AutoBlogging for "Noobs" - A Guide

[GeorgR.]

I really like AutoBlogging.

If you're new to this, you might ask: "What the *** is AutoBlogging?"

Simple: An "AutoBlog" is a blog on either blogger or wordpress (self hosted) which you created one time, with certain plug-ins which set the blog on autopilot, deliver content to it 24/7, auto-bookmark, ping....and you dont need to move a finger since it all happens automatically.

In my little "guide" i focus on self-hosted WordPress, since it is the best blogging platform (IMHO) with the greatest flexibility and a very reasonabale "Work <---> Result/ROI" ratio. Its not hard to set up WordPress.

) Where does the content for those blogs come from?
The content is automatically taken (some say "scraped") from sources like Yahoo Answers, Forums, Youtube and Article Directories.
(There are more options which i will describe further below)

You set up a standard WP blog from within your hosting, using Fantastico, or you upload your blog from your PC to your host. You set the config accordingly, database, the usual.

You need some essential "plugins", which are extensions for your blog, as well as "nice" theme.

Plugins:
1) Platinum SEO Plugin
2) Caffeinated Content (Or Autoblogged, WP VideoTube...)
I prefer Caffeinated Content.
3) Google XML SiteMaps
4) Ping Crawl
5) Max Blogpress Ping Optimizer
6) Auto Social Poster

A nice theme, i highly recommend "flexibility" Flexibility Theme for WordPress

You active all your plugins, put your settings in, site name, SEO, you configure Ping Crawl with a nice pinglist, and you add your bookmarking accounts into Auto Social Poster

The core of our 24/7 blogging machine is Caffeinated Content which can pull articles or videos from Youtube, Yahoo answers or Article Directories.

What you do with Caffeinated Content: You set a date, like from "2 weeks ago" ..say "12/01/2008 to 03/01/2009" (in the future), you count those days (in this case 4 months) and chose a reasonbale number of articles to pull, say 100 for this time frame. I recommend about 1-2 articles/day.

CC then pulls all this content from the specified source and stores it on your wordpress. It posts the one from "two weeks ago" already, and it schedules the future dated articles to post over time, up to the date you specified. If you chose a number of articles approximating the number of days you set in CC it will, on average, also post one article per day.

Furthermore you configured PingCrawl which is a nice grayhat plugin, it will ping out after each post and collect links to "related blogs".

Auto Social Poster will actually go out and bookmark your blogs.

Here is caution advised: If you use APS you need to be really naughty and have SEVERAL bookmarking accounts which you created from different IPs. Then you set it to use one of those accounts randomly and bookmark in a "semi-normal" fashion. Because no normal person would bookmark 200 articles a day. This is to stay under the radar.

Another nice method of getting content is the free "Syndicate Kahuna" where i just signed up. You install simple script on your host, then you enter your sites, keywords etc. on syndicatekahuna.com...and you can specify how many articles you want per day. Here again: A reasonable amount makes sense, like one or two.

Duplicate Content?

There is actually a number of people who tell you: "Dont worry". Maybe this is the case. Just dont bother with article rewriters or magic "uniquefiers" since they wont work, not in Google's eyes.
I also would not dare to present my web site visitors "spun" or automatic rewritten content" which is not really humanly readable.

I tend to say that the duplicate content "penalty" is not as big as some people make it look - if this is a big problem for you you shouldnt even start with autoblogging in the first place.

Now, we forgot something essential: You want to monetize your blog

So..put a nice adsense template on it, or go to CbProAds and get clickbank ads related to your niche...or go to CJ and get banners and ads from there.

Then start promoting your sites using Article Marketing and the usual.

Its good to know that your sites work automatically while you sleep, they pull content and ping and bookmark and all the work.
The best thing is that such an "autoblog" is WAY beyond the "olden times" Made-For-Adsense sites, those autblogs actually look GOOD. I see myself constantly browsing my own sites because is see interesting content and articles related to the niche i chose. Those are sites people STAY on as opposed to MFA linkfarms.

Happy (Auto)Blogging

G.

Edit: I did not expect this thread getting so much attention, but for one of my blogs check
out
http://www.internetmarketingbits.com or
http://www.cookingrecipesweb.com

to get an idea how it looks. The blogs can easily be changed according to niches just by changing templates, eg. for financial, debt (high adsense i chose ProSense template for high AdSense CTR.

[digitalproductreporter]

cool post, thanks

do you find these sites get indexed well or does google only do the homepage and a few others?

[GeorgR.]

my blogs are still extremely new, my oldest one (two weeks old) has 60 sites indexedas of now. But i did a lot of changes and added more plugins, so i will monitor the new sites in terms of backlinks and indexing, give me a month or two.

