Automatic Blogging. Is It Rubbish?

Yes, indeed from other blogs.
You should check a thread here by Tim Dixon for more about this approach.

I dunno about legality... but if you can get traffic to a blog
on a certain topic - news about pig-farming for instance,
wouldn't it make sense just to grab relevant feeds so your
readers will be served?

Ok. That's cool right.

But that's probably not what you want. You are probably
thinking your can set up content feeds, ping 'em, and get
a flood of traffic who will eagerly click on your banner
ads for FatLoss4Idiots or other mass-market affiliate program
du jour.

It's a chicken-or-egg question. What comes first? visitors
who want content, or content that brings visitors.

Everybody is looking for ways to get traffic without spending
any money or writing anything interesting about anything interesting
that requires reading. We are all too busy playing golf and
living the internet-marketing lifestyle to concern ourselves
with such things.

My guess is you have no traffic and you are wondering if
this would be an easy way to get some. Dunno. test it.

This is just an experience from a friend of mine, I haven't done auto blogging myself,
he set up few blogs - auto blogs - taking contents from other blogs and set adsense there.
For the first few months he got decent amount of visitors and performed great on adsense, even got some blogs on first page of google, not sure though if he did some optimizations on the sites,
later on the blogs began to sink, then he set up other new auto blogs and so on.

Just need confirmation from other bloggers, is this the nature of auto blogs?

i dunno about all this, but hey, test it out!

Long term it's just not going to work because you are duplicating content.

If you want true long term success, establish yourself as a leader in a nice refined niche and deliver original content on your blog.

I have about 30 autoblogs set up so that I can link them to my web sites to give visitors somewhere else to go to and come back from. The auto blogs get between 80 and 1000 posts a month, depending on the subject - but they only get visitors from my sites.

They help me to keep my visitors and that is what they are there for.

I test drove a system like this a while back. The whole ideal was to get free traffic from search engines because of all the activity on your blog daily which will boost your rankings...

BUT, the down side is it gathers it from other sites, blogs and stuff. So it's not original... The end result I think is you build a high ranking blog with bad content...

So, you may be getting a lot of visitors but they will be leaving as soon as they land on your site... In my view whats the point. I would say rubbish.

I think the quick way sometimes is not the best in the long run.

I think if you rely purely on replicating content from other sites via RSS then you will probably be in that never ending cycle of having to create more and more autoblogs.

There are however many sides to what could loosely be termed 'autoblogging' and it doesn't just have to be building 1000s of splogs scraped from RSS feeds.

The way I view automation is in the actual posting of content onto the blogs. This can be done in numerous ways and there are many plugins you can use for the purpose as many will be aware.

But the content you feed to those automated blogs is another matter. You can use datafeeds from affiliate networks, unique content of your own, PLR articles, user generated content from forums and social networks you run or have access to, articles from article directories, and of course you can provide your own RSS feeds with mixtures of all sorts of content including news snippets with your own annotations, videos etc. etc.

So you can create pretty unique and useful blogs through these techniques.

Although it may 'seem' like you're having to do more work initially than just setting up hundreds of splogs, in the long run as far as time vs. return is concerned it isn't and once you have your system sorted, it doesn't take much work to maintain it.

There's also the question of what you use the automated blogs for. If you're just going to use them for adsense and maybe a bit of affiliate income, then that's fine but don't expect much from it. I use mine for slightly different purposes such as testing and tracking in a niche I'm involved in to help with product development and market research.

They do provide some small income streams in themselves along the way which is great, but for me, that's not their primary purpose. Also I create far fewer automated blogs to suit my purpose than a splog farmer, which in turn means it is far easier to concentrate on keeping them fed with useful content.

If you want to see a great example of 'thinking outside the box' as far as automated blogs/content then take a look at Kurt's post on something he's doing. You can find that here:
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ntent-rss.html

The best way to see what works for you is to actually try it. Just set up a couple of automated blogs and feed them a mixture of some news items, unique and/or PLR content etc. Try monetizing them with some adsense and/or affiliate programs or use them to send traffic back to one of your main money sites. Put some tracking code on them to keep track of things.

See how they perform, find out what works best for you. Then use that knowledge to build on.

Hope that helps a few people.

Tim

GD,

do you think all of your readers know ANY article posted on the various article directories?

Do you think they go to your blog and say "oh god...i just saw that article on XYZ article directory?"

I can tell you its not the case, there are many sources to get AB content from, be it Blogs, RSS, newsfeeds, Youtube, yahoo.

Furthermore, i notice a "paradox" behavior in many interested people, i see a steep increased interest in autoblogs, but at the same time the people have various concerns which are in stark contradiction to what they actually want to achieve.

