Check out my automated niche blog business model (it really works)

[ztrek]

Originally Posted by Mark Brian

Would you mind giving a hint in what I think this is the most important part of this method: "get keyword-based RSS feeds for WP-O-Matic", where can we find them?

The metthod I use to find such feeds is by simply going to google and doing a search
"your keyword" RSS
or use google blog search with your keywords

[bill05]

Keith

This is fantastic stuff!

And a little help for folks looking for keyword feeds...

I was doing the google rss search and came across a nice list of plug-n-play feeds at this site - just add your keyword

(but the system will not let me add the url until I have 15 posts)

bill

[bill05]

So I have added this post to be able add the next post

[bill05]

Which is here (a list of generic rss feed source - just add your keyword)

List of Keyword RSS feeds

and hopefully a help for someone

bills

[Tim Dixon]

Originally Posted by ztrek

The method I use to find such feeds is by simply going to google and doing a search
"your keyword" RSS
or use google blog search with your keywords

If you use Google Reader you can also use the search function from within GR itself which usually pulls up at least a few relevant feeds.

Don't forget you can usually make a feed from lots of sites where there is a search functionality as well.

Take YouTube for instance, if you go there and search on your keywords, you should be able to make a feed out of the results page using the feed buttons in your browser.

Tim

[Tim Dixon]

Originally Posted by bill05

Which is here (a list of generic rss feed source - just add your keyword)

List of Keyword RSS feeds

and hopefully a help for someone

bills

Good find Bill, thanks for sharing.

Tim

[BigSexy]

I don't get the link building part of this method...can you really get to high PR rank just by auto-submitting to feed aggregator sites??

[Keith Kogane]

Hey all. Don't want anyone to think I've forgotten about this thread. If you asked me a question here or sent me a PM recently I WILL get back to you. Maybe not until the weekend, but hopefully before then.

IN the meantime, I have a new successful experiment to share. I know a lot of folks are only finding snippets of content, and are having problems with that conceptually.

Well, it occurred to me that with the popularity of Twitter, that short snippets are not necessarily a problem. People are becoming used to the idea of "micro" content. The challenge here is to match up tiny content with a format that looks sensible.

So use the Prologue theme (Which is meant to be an "internal" Twitter shared by a small team of users).

And then the standard setup of WP-O-Matic, GoCodes, etc.

However, you go through the trouble to create several user accounts in the WordPress install, and then when you set up your campaigns in WPOM, you can select an author per campaign. I've never used that feature before ever, but it works pretty great with this setup.

What I've done in the experiment is set up a "user" for each of my content sources, so they are labeled as the author of their content to my "twitter" clone. (In fact, you can do this with any blog setup, and is a nice way to give even more credit to the source of the content.)

Otherwise, the rest of the method remains the same.

I'm really liking the results, and though I can't say for sure yet, this should work just as well as any other theme long term, it just helps put those snippets into a context people might feel is more solid conceptually.

FOr my more lengthy writeup, I'm also trying out a lot of different plugins to try and recreate the desired functionality of GoCodes and WPOM so that people who have trouble with those particular ones have alternatives they can try.

Oh, also, for the people who are having trouble with GoCodes after upgrading to 2.7, double check that the upgrade didn't overwrite your htaccess file and remove the portion you added to make GoCodes work. I can't say for sure that's it, but that's the first place I'd look.

Anyways, back to the mines for me. I'll be back hopefully before the weekend to catch up. Take care, all!

[Tim Dixon]

Hi Keith.

I've been toying with the 'Twitter type' microblogging idea as well, but not in relation to my autoblogging techniques, so interesting stuff to compare how you're doing it.

As you mention, that idea about using different accounts for each campaign is actually something to consider for the more 'normal' (if there is such a thing) type of autoblogging, it all helps to add authenticity to things.

I don't get the link building part of this method...can you really get to high PR rank just by auto-submitting to feed aggregator sites??

This method is not just well known within the autoblogging world but is used by many people for all sorts of sites.

Not all the RSS directory sites will help towards your PR as some use the nofollow attribute now, but it does work. I wouldn't go as far as to say you will get a 'high' PR though (although anything is possible in theory) and it will take time.

Aside from the PR point of view it helps with indexing and can bring in traffic as well of course.

Tim

[nolachief]

keith,

thanks for this one, too. Great stuff!! and all for FREE!!

bob

[moonlasor]

Hello Keith,

First, thank you for such a dead on article (series).

I have just started to use a similar WP Pluggin to WP- O- Matic.

How many posts do you start off with initially? How many new posts a day do you use, generally? And at what time intervals?