[onera]

Thanks for sharing. Great way to monetize your parked pages.

[SeanIM]

hmm, this looks oddly familiar to another post I've seen on BHW that
rocked...

great share :thumbsup

-S

[ryon1]

Great post,
The Idea of autobloging is great, but is it more effective than managing our blog manually?
Effective in term of money.

thanks GeorgR.

Good luck for YOUR Success, Rudy Yonatan

[Andrei Rotariu]

Nice post, will def use that some time in the future.

[Tim Dixon]

Thanks for that George.

I need to look into using Caffeinated Content as I have been concentrating on WP-O-Matic (amongst others) up to now.

The auto blogging model is one that has always fascinated me and I love looking at all the different ways of acheiving it.

Tim

[Patrick Carlow]

George,

Great guide, thanks for posting this. I've been looking for a solution like this and got my first blog set up last night using the plugins you've suggested here.

I feel like the blog still needs something else to mix things up a bit. One thing I'm considering adding is a random recent posts plugin. You mentioned some other plugins you added and changes, would you mind sharing any of those?

Thanks,
Patrick

[IMChick]

I'm going to set up a blog with this blueprint over the weekend. I'll let you know what happens. Thanks for the info.

[Emmbee]

Does CC allow easy to implement manual content in the auto-mix?

[GeorgR.]

Well CC basically "runs on the side"...it takes its saved content and posts it according to schedule.

You can always post as normal in addition, or re-run CC eg. for another keyword...or use any other source to additionally get content on the blog.

Patrick:
>
One thing I'm considering adding is a random recent posts plugin. You mentioned some other plugins you added and changes, would you mind sharing any of those?
>

i actually feel that those blogs already have "enough", especially if you take the time and run three runs of CC, one for articles, one for yahoo answers and one for videos.

The "pingcrawl" plugin then gets a lot of incoming links, make sure NOT to use more than three generated tags in CC since pingcrawl goes out and pings for each tag....so more than three are not recommended.

I only use very few plugins, CC, Platinum Seo, Maxblogpress Ping Optimizer, Auto Social Poster, Pingcrawl, Google XML sitemap.
More would be overkill, i looked long enough what "essential" plugins i need, and thats the one i found. Besides it keeps the time to install a new blog at minimum since you can set them up relatively quick.

Using the flexibility theme i got categories and recent posts automatically, then add the content itself and the many comments (from yahoo answers) and you got PLENTY of content without actually having to change anything.

The flexibilty theme also allows easy integration of adsense and banners, i actually modified it a bit since i dont want adsense, edited the template so i can put in my CBProAds Clickbank products.

[sunnyman]

Cool thingy, PingCrawl. Looked at a download page (joshteam.wordpress.com), seems a lot of people have had trouble making it work. Any particular download recommendation?

[harbors]

Is Caffeinated Content a free plugin? I can't find it on WP

[SeanIM]

Originally Posted by harbors

Is Caffeinated Content a free plugin? I can't find it on WP

it's not a free plugin, here's the link:

Kansieo.com - Buy Caffeinated Content for WordPress

[sider]

AutoBlogs are good for lazy people, although I love it and actually use it but such blogs do not rank high in search engines.
If you are looking to have an authority blog in your niche, take time to do the work!

[Keith Kogane]

Originally Posted by sider

AutoBlogs are good for lazy people, although I love it and actually use it but such blogs do not rank high in search engines.
If you are looking to have an authority blog in your niche, take time to do the work!

Amen from a lazy person.

Whether your blog will rank well has nothing to do with whether it's automated or not. The factors by which sites get rankings are just as easily applied to an automated website as a human edited one. The problem is that most autobloggers can make websites that will "fool" a search spider, but not a human. Eventually, such sites get manually de-indexed. However, it is certainly possible to create a completely automated blog that is not detectable as such by people or search engines. It just takes a bit of work up front to set everything up properly.

If you know what you're doing, you can easily and consistently create blogs that have automated content, create automated backlinks, and make passive ongoing (even growing) income.

If you're a non-noob, or even a noob that just wants more detailed auto-blogging tactics, you can see the thread in my sig, or also check out Tim Dixon's methods for using Google Reader as well.

Anyway, good post. This kind of thing DOES work, and is the easiest method I've tried so far to get something going online.

Originally Posted by jimrpips

Hate to say it, but these 'autoblog' sites never get good organic traffic. Google's algo just indexes them as duplicate content and dumps 'em at the bottom of the SERPs.

