Auto-Blogging - Does It Work?

[Adam Carn]

Last year Keith Kogane posted an auto-blog system where you setup a Wordpress blog with your affiliate ads and it runs itself with an auto-posting plugin that converts RSS feeds into posts and automatically posts them regularly.

Here's the original post:
Check out my automated niche blog business model (it really works)

I've been a marketer for many years now but never really used blogging to make money (I know I'm slow) and was thinking of doing something like this.

- Anyone do this?
- How successful can this system be?
- How much money can each auto blog make and in what time frame?
- Is it a good idea to setup hundreds of these?
- If so can a lot of them be in the same niches?
- Any tips?

Thanks,
Adam

[jasonmorgan]

well, you have just described about 99% of adult (porn) blogs.

This concept has been around for years, I like to refer to it as a shotgun approach to IM. You're essentially throwing as much mud against the google wall as you can and hope that quantity will make up for quality. In the adult world these are typically called 'splogs' or spam blogs.

There are webmasters that run thousands of these, typically on freehosts, each site on it's own may not bring in big $$ but it all adds up. The webmasters just sit around all day creating new sites (it's a 30 min process if your slow) and over the course of a couple of months have tens of thousands of pages indexed by google, throw enough hooks into the river and eventually fish are gonna bite.

And for the rest of your questions, it all depends on the webmaster, results are not the same for everyone.

[Britt Malka]

I have tried autoblogging, and in my experience, it is better than no new posts at all, but then all is said.

What you need is unique content. Written by real humans, not just RSS feeds.

[debra]

Yes...it works. I have a few of them.

It's not a matter of just throwing one up though. Sorry, to have to burst some bubbles out there.

You use them as tightly themed traffic generators.

They really don't take off on thier own either. You have to put some work into them on the front end before you have a shot at making them stand on thier own.

[AaronJones]

Originally Posted by Adam Carn

Last year Keith Kogane posted an auto-blog system where you setup a Wordpress blog with your affiliate ads and it runs itself with an auto-posting plugin that converts RSS feeds into posts and automatically posts them regularly.

Here's the original post:
Check out my automated niche blog business model (it really works)

I've been a marketer for many years now but never really used blogging to make money (I know I'm slow) and was thinking of doing something like this.

- Anyone do this?
- How successful can this system be?
- How much money can each auto blog make and in what time frame?
- Is it a good idea to setup hundreds of these?
- If so can a lot of them be in the same niches?
- Any tips?

Thanks,
Adam

Adam,

I'm using a software can pull 2-3 articles, videos, google/yahoo news, rss etc and post them on a single page which gets you auto posts that appear as unique content.

I've put up some auto blogs but without any unique content those ones got sandboxed quickly and have no traffic.

You'll have to do more than just pull some rss and forget about it. Maybe things were different a year ago?

Aaron

[debra]

Originally Posted by AaronJones

Adam,

I'm using a software can pull 2-3 articles, videos, google/yahoo news, rss etc and post them on a single page which gets you auto posts that appear as unique content.

I've put up some auto blogs but without any unique content those ones got sandboxed quickly and have no traffic.

You'll have to do more than just pull some rss and forget about it. Maybe things were different a year ago?

Aaron

Hummm...what was it that got you sandboxed? I pull in approx. 150 articles and content a day to one of the auto-blogs and never got penalized for anything.

[AaronJones]

Originally Posted by debra

Hummm...what was it that got you sandboxed? I pull in approx. 150 articles and content a day to one of the auto-blogs and never got penalized for anything.

150 in a day for one blog? How long have you been doing this may I ask? This goes against everything I have been taught and have experienced.

Aaron

[Sirago]

Ehh. I run an autoblog but I kinda neglected it since I set it up.. It has THOUSANDS of articles and somehow I'm still a PR0.

[Keith Kogane]

Originally Posted by Adam Carn

- Anyone do this?

Yep, still do.

Originally Posted by Adam Carn

- How successful can this system be?

Define "successful". I do pretty well still. I haven't been building as much as I wanted to this year, but my best performing blogs are still humming along getting traffic, making sales with only a little nudge from me here and there.

Originally Posted by Adam Carn

- How much money can each auto blog make and in what time frame?