Why do you need to use an affiliate link redirect?

I read your "Your blog domain is getting the benefit of all this backlink love so you will start to grow PR over time too. (This is yet another reason we're using GoCodes. All the backlinks you're generating link back to your own domain, giving YOU the PR benefit." I am not 100% what you mean here.

If you bundle or send out your RSS feeds to various aggregates, wouldn't they automatically come back to you?

"Once the blogs get PR, sell text links
- you can get a sponsor donate plugin to make this automatic."

Please explain this briefly if you can.

Again Keith, I personally thank you for a wonderful and honest article/method.

David

[djleon1]

Here is another plug-in which may work for people having trouble with Gocodes.

It is WordPress › WP-Marketer WordPress Plugins it seems to accomplish what gocodes is set-up to do but is a bit newer and geared towards 2.7

I am not sure if it keeps the links one you send out your posts to different feeds.

[4morereferrals]

Originally Posted by djleon1

Here is another plug-in which may work for people having trouble with Gocodes.

It is WordPress › WP-Marketer WordPress Plugins it seems to accomplish what gocodes is set-up to do but is a bit newer and geared towards 2.7

I am not sure if it keeps the links one you send out your posts to different feeds.

I was looking at this PI [plug in] last night late as well. Looks promising. Looks like it does 2 functions ... affiliate link adding and gocodes?

[ojean]

Hi Keith,
Thank for sharing. You have provided very useful information on automated niche blog business model using WP-O-Matic. I have justed started my own blogging using Blog Solution, a mass blog platform using automated updates and ping. Just wonder have you ever used this software before and how it is as compared to WP-O-Matic?

[kevinw1]

Here's a small gotcha with Gocodes I just discovered - it doesn't work if you have hyphens in the gocode links.

For example,
http://www.example.com/go/test
works, but
http://www.example.com/go/test-two
doesn't, you get a 404 error.

Having solved that, now to work out why WPOM is giving me anything up to 25 duplicates of the same post!

Kevin

[vicone]

Ojean,

I'd suggest doing a little more research on this mass blogging approach. I know of many marketers who tried this - especially with Adsense - and their sites were promptly dropped by the search engines when detected. PPC traffic providers may resist sending traffic and Adsense may pay you peanuts per click.

Consider how the site is to be used and whether useful information is being provided to visitors.

A special difficulty with mass-producing blogs is that, as each blog fails, you're obliged to create a new one to make up for it. This means a never-ending cycle of crash-burn-rebirth. Unless you're a Phoenix, I'd suggest approaching your blog-building activities in a way that has a cumulative benefit and, over time, means that you are building an asset.

Many find the crash-burn-rebirth approach to be tiresome, boring and frustrating, although they may succeed in earning short term profits.

There are many good mentors that will point you in the direction of long-term sustainable profits.

Incidentally, I love the idea of automating as much as possible; my caution is against thin, inadequate content.

Ivan

[Tim Dixon]

Originally Posted by kevinw1

Having solved that, now to work out why WPOM is giving me anything up to 25 duplicates of the same post!

Kevin

Here's a thread from the WPOM issue tracker site discussing duplicate posts.
#148 Problem with Multiple Same Posts - WP-o-Matic - wpomatic

Tim

[Alaister]

Hi Just wondering with this strategy wp-o-matic doesnt actually write a proper post for you does it?

it only automates a very short one line or two line post. I understand you want to replace the keywords with your affiliate links but you are not really providing people any good content so why would they come to your site?

This could be a totally newbie question but yeh if you could clarify on that, i would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks

[kevinw1]

Thanks Tim, I've plugged in that fix and I'll see how it goes. The problem doesn't seem to happen if I do a manual fetch (which would agree with the cause discussed in that thread, of multiple cron jobs).

[4morereferrals]

Originally Posted by Alaister

Hi Just wondering with this strategy wp-o-matic doesnt actually write a proper post for you does it?

it only automates a very short one line or two line post. I understand you want to replace the keywords with your affiliate links but you are not really providing people any good content so why would they come to your site?

This could be a totally newbie question but yeh if you could clarify on that, i would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks

It totally depends on your feed source - if all the rss feed is sending is the link back to the originating blog - then yes - all you get from WPOM is a title and excerpt.

However; I dont use those feeds. I get feeds with full articles, and I select them manually in multiples, via Tim Dixon's Google Reader aggregator method. I also annotate them with my thoughts on how they apply to the niche - and all that gets posted. Semi Auto mode

Keiths is FULL AUTO and for certain sites that's bangin' and will do the deal.