Again, incorrect. First, duplicate content penalty does not apply. Even if it did, there are many ways to auto-blog without duplicating content. Scraping content and reposting it is only one way to do this. There are many other ways. For example, I can take a crop of PLR articles, use WordPress and the "Get Random Page" plugin to make a dynamically randomizing article. I do this by making multiple rewrites of each sentence. I can then make a post using the plugin's tokens that will re-construct the article picking a random variant sentence by sentence, meaning each time the article is viewed, it will be unique enough to count as unique content.

I can take a number of articles arranged this way and set them up on a WordPress installation with the "Oldest2Newest" or "Scheduled Post Shifter" plugin so they rotate on an ongoing basis. You can then take the feed generated by this installation and use it to post to a number of other wordpress blogs. Every post on every different blog reposting this feed will be unique, but identical semantically.

With about 50 or so articles on related topics created this way, you have plenty for a one post a week blog. Fully automated.

Now, of course, the problems of SEO and monetization remain, but those are easily grafted onto the above outline. Again, see my post in my sig if you want some ideas.

But the big takeaway here is AUTOMATED DOES NOT MEAN DUPLICATED

[GeorgR.]

i am also really looking forward how syndicatekahuna works, which i have in addition to CC. While CC pulls from articlesbase.com and y answers and youtube, the idea behind syndicatekahuna sounds actually great.

Yes...i mentioned Blogpress Pingmaximizer plugin, its actually recommended to set it so it only pings each 1000-1200 minutes to avoid the "ping spammer" penalty.

[manzilla911]

A lot of worriers seem to be into this idea of auto bloging and post tid bits of info like this and i do apresheat it. I was just wondering if any one had a in depth blueprint on this subject.

[maverick4u]

I've been trying to do this autoblogging on my own but didn't see the "big picture" on how everything fits together. Do you use the links.txt file in CC to link to your affiliate links? Or is it better as some suggest to just use it to point to a random first name-like they were a contributing author to a post? I was also wondering if you have ever tried using WP-O-Matic with the go-codes set up that Keth Kogane talks about and the CC plugin together on the same blog or would they conflict?

[GeorgR.]

i had wp-omatic as well as go-codes, but i am back to CC. I dont use links.txt.

I monetize either with banner/contextual Clickbank Ads or with Adsense. You could as well use GoCodes or similar to make keyword-links, or use GoCodes in addition. I just fell in love with CBProAds and i think that for niche sites appealing banners and text-ads w/ covers look more appealing.

manzilla: Its really not that hard, you got all basics from my post or in this thread.
You set up the blog, configure the plugins, then you run CC and fill the blog with content, CC will continue to run until specified date in the future and drip-feed your blog with the content it pulled at the initial run. I usually set it to pull "3 months in advance", pulling like 90 articles/videos total....equals to about 1 article/day which CC will post over time then.

As for pinging and using the mentioned plugins, key is not to "over do it", eg. one/two article a day, one ping a day etc..etc... to look like a "normal" site with normal post volume, and not post 50 articles/day and ping each 15mins

[AlanCarr]

Is it just me or is syndicatekahuna not working?

Just signed up and logging in just dumps me back on the home page.

??

If I use a wrong name or password it says so, so what are they doing?


B.

[GeorgR.]

works here

[Keith Kogane]

The principle behind CC is solid, but the content it pulls just looks weird to me. I build authority blogs, so it looks weird to have the poster ask a question and have the commenters answer. To each their own, it just looks wonky to me.

[sunnyman]

Agreed. The content created by Caffeinated Content looks wonky to a human, and I wouldn't use this on a blog intended for human eyes.

[GeorgR.]

what are you talking about:

http://www.cookingrecipesweb.com/how...chicken-recipe

the "xxx asked" is a minor thing, really.

CC doesnt "create" content, it pulls valid content from article directories, Yahoo answers or Youtube.

The only thing i criticize as for now is the lack of "organization", eg. on my cooking recipes site there could be tabs and "sub sections", looking at a typical site visitor i can see he might want to search for "cookies", "desserts", "chicken" and so forth, maybe the search bar needs more exposure, or better sorting into categories.

[clashctyrokr]

Very helpful post! I might try that if I have time tommorow

[Yankabilly]

Cool everybody in the forum is great!
People Helping People...

[tnoldman]

Thanks for turning me on to the warrior forum this is great.

[Emmbee]

I really look forward to trying CC, but I'm waiting for a better coupon code. The current $9 off "nineoff" is pretty low compared to codes that just recently expired. Yup, I'm cheap I'm just about to install syndicate kahuna for free. I'll report back to this thread with my experiences. Great thread everybody!