Way too many variables are involved to make any kind of blanket estimate. The trick is really to just build explosively and try a lot of different markets, and a lot of different promotions. Much like an Adwords PPC marketer, it's all about testing new ones. Unlike PPC though, I can just keep running my "failures" and use them for building backlinks to rank other stuff down the line. That's just one example, but having lots of blogs that post frequently and get age on the domain and pages in the index is the "side effect" of failing at my method.

Ask anyone who knows SEO how valuable that kind of thing is. Even if all these blogs don't make a dime, if you build as many as you can that update and get spidered multiple times a week, you've basically built a traffic pushing network all by yourself.

Originally Posted by Adam Carn

- Is it a good idea to setup hundreds of these?

Sure, why not?

Originally Posted by Adam Carn

- If so can a lot of them be in the same niches?

Going for sub-niches and cross markets is exactly what you want to do. In the same way that you want to be failing a lot because you're trying a lot, there's a flip-side. Once you find a winner, mine that vein as deeply and broadly as you can. When it comes to the model I describe, a "success" indicates both a healthy audience who is interested in your topic as well as a productive niche that creates a lot of its own topical content.

That kind of community will self compartmentalize into sub-niches all by itself.

Originally Posted by Adam Carn

- Any tips?

Beyond all the other stuff I've already posted here in that thread and others, not really. That's the whole deal, pretty much. Some of the details as far as which specific plugins and themes are used - that stuff changes like all software.

But the functionality and methodology of finding a "high chatter" niche that can use a news aggregator and letting the community generate the content for the purpose of selling advertising and affiliate products - that remains the same and is just as legitimate now as it was last year.

Originally Posted by jasonmorgan

well, you have just described about 99% of adult (porn) blogs.

Well sure, and a horse is a mammal with 4 legs, but so is a cow. The method I posted that he linked to has a key difference than most "auto blog" methods. Basically, you VERY CAREFULLY select the sources of your automated content in order to actually sort useful content from quality sites into an organized and valuable community resource. The goal is to take all of the possibilities that scrapers and re-posters present and use them to build a REAL site that has QUALITY and VALUE in the particular market.

Originally Posted by jasonmorgan

This concept has been around for years, I like to refer to it as a shotgun approach to IM. You're essentially throwing as much mud against the google wall as you can and hope that quantity will make up for quality. In the adult world these are typically called 'splogs' or spam blogs.

It's really not much to do with Google or splogging. I can see why you're confused, but you should check out the old thread to see what's actually possible to do nowadays before you dismiss the whole concept due to shoddy implementations that some folks might use to get by.

Originally Posted by jasonmorgan

There are webmasters that run thousands of these, typically on freehosts, each site on it's own may not bring in big $$ but it all adds up. The webmasters just sit around all day creating new sites (it's a 30 min process if your slow) and over the course of a couple of months have tens of thousands of pages indexed by google, throw enough hooks into the river and eventually fish are gonna bite.

Again, what you describe is just one way to apply the automation tools to make money online. I prefer to create a site that's an aggregator of all of a niche's news and links and chatter and become an authority simply by being a kind of librarian and tour-guide kind of site. I make my revenues by attracting an audience and keeping it there with lots to check out, and lots of reason to keep coming back if you're into the topic I've targeted.

Originally Posted by jasonmorgan

And for the rest of your questions, it all depends on the webmaster, results are not the same for everyone.

Very true.

Originally Posted by Britt Malka

I have tried autoblogging, and in my experience, it is better than no new posts at all, but then all is said.

What you need is unique content. Written by real humans, not just RSS feeds.

If your goal is to build an automated blog, then what you're saying is the opposite of what he needs. And since when does the content in RSS feeds magically become "inhuman"? People wrote it, right? What's wrong with using their RSS to pull a snippet of their article and linking back?

All the content in RSS feeds is unique and human generated. Especially if you pull content from lots of places and assemble it together as I've described in the other thread.

Anyways, hope that clears some stuff up. I don't stop by here much lately, but it's nice to see people still checking out that old thread. As far as I can tell, it's actually the most viewed thread on the forum (since the migration anyway).

Maybe I should get around to selling something one day and not squander all that attention, huh? Maybe one day.