1) The dupe content "penalty" is a MYTH, i dont see it. I have some sites indexed w/ over 1000 pages...and i am talking pure garbage ABlogs which only use some news feeds.

2) my other "higher quality" ablogs get indexed too, but here i post less frequently, usually 1 only 2 posts a day. Everything gets indexed also.

3) Autoblogs are, well, uhm Autoblogs. Check
Powers Beyond - Secret Human Knowledge

Do you think this site is "worthless"? No its not, it has nice content - its not relevant whether the articles have been posted already "somewhere else, not for the site visitor!

As for monetisation:

1) Adsense (with AdSense WP templates like Prosense, like Student Loan Consolidation)

2) CBProads, like on my niche sites where i use CBProads, check
Internet Marketing Bits
and read my little "review" of CBProads.

You for sure dont "lose" anything making autoblogs, its relatively simple.

(Yes, those are all ABlogs...)

Great posts so far, if you were going to avoid copyright infringement with autoblogging I think the key would be to alternate the auto with the manual sources. Providing useful information with a mixture of articles and RSS feeds on a daily or weekly basis will surely entice visitors make it interesting to them. I think you need to make sure the content is up to date and relevent before thinking about automation, if an automated service can provide this for you without copyright issues, go ahead and do it and get high quality traffic in the meantime! Just my 2 cents!

Automated blogging is something that I have been looking into as well. Some great ideas discussed here.

I would assume that the autoblog information is coming from an RSS feed on another relevant blog with relevant content. I agree that you would need to make a few manual postings occasionally to mix the content to make a little more unique, but if your blog is unique in its own niche and promoting something unique, this shouldn't be a problem.

One point of caution re using feeds to auto-populate your blogs. Make sure to read each feed's TOS to make sure using it for commercial purposes isn't prohibited.

There have been instances noted here on the forum where folks have been contacted by feed owners and told to remove their feeds because the manner of usage violated the TOS.

It only takes an extra few minutes to find the terms of service or usage to see what is - or isn't - allowed. In the longrun, it might save you a headache or two.

Cindy

Even if auto blogging seems tempting, i don't see much point in it. Instead of constantly building new sites, maintaining low value blogs that don't build relationship with people and are not reliable, with the same amount of work you can establish 2-3 powerful blogs, with valuable content, build opt-in lists and have steady, reliable stream of income. Which in time only grows in value. Is just a matter of quantity versus quality.

I always think long-term, so for me auto blogging is not a good option. But i guess that trying and testing is the best approach.

Carter

well..the subject "autoblogging" has already discussed here like crazy...and i am certainly a big supporter of autoblogs.

There is also certain levels of autoblogs, you could make a 100% autoblog which only lives off RSS or articles, you could make a semi-autoblog where you occasionally add "real" content by hand too.

I have one job site which pulls 50 feeds (job listings)...and i am certainly NOT manually adding 1000s of jobs listings from the paper by hand into my site every day

Also...there are some BIG AdSense earners which make VERY good money, they do this with a multitude (1000s) of autoblogs. Maybe one blog only makes $5 or $10 a day....but add it up and assume someone has 1000s of "worthless autoblogs" running.

Do you think those big earners do nothing all day than writing with bloody fingers to submit unique content to their 1000s of blogs?

That being said, a good autoblog can have very valuable information. Not every visitor visiting your site "knows" the articles are from ezine or somewhere else - they can still go to your site and its new content for them since they have never seen the article before.

Autoblogs CAN provide value and they can look good, if done right.

if it is copy from another blog, means it is illegal. That's my point.

Wow, I thought auto-blogging meant creating a bunch of posts and then having them posted automatically at set times. Kind of like follow up autoresponders

I am a newbie though, and I haven't blogged yet. I will be creating one soon though.


anyway, can you set up your blog like an auto-responder.

Like say I write 20 posts this week.

and then I set a time when I want these posted to my blog let's say every two days. Is this possible to do?

Thanks

Shane_K

I'm loving this thread but...

Is there an automated method or software that allows you to 'Preload' it with unique posts or articles, post date their release and allows you select specific blogs to post to?

In other word, not thousands of automated post from just about anywhere, but specific articles with specific targeting, released at scheduled times and dates.

I'd appreciate any ideas.
Cheers,
Jeff

RSS is mainly promotion for the ones offereing the feeds, thats why its mostly only short excerpts with links to their sites.

Not sure if I'm resurrecting an old post or not, but I have an autoblog question. A fellow somewhere here had mentioned that his autoblog was also generating backlinks along with the content using his wpomatic (or caffeinated content) autoblog plugin. Since I have no idea about this, will autoblogging create backlinks to a blog? Just wondering because the concept is flying over my head right now.

I tried this method and got no where because any automated post is just duplicate content and gets buried in google results.