often do you think you should use content generators?

My verdict is, the generators are only good for new ideas, but you can never trust them with the real content.

Do you use content generators? Share your experience in the comments!