[smile]

I have just starting doing auto blogs, mainly promoting amazon products and clickbank products that get auto posted, they are set up to self promote themselves though bookmarking, pinging and rss.
They are slow, but easy to set up and you can do it with in about 30 minutes to an hour if you are slow.
I am also looking into selling some of them soon and making some money that way, I look at it as more of a hobby, when I need a rest from all the usually IM stuff but still want to be productive I will create some while watching TV.

We live in great times with some amazing plugins available today.

[debra]

Originally Posted by AaronJones

150 in a day for one blog? How long have you been doing this may I ask? This goes against everything I have been taught and have experienced.

Aaron

Since 2004.

And I've never been penalized or shut down.

I do my setups a little different than Keith but it's about the same. Tightly focused niches and remeshed to where you establish the site as a go-to place for concentrated infomation on the niche.

Oh...and heavy onpage seo. And I'm not talking about the seo plugin or headspace or any of those. I use those too, but in addition it my seo.

Then coomon sense off page seo...which is really just plain sem.

[Adam Carn]

Thanks guys for for your feedback and thank you Keith for taking your time to answer my questions. I really appreciate it.

Adam

Originally Posted by Keith Kogane

Yep, still do.



Define "successful". I do pretty well still. I haven't been building as much as I wanted to this year, but my best performing blogs are still humming along getting traffic, making sales with only a little nudge from me here and there.



Way too many variables are involved to make any kind of blanket estimate. The trick is really to just build explosively and try a lot of different markets, and a lot of different promotions. Much like an Adwords PPC marketer, it's all about testing new ones. Unlike PPC though, I can just keep running my "failures" and use them for building backlinks to rank other stuff down the line. That's just one example, but having lots of blogs that post frequently and get age on the domain and pages in the index is the "side effect" of failing at my method.

Ask anyone who knows SEO how valuable that kind of thing is. Even if all these blogs don't make a dime, if you build as many as you can that update and get spidered multiple times a week, you've basically built a traffic pushing network all by yourself.



Sure, why not?



Going for sub-niches and cross markets is exactly what you want to do. In the same way that you want to be failing a lot because you're trying a lot, there's a flip-side. Once you find a winner, mine that vein as deeply and broadly as you can. When it comes to the model I describe, a "success" indicates both a healthy audience who is interested in your topic as well as a productive niche that creates a lot of its own topical content.

That kind of community will self compartmentalize into sub-niches all by itself.



Beyond all the other stuff I've already posted here in that thread and others, not really. That's the whole deal, pretty much. Some of the details as far as which specific plugins and themes are used - that stuff changes like all software.

But the functionality and methodology of finding a "high chatter" niche that can use a news aggregator and letting the community generate the content for the purpose of selling advertising and affiliate products - that remains the same and is just as legitimate now as it was last year.



Well sure, and a horse is a mammal with 4 legs, but so is a cow. The method I posted that he linked to has a key difference than most "auto blog" methods. Basically, you VERY CAREFULLY select the sources of your automated content in order to actually sort useful content from quality sites into an organized and valuable community resource. The goal is to take all of the possibilities that scrapers and re-posters present and use them to build a REAL site that has QUALITY and VALUE in the particular market.



It's really not much to do with Google or splogging. I can see why you're confused, but you should check out the old thread to see what's actually possible to do nowadays before you dismiss the whole concept due to shoddy implementations that some folks might use to get by.



Again, what you describe is just one way to apply the automation tools to make money online. I prefer to create a site that's an aggregator of all of a niche's news and links and chatter and become an authority simply by being a kind of librarian and tour-guide kind of site. I make my revenues by attracting an audience and keeping it there with lots to check out, and lots of reason to keep coming back if you're into the topic I've targeted.



Very true.



If your goal is to build an automated blog, then what you're saying is the opposite of what he needs. And since when does the content in RSS feeds magically become "inhuman"? People wrote it, right? What's wrong with using their RSS to pull a snippet of their article and linking back?

All the content in RSS feeds is unique and human generated. Especially if you pull content from lots of places and assemble it together as I've described in the other thread.