[Alaister]

Originally Posted by 4morereferrals

It totally depends on your feed source - if all the rss feed is sending is the link back to the originating blog - then yes - all you get from WPOM is a title and excerpt.

However; I dont use those feeds. I get feeds with full articles, and I select them manually in multiples, via Tim Dixon's Google Reader aggregator method. I also annotate them with my thoughts on how they apply to the niche - and all that gets posted. Semi Auto mode

Keiths is FULL AUTO and for certain sites that's bangin' and will do the deal.

ok great. thanks a lot for clarifying things.

ill check out the google reader method

[Dave Earley]

Originally Posted by Keith Kogane

I only tried a couple of others before I found WP-O-Matic. Actually when I came across it, it didn't work for me, but I happened to find it just before one of the version upgrades that switched it to use WordPress's built-in Cron rather than a server-based Cron.

The plugin that I downloaded told me to add a piece of coding to my crontab, which I found in my cpanel. Are you saying there's another one?

Also, what kind of content is this automation producing? Are these going to be frankensteinn articles of some sort? Do you have a sample post we could view?

Great work by the way, Keith.

Dave

[John W.G.]

after I activate wp-o-matic I see a link in the upper right corner of my screen that says, "click here to setup and configure wp-o-matic" but when I click it I get taken to a page that says, "Please switch to Firefox / Safari"

I'm using firefox.

Anyone else having this problem?

John

[Tim Dixon]

Originally Posted by John Gottshall

after I activate wp-o-matic I see a link in the upper right corner of my screen that says, "click here to setup and configure wp-o-matic" but when I click it I get taken to a page that says, "Please switch to Firefox / Safari"

I'm using firefox.

Anyone else having this problem?

John

Hi John.

I have had that before and found I had to refresh my browser cache I think to get past it.

Tim

[Tim Dixon]

Originally Posted by Dave Earley

The plugin that I downloaded told me to add a piece of coding to my crontab, which I found in my cpanel. Are you saying there's another one?

Also, what kind of content is this automation producing? Are these going to be frankensteinn articles of some sort? Do you have a sample post we could view?

Great work by the way, Keith.

Dave

It will work without using crontab as it then uses the Wordpress built-in cron function.

As for the content that gets posted to your blog, that depends entirely on the content model you use to produce those RSS feeds.

At the end of the day WPOM will only post what it finds in the RSS feed (unless you use the regex word replacement to change some of the content).

Tim

[John W.G.]

Originally Posted by Tim Dixon

Hi John.

I have had that before and found I had to refresh my browser cache I think to get past it.

Tim

Thank you Tim - solved thanks to you.

Have a wonderful day.

[Alaister]

I was wondering...if you were to automate your blog with the rss feeds wouldn't you be up for duplicate content?

Also as you know a lot of RSS feeds are only an extract perhaps 1 or 2 lines or the actual article. How are you generating traffic if your articles are so short and cannot be relaly littered with keywords?

Am I missing something here??

Thanks,
Alaister

[ojean]

Originally Posted by vicone

Ojean,

I'd suggest doing a little more research on this mass blogging approach. I know of many marketers who tried this - especially with Adsense - and their sites were promptly dropped by the search engines when detected. PPC traffic providers may resist sending traffic and Adsense may pay you peanuts per click.

Consider how the site is to be used and whether useful information is being provided to visitors.

A special difficulty with mass-producing blogs is that, as each blog fails, you're obliged to create a new one to make up for it. This means a never-ending cycle of crash-burn-rebirth. Unless you're a Phoenix, I'd suggest approaching your blog-building activities in a way that has a cumulative benefit and, over time, means that you are building an asset.

Many find the crash-burn-rebirth approach to be tiresome, boring and frustrating, although they may succeed in earning short term profits.

There are many good mentors that will point you in the direction of long-term sustainable profits.

Incidentally, I love the idea of automating as much as possible; my caution is against thin, inadequate content.

Ivan

Thanks for your kind advice, Ivan. Although blog solution is a mass blogging software, I only release one blog per week and moderate the automated updates and ping. Hope that this won't cause any problems then...

[Dave Earley]

Originally Posted by Tim Dixon

It will work without using crontab as it then uses the Wordpress built-in cron function.

As for the content that gets posted to your blog, that depends entirely on the content model you use to produce those RSS feeds.

At the end of the day WPOM will only post what it finds in the RSS feed (unless you use the regex word replacement to change some of the content).

Tim

Thanks, Tim.

Would using the regex word replacement be a good idea? Would it make the content more unique?

Originally Posted by Steve Porcaro

Hi I still see some question on the Go-codes and WPOM. I made a video earlier in this thread.