[worldnet]

Steve, how do you change the templates on CC?

All, how much linking do you put in place for autoblogging? And, what is your primary monetization... is it to start with adsense and if sites starts doing well, move into affiliate or cpa?

Thanks in advance,

Van

[lianwei]

Hmm won't you lose interaction with your readers this way?

[GeorgR.]

"interaction with readers" and "autoblogging" is kind of mutually exclusive
If i want interaction with my readers i dont make an autoblog to begin with.

That being said, those autoblogs still have valuable content, i get pingbacks and replies/comments to whatever gets posted.

[Emmbee]

It seems if one tosses in some original content now and then a certain degree of interaction can be preserved

[Bai_Mike]

Has anyone else tried this before? It seems to be a viable strategy for generating content on top of other hand written or ghostwrited content.

[Evita]

Great thread!

How do I set up a variety of accounts from different IP addys?

What are the prices for ASP and CC? Anyone have a discount code?

Evita

[Shafiq Kamal]

Where I can buy all these? Give me link so I can buy and start the project.

[GeorgR.]

yes, you just run CC three times initially when you want youtube, Articles and Answers content.

You let it run three times, after it fetched all the content it stores the content in a pool and drip feeds your blog from all that saved content - up to the future date you specified.

A good rule of thumb (IMHO) is about ONE or TWO posts a day.

So...if you set CC pulling from 12/15/2008 - 02/15/2009, it would fill your blog with content 60 days worth. Some of it it will already post, and the ones "in the future" it will schedule and drip-feed up to 02/15/2009.

Since in this example its 60 days total, and you might want 120 articles TOTAL (2 a day) i recommend doing three runs. each with 40 articles/videos.

So..you do one run and fetch 40 videos, you do once getting 40 articles, and one 40 yahoo answers.

120 articles/content/videos over 60days ---> on average 2 a day.

On 02/15 you go on your blog again and start to fetch more, like 2 or 3 months ahead again

G.

[tommygadget]

George, I like your recipes site, and the last comment where that guy said that the girl was hot really made me laugh! You know, I found myself looking all over your site, I actually like it, so autoblogging does make for a nice user experience.

TomG.

[jbreezy]

Autoblogs are perfect for flipping.

I suggest you add a custom header, plus sell an ebook on your site. You want to monetize it the best way possible. Becareful not to get into a HUGE...broad niche. You want to get something that won't get lost in the shuffle.

A good Autoblog would be something on a particular sports team. Like say the Indianapolis Colts. You could pull tons of content related to that team. Fans would definitely bookmark you because you are a CENTRAL hub, and you could monetize it by selling sports collectibles, jerseys, and even books.

Start a user forum...video gallery..etc. etc. etc.

[GeorgR.]

i make so many the last few days, various niches. I really have to cut back.

And yes, haven't even LOOKED at flipping yet.

I am waiting for the new flexibility theme 2.0 so i can add better custom headers, should be out soon.

The value of this also for PPC is gigantic, make some sub-pages and "copy" some clickbank product squeeze page, right into your blog.

I get rather "meh" quality score on your typical "clickbank squeeze pages"....but withing a WP blog i have NEVER seen so many "GREAT" quality scores in my life.

I had QS "great" and top bids for pennies for terms like "make easy money"...and i re-arranged my whole adwords campaign now.

The principle is the following:

Make a blog with some general theme, like "sports" or "remedies".

NOW you can chose whatever hundreds products from CB and sell specific remedies or sports products within your blog.

In addition (i already said that a few times) i totally love CBProAds, for $30/year i get sharp looking ads with clickbank products.

So..i make one site which could be "remedies", and then i make a site about a music or sports, and i just replace a few entries in the flexibility theme and i get those ads on the blog.

I think it takes me a whole 15mins to actually have a blog 100% up and running, and the 15mins are totally worth it.

Edit: I noticed some of the blogs have still hickups, eg. CC doesnt post for some reason. I see posts from eg. 12/28 which should be on there now, but they stay at "scheduled" and dont get published.

On some other blogs someone refers to videos, but i dont see them.

My fav. is http://www.powersbeyond.com for now, i like the colors


I could still cut down if i had a central "management station" eg. "WP cloner"...which i dont have YET.

[Emmbee]

Auto social poster is prohibitively expensive i.e. minimum of $99 up to $199. Is it worth it? How effectively can you auto-blog without it? Also, what's the difference between Pingcrawl and Max Blogpress Ping Optimizer. Do you need them both?

Thanks!

[GeorgR.]

The funny thing is, until now i have NOT used "auto social poster" *at all*. The reason is that i need MANY accounts made on various IPs for the various bookmarking services.