Anyways, hope that clears some stuff up. I don't stop by here much lately, but it's nice to see people still checking out that old thread. As far as I can tell, it's actually the most viewed thread on the forum (since the migration anyway).

Maybe I should get around to selling something one day and not squander all that attention, huh? Maybe one day.

[redicelander]

Autoblogging, looks cool. Maybe that's a project for next month!

[jasonmorgan]

It's really not much to do with Google or splogging. I can see why you're confused, but you should check out the old thread to see what's actually possible to do nowadays before you dismiss the whole concept due to shoddy implementations that some folks might use to get by.

thanks for the love

I read the old post ( this one? ). I didn't see much difference between it and what I previously posted.

Your old post wasn't bad and it'll certainly get someone on the road to running an automated RSS fed blog but those exact methods have been in use for years. It wasn't groundbreaking then and with the tools available today it's outdated.

Building a site based on a subject and feeding it with RSS feeds relevant to that subject isn't anything new. I use the little suckers as backlink fodder and traffic feeders myself.

[francof]

I have only one and it's a site I bought from someone... I probably wouldn't have set this up myself but having bought it, seen how it works and seeing the results. Nothing spectacular but it does make money! about 1 minute of work a month (just basically telling the system to create posts for the next month... I could actually just set it for for a few months or a year and it would then just be a minute a year )... so any kind of money is good for 1 minute of work, it's currently making around $50-100/ month. So seeing this, I might just be creating some more of them and thinking of ways to bring more auto traffic to them
The way it's setup is really clever though so I think it needs a good setup for it to be able to bring traffic and create posts that are interesting enough for people to read.

[Adam Carn]

Keith a quick question (sorry). Do you think this would work with subdomains? Like if I have Wordpress MU and setup different blogs on my subdomains?

Thanks,
Adam

Originally Posted by Keith Kogane

Yep, still do.



Define "successful". I do pretty well still. I haven't been building as much as I wanted to this year, but my best performing blogs are still humming along getting traffic, making sales with only a little nudge from me here and there.



Way too many variables are involved to make any kind of blanket estimate. The trick is really to just build explosively and try a lot of different markets, and a lot of different promotions. Much like an Adwords PPC marketer, it's all about testing new ones. Unlike PPC though, I can just keep running my "failures" and use them for building backlinks to rank other stuff down the line. That's just one example, but having lots of blogs that post frequently and get age on the domain and pages in the index is the "side effect" of failing at my method.

Ask anyone who knows SEO how valuable that kind of thing is. Even if all these blogs don't make a dime, if you build as many as you can that update and get spidered multiple times a week, you've basically built a traffic pushing network all by yourself.



Sure, why not?



Going for sub-niches and cross markets is exactly what you want to do. In the same way that you want to be failing a lot because you're trying a lot, there's a flip-side. Once you find a winner, mine that vein as deeply and broadly as you can. When it comes to the model I describe, a "success" indicates both a healthy audience who is interested in your topic as well as a productive niche that creates a lot of its own topical content.

That kind of community will self compartmentalize into sub-niches all by itself.



Beyond all the other stuff I've already posted here in that thread and others, not really. That's the whole deal, pretty much. Some of the details as far as which specific plugins and themes are used - that stuff changes like all software.

But the functionality and methodology of finding a "high chatter" niche that can use a news aggregator and letting the community generate the content for the purpose of selling advertising and affiliate products - that remains the same and is just as legitimate now as it was last year.



Well sure, and a horse is a mammal with 4 legs, but so is a cow. The method I posted that he linked to has a key difference than most "auto blog" methods. Basically, you VERY CAREFULLY select the sources of your automated content in order to actually sort useful content from quality sites into an organized and valuable community resource. The goal is to take all of the possibilities that scrapers and re-posters present and use them to build a REAL site that has QUALITY and VALUE in the particular market.



It's really not much to do with Google or splogging. I can see why you're confused, but you should check out the old thread to see what's actually possible to do nowadays before you dismiss the whole concept due to shoddy implementations that some folks might use to get by.



Again, what you describe is just one way to apply the automation tools to make money online. I prefer to create a site that's an aggregator of all of a niche's news and links and chatter and become an authority simply by being a kind of librarian and tour-guide kind of site. I make my revenues by attracting an audience and keeping it there with lots to check out, and lots of reason to keep coming back if you're into the topic I've targeted.



