Anyone really making real money with auto-posts?

Excellent question. I have been wondering about the success with auto blogs too. I'm curious to see what kind of response you get to this question.

I want to start doing more auto blogs and post down the road, but I haven't studied this enough to see if it is something that works and is worth it.

I have a few WP blogs running on this model and I have not been impressed with the results. It certainly hasn't helped with ranking or traffic, even when there are hundreds of posts full of content. It's probably better to consistently add original content to your site -even though that involves real work, lol- and maybe use WP Robot or something similar to add some affiliate offers and flesh out the site. But then, from other posts I've read, there are apparently people who have mastered the autoblogging system and have been successful with it, especially with Amazon.

Success with automated blogging is when you realize that you need to take the role of an editor/publisher/reporter and "cover" the stuff happening in a niche, using RSS to help you collect relevant info from quality sources, and then monetizing that traffic as a middle-man, building lists and serving relevant ads alongside the content (even though all your content is sourced and linking out to the original posted locations).

I think a lot of people get caught up in trying to use autoblogging as a way to create a simulated single-author-style, traditional "blog" as in "weblog" type of site. That's why those sites always end up looking trashy - it's just hard to do.

Whereas, if you take the editorial approach, you don't have to worry about spinning or originality - covering and reprinting is the whole point, and the more stuff you pull from elsewhere (and the more diverse the sources), the more useful and valuable your site actually is.

With some time spent carefully laying out a map of the niche, the content producers and opinion makers in it, and then intelligently hook those kinds of feeds into an automated blog, you've got a news site that can be run in a few hours a month, doing the same sort of thing that would take a staff on another kind of website.

I've got a couple of sites running wpRobot and the conversion is dismal, but it'll paid for its self in 2 months or less if done right... Nothing to write home about though.

My tip, is make the home page look good, don't auto post to often, and get something like the plugin maxblogping so you don't get banned from the ping sites for pinging to often.

-Brad

Oh, I should also add that if you're auto-posting, make sure you also have something that's auto-tagging and taking care of your automated SEO stuff, too. Having a site that has a lot of pages, all SEO'd and ranking for SOMETHING is very valuable even if it gets no traffic and no ad clicks. Get some PR, some age, and some kind of index footprint and the link-juicing ability of such a site will be worth holding onto - for when you DO strike a successful niche and want to throw as many good backlinks at it as possible.

The usefulness and long-term value of a self-growing site like this goes beyond just what the site can earn for itself. Consider how you can use these sites as part of your whole VRE portfolio.