I put it in my signature for easier reference.

Great tutorial Steve! Easy to follow and understand.

Dave

[Dave Earley]

I forgot one thing:

Lets say that I use several different keywords that make up several different categories with WPOM. Will the posts be categorized automatically, or will I need to take care of that manually?

Dave

[Chris Lagarde]

Here's an example of using GoCodes and what to watch out for. Let's say my website is promoting acne solutions clickbank products.

With WPOM you could hyperlink the word "acne" as rss feed stories are pulled in. The hyperlink will be with your affiliate clickbank id.
for example:
http://bettylife.nichegroupllc.hop.clickbank.net/

You don't want this because people will avoid clicking on the hyperlink. Instead you have WPOM hyperlink a friendly GoCode redirect URL.

Note: the landing page ends up being the same (see above) BUT by first making your affiliate link into a GoCode, the hyperlink that shows when readers hover their mouse will look like:

http://YOURBLOGNAME123.com/go/acne

A much better looking hyperlink URL!

In the above GoCode example the word "acne" is what GoCode refers to as the "redirection key". When you are in the GoCode setup, you will the blank area where you are requested to fill in the redirection key.

GoCode Redirection Key Tips:
NO spaces, NO hyphens, NO underscores

Example of what DOES NOT work:
http://YOURBLOGNAME123.com/go/acne-solutions
http://YOURBLOGNAME123.COM/go/acne_solutions
http://YOURBLOGNAME123.com/go/acne solutions

Example of WHAT DOES WORK:
http://YOURBLOGNAME123.com/go/acne
http://YOURBLOGNAME123.com/go/acnesolutions

Lastly, while doing research on GoCodes I found out you can change the /go/ in your GoCodes to other words like /recommends/

See below:
------------------------------------------
Additional tips, you can change the go word into something you like, example instead of pointing to “mydomain/go/key” you can make it to “mydomain/recommend/key”, simply by tune the .htaccess file a little bit.


Check this part from your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^go/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/?$ /index.php?gocode=$1 [L,R]`

Change the ^go to ^recommend, save and reupload your .htaccess. Voila, it’s done

If you find any problem whatsoever with the plugin, you can contact Matt the gocodes creator. As he put concern on his free product. I face some problem two days ago, and it’s fixed already by now.

[neoo28]

Hi, this model is very interesting. I just have a question about legality . Is it legal to put your own affiliate link in to content which is not yours. It said that you can use RSS feed on your blog without changing it .
I want to make blog like this but scared of legal issues .

[Tim Dixon]

Originally Posted by Dave Earley

I forgot one thing:

Lets say that I use several different keywords that make up several different categories with WPOM. Will the posts be categorized automatically, or will I need to take care of that manually?

Dave

Dave, you choose what categories the posts for each campaign go into when you set up that campaign.

Also, regarding the Regex function, I personally don't use it as I the only thing I ever do is change link a particular word or phrase in the content that I add to the feed item through Google Reader.

However, theoretically you could of course use this to change content to make it more unique, but I could see it being a real pain to set up and maintain.

Tim

[4morereferrals]

Originally Posted by STOREHEALTHBEAUTY

Hi, this model is very interesting. I just have a question about legality . Is it legal to put your own affiliate link in to content which is not yours. It said that you can use RSS feed on your blog without changing it .
I want to make blog like this but scared of legal issues .

I think you need to see tim Dixon's posts #1 and #2 for a solution to that. Add your own anecdotes and put links in there, if ya skeered. :-)

[chamilj]

Originally Posted by Steve Porcaro

Hi I still see some question on the Go-codes and WPOM. I made a video earlier in this thread.

I put it in my signature for easier reference.

Thanks Steve, Your video really useful.
Chamil

[chamilj]

I am getting same post two / three times when WP -O -Matic fetches RSS feed. How I avoid it please help.
Chamil.

[Tim Dixon]

Originally Posted by chamilj

I am getting same post two / three times when WP -O -Matic fetches RSS feed. How I avoid it please help.
Chamil.

Chamil.

This has been asked before, check out my reply #531 for a link to some solutions to it.

Tim

[chamilj]

Thanks Tim.
Chamil

[Wealth Mentor]

Keith, what will you charge to set these up for us in our own niches??

You can PM me...

[fight_prof]

good stuff thanks.

[Dave Earley]

Originally Posted by Tim Dixon

If you use Google Reader you can also use the search function from within GR itself which usually pulls up at least a few relevant feeds.

Don't forget you can usually make a feed from lots of sites where there is a search functionality as well.