Very true.



If your goal is to build an automated blog, then what you're saying is the opposite of what he needs. And since when does the content in RSS feeds magically become "inhuman"? People wrote it, right? What's wrong with using their RSS to pull a snippet of their article and linking back?

All the content in RSS feeds is unique and human generated. Especially if you pull content from lots of places and assemble it together as I've described in the other thread.

Anyways, hope that clears some stuff up. I don't stop by here much lately, but it's nice to see people still checking out that old thread. As far as I can tell, it's actually the most viewed thread on the forum (since the migration anyway).

Maybe I should get around to selling something one day and not squander all that attention, huh? Maybe one day.

[dspa72]

Autoblogs are a failure in most cases. Why?
Poor or, as is often the case, duplicate (i.e. stolen) and no-sense content in the blogs that are created.I'm making a living with manual-autoblogs...

You need good rich content and a tool to automate the process. For this reason I call them manual-autoblogs
manual: you need to manually "create" your content
autoblog: automate the processFrom my experience, I have created a tool to make this an easy process...coming soon

[bfletch]

I am new to internet marketing, but I have set up an auto-blog. So far it has helped to get my site ranked. I also post my own thoughts and tips to help it along. As of right now I have a little more traffic, time will tell.

[Kevin Barnes]

I have a blog I threw to gether just last week and its already getting 50 - 100 hits per day.... Guess what?

I used all duplicate content.

I've been doing this for over two years now and get awesome results!

[Alminc]

' Does it work?' depends on what you want to achieve

I have blogs that are 100% automatic and on 1st page
in google serps for medium competitive keywords, getting
1500-2500 unique visitors per month.

However, setting up an autoblog correctly demands
patience and some wp and rss knowledge.

[Adam Carn]

Thank you all, I appreciate your input.

Thanks,
Adam

[InternetMarketingIQ]

Set up a network on a host you don't use for your regular sites. Register in Proxy. Don't bother with affiliate offers. Then use the blogs to feed traffic. You may also want to pull your feeds into a non public blog then repull those feeds into your blogs.

Lots of tricks and scams to fool the search engines. Ultimately it's a lot of work. I pull feeds into blogs but don't bother scraping or autoblogging because the search engines that matter are pretty good about weeding them out.

Most people can't make autoblogging work for them... but if you have a scammers mentality and want to play that game you might be able to get something out of it.

For ordinary people it's simply not worth the investment in time.

[Steven Fullman]

PM en-route, Adam...

Steve

Not to be rude or anything...

[Keith Kogane]

Originally Posted by jasonmorgan

thanks for the love

I read the old post ( this one? ). I didn't see much difference between it and what I previously posted.

Your old post wasn't bad and it'll certainly get someone on the road to running an automated RSS fed blog but those exact methods have been in use for years. It wasn't groundbreaking then and with the tools available today it's outdated.

Building a site based on a subject and feeding it with RSS feeds relevant to that subject isn't anything new. I use the little suckers as backlink fodder and traffic feeders myself.

Sorry if I misunderstood. I see now that though you were talking about adult sites, you didn't really unfairly dismiss the methods for being garbage or whatever. Lots of folks do, for no real good reason. Sorry to have misunderstood what you meant, but glad to discover we actually agree.

Originally Posted by Adam Carn

Keith a quick question (sorry). Do you think this would work with subdomains? Like if I have Wordpress MU and setup different blogs on my subdomains?

Thanks,
Adam

I don't see why not. WordPress Mu is what WordPress.com runs on and all of those sites tend to rank okay and get traffic if they're any good. It's not the way I've done it, but subdomains should work. The downside of that is being able to use "failed" sites as rank builders for your later sites. If all your sites are on the same main domain it'll probably not be as easy to push around page rank. I'm not an SEO expert, so take any advice along those lines with a grain of salt.

Originally Posted by dspa72

Autoblogs are a failure in most cases. Why?
Poor or, as is often the case, duplicate (i.e. stolen) and no-sense content in the blogs that are created.I'm making a living with manual-autoblogs...

