Doing a case study (Auto Blogging), any idea, advice,...welcome

[satrap]

I had (have) a domain (yourfreeonlinestuff.com) which I bought a couple of weeks ago. I had some plans with it, I even asked warriors for ideas, which I got some good ideas, like listing free things, freebies and etc. But things have changed. So I couldn't spend time on it.

Then I saw a post on WF about automated blogging system by Keith Kogane, which I thought was great and very nice of hime to share. So I thought it would be a good idea for me to use that domain for an automated blog. But I thought instead of using rss feed, why not just manually load plr articles which I can have a little more control over it and maybe change a few things like titles.

So I decide to use it as my first automated blog, well not fully, maybe semi automated. I wanted to use this blog as a kind of case study, so I can learn something for myself and at the same time see what is real and whats myth.
Here is what I am doing with it:

I got some plr articles,topic ranging from forex, affiliate marketing, blogging and etc. Basically online money making.

I didn't rewrite the articles, just changed the titles and changed somethings here and there(like adding keywords).

I got a simple wp theme and added some plugins such as all in seo, sitemap generator and etc. I also used adsense to monetize it.

I loaded the blog with plr articles using word press's built in post Scheduling feature, for a month, posting 2 article a day.

My plan is to post more articles as I go along, Like sit down one day that I have time and schedule posts for a month or two ahead.


I am doing this for a couple of reasons.

First as I said I dont have much time for it, so I diddnt want to just leave it sitting there. I mean even if I dont make any money with it, I think the experience will be worth it and it will help me grow.

I also wanted to find out for myself if you can succeed with plr articles unchanged(or change very little).

Another thing I wanted to tackle is the domain name thing. I want to see how much it will effect it negatively if at all. I mean I know domains with your keywords in them are better for seo, but I have also seen domain names totally different from what the site is all about, and they were doing way better than domains in the same niche with most used keywords of the niche as their name.

Now I would appreciated if anyone could give me ideas to better this experience. Anything that you think can help it grow better. For example I know there are some plug ins that allows you to load your affiliate links and keywords and it automatically makes those keywords into links using your affiliate links, which of course would be a good idea for making money with it. But I have tried a couple but couldn't quite figure out how they work.

Any way, if you have any idea, thoughts or any advice, I would appreciate if you could share it with me.
I will report back here with my experience, and any good or bad result I get with this blog. I think it will be interesting.

[atwellpub]

Hey satrap,

I'm looking forward to learning from your case study. My only advice would be to put a google alert out on your niche, and re-post the very good stuff that shows up. This over time will turn your blog into a thoughtfull semi-automated blog that, even if you do not do any seo, you consistantly climb in the ranks over the year.

adbox

[Dan Bainbridge]

When you said autoblog I thought you meant hooking it up to AMA or a similar service, which has been totally useless for me, but this semi automated approach might be a little more beneficial and I'd be interested in the results.

I personally think you will see little benefit from the exercise itself and very few affiliate sales from it, but in 6 months time you might have a half decently ranked site with a little page rank and then if you wanted to put real articles and reviews on it they might work a bit better and rank easier than if you were to try and put them on a brand new site.

Another approach I started to try with my autoblog (before I got distracted with other things) was to manipulate the homepage so that it had 1 or 2 sticky posts which were good articles written by me, and limit the homepage to just these posts and have the autoblog articles appearing in the background of the site driving small amounts of traffic to it and hopefully back to my homepage...

[cashcow]

My personal experience has been that if you don't get backlinks and promote the blog it will not get much traffic. This is true for autoblogs as well as blogs that are filled with unique content.

Autoblogging just automates the "adding new posts to your blog" part. You still need to do the promotion for the site.

IMHO, your promotion and back linking plan for a site has about 90% influence on the success of the site and what you actually put on it only about 10%. I'm speaking as far as bringing in traffic (I know having great persuasive content is of he utmost importance
once you get the traffic).

Lee

[PerigVe]

I have to agree that content is good but promotion is the key part. I am not sure how Google will actually rank the articles if they are considered as "duplicate".

[satrap]

Originally Posted by atwellpub

Hey satrap,
My only advice would be to put a google alert out on your niche, and re-post the very good stuff that shows up. This over time will turn your blog into a thoughtfull semi-automated blog that, even if you do not do any seo, you consistantly climb in the ranks over the year.

Thanks for the info. I am not familiar with Google alert thing, would you mind explaining what it dose and how it works? Cos what you said actually mad me interested. Thank you

adbox[/QUOTE]

[quote=submp3s;1693478]When you said autoblog I thought you meant hooking it up to AMA or a similar service, which has been totally useless for me, but this semi automated approach might be a little more beneficial and I'd be interested in the results.

I personally think you will see little benefit from the exercise itself and very few affiliate sales from it, but in 6 months time you might have a half decently ranked site with a little page rank and then if you wanted to put real articles and reviews on it they might work a bit better and rank easier than if you were to try and put them on a brand new site.
/QUOTE]

I will make sure to update you guys with the progress. Thanks fo your input.

Originally Posted by cashcow

My personal experience has been that if you don't get backlinks and promote the blog it will not get much traffic. This is true for autoblogs as well as blogs that are filled with unique content.

Autoblogging just automates the "adding new posts to your blog" part. You still need to do the promotion for the site.

IMHO, your promotion and back linking plan for a site has about 90% influence on the success of the site and what you actually put on it only about 10%. I'm speaking as far as bringing in traffic (I know having great persuasive content is of he utmost importance
once you get the traffic).

Lee

I have to agree about backlink, I may do some link building if I happen to have the time for it. But thats one of the reasons I want to do this, so I can see it for myself if indeed it effects it dramatically or not. The other thing is I heard pinging does kind of work as a link buildr. Which if thats true, I installed a pinging plug in that can ping without doing it too much.

Originally Posted by PerigVe

I have to agree that content is good but promotion is the key part. I am not sure how Google will actually rank the articles if they are considered as "duplicate".

Thats another reason I am doing this. I want to find out what really happens if I just use PLR articles. I have heard stories from the both side saying it doesn't matter and you will rank, and that PLRs wont get you anywhere.

So all and all I think it will be interesting to see what happens. If anyone has any idea, suggestion or what have you, please dont hesitate to let me know, I would appreciated. Thank you guys.

[Tony Marriott]

Originally Posted by submp3s

Another approach I started to try with my autoblog (before I got distracted with other things) was to manipulate the homepage so that it had 1 or 2 sticky posts which were good articles written by me, and limit the homepage to just these posts and have the autoblog articles appearing in the background of the site driving small amounts of traffic to it and hopefully back to my homepage...

That is great approach and one I use myself. Fix your home page, link/rank it as a normal web page and hang the automation on the back. Don't just post scraped content though you need some uniqueness to make this work.

[ivatel42]

Hi Satrap

You asked about using google alerts above.

It's very handy for letting you know about new content add to Google about certain keywords you want to know about.

So if you wanted to get an automated email everytime something new about say
Green spotted dogs was indexed then Google will oblige by letting you know

You can find it here it's very easy to set up and you can do it for multiple keywords.
Google Alerts - Monitor the Web for interesting new content

[Rukshan]

Originally Posted by satrap

Thanks for the info. I am not familiar with Google alert thing, would you mind explaining what it dose and how it works? Cos what you said actually mad me interested. Thank you

adbox

Just signup to Google alert with your Google account. In that account, you can setup keywords which you are interesting to hear latest news. You also can mention the frequency to receive news like 1 day, 3 days etc
You will receive news which related your niche. This is a good technique to collect update info. You can spun these article and publish it in your blog.

Thanks
Rukshan