Take YouTube for instance, if you go there and search on your keywords, you should be able to make a feed out of the results page using the feed buttons in your browser.

Tim

Good info. Tim.

I thought about trying something like that with Yahoo, but I thought I would also get a lot of content outside of my niche.

Might try it though. Didn't know that I could kind of create a particular feed using the search information.

Dave

[Dave Earley]

Two things I am noticing now:

On my blog my main page is made up of partial posts, and the title links it to the whole post on a separate page. If I check the link to source box in WPOM, then once I click on the title to get to the whole post, I am instead taken to the original post, so there is no way that anyone can view the whole post on my site. Is there a way to correct this, without having to manually add the source in the post?

Also, I am noticing an awful lot of links within these posts. Is there a way to keep all links from showing up?

I am also having a problem with the images, but I believe my redirect links are crossing them up some how in the coding. I will see if I can correct that one now...


Update: Haven't figured out how to get the images working, apart from not using any redirects. It seems that if one of my redirect keywords in contained within the image code, it breaks up the code for the image and will not show up.

I am also having trouble finding full RSS feeds. I've searched through hundreds of feeds, and very few feeds contain a full post.

At this rate is seems easier to go around and copy information and add the source to it, but if I'm going to do that I would rather change up the content and get some unique information out of it.


Dave

[Tim Dixon]

Originally Posted by Dave Earley

Two things I am noticing now:

On my blog my main page is made up of partial posts, and the title links it to the whole post on a separate page. If I check the link to source box in WPOM, then once I click on the title to get to the whole post, I am instead taken to the original post, so there is no way that anyone can view the whole post on my site. Is there a way to correct this, without having to manually add the source in the post?

You need to use a custom post template on the options screen of that campaign when linking the title to the whole post on your blog.

Put something like:

{content}
Source of this article: <a href="{permalink}">{title}</a>

in the template to do it all automatically.

Also, I am noticing an awful lot of links within these posts. Is there a way to keep all links from showing up?

Not really, unless you get WPOM to post it as a draft and then you edit the post before you publish it. Of course you could run the feed through Yahoo!Pipes first to remove the hyperlinks if you were really desperate. However, I prefer to leave them as they are.
You can also edit them within Google Reader by the way, in case you didn't know.

I am also having a problem with the images, but I believe my redirect links are crossing them up some how in the coding. I will see if I can correct that one now...


Update: Haven't figured out how to get the images working, apart from not using any redirects. It seems that if one of my redirect keywords in contained within the image code, it breaks up the code for the image and will not show up.

In my model I do not use the replace function in this way as it can cause some messing up of the posts. The way I do it is in Part 2 of the Google Reader thread I think.

I am also having trouble finding full RSS feeds. I've searched through hundreds of feeds, and very few feeds contain a full post.

At this rate is seems easier to go around and copy information and add the source to it, but if I'm going to do that I would rather change up the content and get some unique information out of it.

If you use the Google Reader method you can make this task a lot easier, but as for finding full feeds, it can be difficult sometimes.

You just have to keep looking really. Also don't forget that even if a feed is full now, the originator could change that at any time and if you aren't keeping track, you would never know.


Tim

[Dave Earley]

Thanks Tim.

I'll try the code, and probably will have to set WPOM to make the posts drafts, so that I can take care of any links or code problems.

I'll also check out your posts about google reader...

Dave

[sunnyman]

Dave Earley ---

If I were you, I would check what's going on at your site....
seems to be hacked.........

[Dave Earley]

Originally Posted by sunnyman

Dave Earley ---

If I were you, I would check what's going on at your site....
seems to be hacked.........

Thanks, I know.

I haven't used that site in a while, and it doesn't get much traffic anyway. I need to move it to a new server, but am not concerned with it that much at the moment.


In other news, I seem to be getting a 500 internal server error when I do a manual fetch of the RSS feeds at times. I wonder what would be causing it?

Dave

[Dayne Dylan]

I'm getting the Internal Server error now as well. I think it has to do with Cron jobs.

[Wealth Mentor]

Originally Posted by Wealth Mentor

Keith, what will you charge to set these up for us in our own niches??

You can PM me...

S E C O N D R E Q U E S T: Keith, what will you charge to set these up for us in our own niches??

You can PM me...

[GrinningFool]

Thanks Tim for the informative replies. Its much appreciated!

[BigSexy]

Am I the only one who have his pages not indexed in Google? If I've understood correctly, Keith method just uses the RRS Feed without changing anything (unlike Tim Dixon's method).

Well, I'm doing the same thing but Google just refuses to index the pages, obviously for the duplicated content.