You need good rich content and a tool to automate the process. For this reason I call them manual-autoblogs
manual: you need to manually "create" your content
autoblog: automate the processFrom my experience, I have created a tool to make this an easy process...coming soon

I agree that most autobloggers fail, but it's more a matter of not being discriminate enough in picking content sources, or spending enough time organizing and setting up for intelligent automation at the beginning.

People tend to forget that just because a tool allows automation doesn't automatically mean you have no editorial or quality control. You can be very precise when creating "recipies" for sites that are useful to visitors (as a resource), valuable to the sites you syndicate (as publicity/traffic source), and profitable for you (based on the inevitible ad click or sale from an affiliate promo.

I find a useful way to think about building good autoblogs is to think of the system as a robot reporter, and you're the magazine editor/programmer. You tell the reporter what kind of stuff you're looking for, he goes out and grabs a bunch of info and links back to where it came from.

Seems pretty logical to me, but for whatever reason, people hear "automation" and "RSS" and "blog" altogether and they automatically presume spam.

Originally Posted by InternetMarketingIQ

Set up a network on a host you don't use for your regular sites. Register in Proxy. Don't bother with affiliate offers. Then use the blogs to feed traffic. You may also want to pull your feeds into a non public blog then repull those feeds into your blogs.

Lots of tricks and scams to fool the search engines. Ultimately it's a lot of work. I pull feeds into blogs but don't bother scraping or autoblogging because the search engines that matter are pretty good about weeding them out.

Most people can't make autoblogging work for them... but if you have a scammers mentality and want to play that game you might be able to get something out of it.

For ordinary people it's simply not worth the investment in time.

For example, this guy can't see past his "spam" alarm to think about how the tools of the scammer can save a legitimate webmaster a lot of time and money. I want to build lots of dynamic, interesting VRE news sites to collect decent size niche audiences. I also don't want to pay an army of writers, or editors, or bloggers, or anyone really. I am physically and mentally able to "edit" and manage the content on over 100 blogs because I do all of the heavy lifting during setup, and then just tweak along the way.

Much like a real blog investor with a staff, I can focus my entrepreneurial interests on the marketing and growing of the sites without having to worry about the content. Whatever good content occurs in my niche will automatically be spotted by my "robot reporters" and posted to my sites (or queued as a draft for review/commentary).

So yeah, what this guy says is what you would do if you WERE trying to approach this as a black hat traffic driver or search engine scam. But if you're referencing my stuff, I only ever recommend building a real site through automation, not ever solely for "scamming" the search engines or my content providers, or my readers.

[andrew_writes]

I tried the rss autoblog scripts and they suck.

I tried the blog post autoblog scripts that pull in posts and they suck.

I tried an autoblog plugin that uses plr or any text post that you write. You upload all the content to a folder, pick a category and a schedule like every 3 days and it will post them for you.

I like this one and if you have 365 plr articles on your topic, you can post everyday for a year from about 10 minutes of work from installing the plugin to hitting the post button.

[andrew_writes]

Originally Posted by andrew_writes

I tried the rss autoblog scripts and they suck.

I tried the blog post autoblog scripts that pull in posts and they suck.

I tried an autoblog plugin that uses plr or any text post that you write. You upload all the content to a folder, pick a category and a schedule like every 3 days and it will post them for you.

I like this one and if you have 365 plr articles on your topic, you can post everyday for a year from about 10 minutes of work from installing the plugin to hitting the post button.

I just checked my digital stash and it's called auto blog feeder. You can find it all over the net for very low prices, like $9.

If you need a copy, let me know, I have MRR rights to the plugin.

[adamsad]

i have an autoblogging site. 500++ unique visitor in just 3 months. But it is sucks..totally..
despite a lot of traffic, no sales has been made....
can you imagine what you can do with 500++ unique visitor??
but that's what I got...to promote and get backlink I use auto social poster.
I think auto social poster works best if the content is a real articles...
try it...make 200-300 word per post everyday...the effect is almost the same.
I plan to start make short posting to my blog this week. And plan to put adsense on it.

[Leanne King]

auto blogging is super cool coz it's easy. You can improve an auto blog though when you add value in the form of some unique content, some seo love etc and this can all be automated with wp