I had someone creating accounts for me, but it didnt turn out too well.

Pingcrawl is a plugin which "goes out" and for each tag generated (by caffeinated content) it looks for related blogs and puts link in your blog.

Max Blog Press Ping Optimizer is SUPPOSEDLY limiting your pings, eg. you can set it to let WP ping only each 10 hours or something.

The reason is that older WPs (by default) pinged at each modification of any post....causing a "ping overload" and SUPPOSEDLY getting you banned by pinging services. (However, this is all rumors and hearsay since i never really saw PROOF someone getting banned by ping services)

MaxBlogPress Pingcrawl is basically setting a limit to those Pings - HOWEVER the plugin itself is not without flaws, i am "in between" when it comes to my opinion in regadrs to that plugin.

General:

I just made a list of my blogs and it gets CONSIDERABLY harder to manage them, uodating plugins, themes and so forth. And i am just talking about 30 blogs now.
Thats why i got Edna's wpmanagerDX, looking into this now and better ways to manage all the blogs from a central point.

Also, Emmbee. ASP is NOT the "autoblog plugin". At the core of it all is still Caffeinated Content which retails of $77, but there are coupons out there to get this for $43 if you look around a bit.

ASP you can skip (for now), as said i didnt ever use this (yet).

G.

[Mark Dulisse]

Very very cool. I learned a lot here. I'm going to try that on a obscure niche. Thanks for caffienated plugin idea.
Mark

[xlfutur1]

Originally Posted by Keith Kogane

The principle behind CC is solid, but the content it pulls just looks weird to me. I build authority blogs, so it looks weird to have the poster ask a question and have the commenters answer. To each their own, it just looks wonky to me.

I have used CC with good success, but if you only pull from Yahoo answers, your blog will look weird. If you mix up the blog posts with articles and videos and some original content than it looks much more natural. I always manually edit the posts as well to take out the caffeinated content link (I hate that it is in every post, big footprint problem) and usually the graphic it pulls too.


There are other uses for CC if you think outside the box. I used Caffeinated content to resurrect an old domain (Chicago attorney site in sig). It made a new site look established and now I have actual attorneys answering real questions that visitors ask. I then share the leads with them. It ranks #6 on page one of Google for: chicago attorneys Without CC I never would have been able to get that domain back on track.

[strsinthesky]

Thanks for another great autobloggin post! I myself use caffeinated content for great results. Youtube wordpress plugin also works wonders.

[iMerickz]

Nice compilation of the essential plugins needed for auto blogging..
But i won't recommend bookmarking for these auto blogs coz since these are already scrapped material from the web, most probably there are already similar content on the bookmarking sites so i 'll just concentrate on the setup of the content and after that just let it run by itself and review the traffic stats every week to work on any improvements (if any).
Another plugin worth consider is the auto tagger and technocratic tag plugin.
These make tags based on your content and then convert to technocratic tags. Quite important to tag your posts to technocratic, IMO..
After that just blast your RSS feed to all the most popular RSS directories.
I do this using a very cheap and fantastic tool being offered in a current WSO. Go find it if you need to do this automatically, it will really saves up tons of your time!

[vicone]

George,

You've developed a very interesting thread.

I think more is yet to come, in particular how to monetize effectively with CBProAds.

To use PPC effectively, Adwords needs to be well targeted so that the visitors will click thru on the landing page.

It seems to me that the ads provided by CPProAds are too broad and not niche oriented. It's impossible to tell what ads will appear.

For instance, on a Skin Care site I could be displaying health related ads, such as ads for Yoga, Dieting, and Eczema. It seems to be difficult matching the Adgroups to the ads displayed, although it's possible to match the Adwords to the content of the landing page.

How effective have you found CBProAds to be? They do look good, just not as well targeted, which would affect click thrus and conversions.

Ivan

[vicone]

iMerickz,

Is the RSS poster you're referring to the one by Big Mike?

Ivan

[iMerickz]

Originally Posted by vicone

iMerickz,

Is the RSS poster you're referring to the one by Big Mike?

Ivan

Yup ..
At $7 you can't get anything better than that!
Definitely worth much much more!
Save you tons of time if you are submitting by hand (if you are still doing that) and the developer are still working to add more RSS directories to it and making it more better. Free updates for life.. Can't really ask for more..
BTW, out of the 30 sites submitted, i only get 2-3 errors sometimes but i am too lazy to check out the actual faults..

P/S: Don't forget that while the tool is busy doing all the work for you on the background, you can make use of the time to do your other stuff. Isn't IM all about making use of our time and multiplying our efforts but minimizing the work to be done?