Auto-Blogging - Does It Work?

Yes...it works. I have a few of them.

It's not a matter of just throwing one up though. Sorry, to have to burst some bubbles out there.

You use them as tightly themed traffic generators.

They really don't take off on thier own either. You have to put some work into them on the front end before you have a shot at making them stand on thier own.

Yep, still do.

Define "successful". I do pretty well still. I haven't been building as much as I wanted to this year, but my best performing blogs are still humming along getting traffic, making sales with only a little nudge from me here and there.

Way too many variables are involved to make any kind of blanket estimate. The trick is really to just build explosively and try a lot of different markets, and a lot of different promotions. Much like an Adwords PPC marketer, it's all about testing new ones. Unlike PPC though, I can just keep running my "failures" and use them for building backlinks to rank other stuff down the line. That's just one example, but having lots of blogs that post frequently and get age on the domain and pages in the index is the "side effect" of failing at my method.

Ask anyone who knows SEO how valuable that kind of thing is. Even if all these blogs don't make a dime, if you build as many as you can that update and get spidered multiple times a week, you've basically built a traffic pushing network all by yourself.

Sure, why not?

Going for sub-niches and cross markets is exactly what you want to do. In the same way that you want to be failing a lot because you're trying a lot, there's a flip-side. Once you find a winner, mine that vein as deeply and broadly as you can. When it comes to the model I describe, a "success" indicates both a healthy audience who is interested in your topic as well as a productive niche that creates a lot of its own topical content.

That kind of community will self compartmentalize into sub-niches all by itself.

Beyond all the other stuff I've already posted here in that thread and others, not really. That's the whole deal, pretty much. Some of the details as far as which specific plugins and themes are used - that stuff changes like all software.

But the functionality and methodology of finding a "high chatter" niche that can use a news aggregator and letting the community generate the content for the purpose of selling advertising and affiliate products - that remains the same and is just as legitimate now as it was last year.

Well sure, and a horse is a mammal with 4 legs, but so is a cow. The method I posted that he linked to has a key difference than most "auto blog" methods. Basically, you VERY CAREFULLY select the sources of your automated content in order to actually sort useful content from quality sites into an organized and valuable community resource. The goal is to take all of the possibilities that scrapers and re-posters present and use them to build a REAL site that has QUALITY and VALUE in the particular market.

It's really not much to do with Google or splogging. I can see why you're confused, but you should check out the old thread to see what's actually possible to do nowadays before you dismiss the whole concept due to shoddy implementations that some folks might use to get by.

Again, what you describe is just one way to apply the automation tools to make money online. I prefer to create a site that's an aggregator of all of a niche's news and links and chatter and become an authority simply by being a kind of librarian and tour-guide kind of site. I make my revenues by attracting an audience and keeping it there with lots to check out, and lots of reason to keep coming back if you're into the topic I've targeted.

Very true.

If your goal is to build an automated blog, then what you're saying is the opposite of what he needs. And since when does the content in RSS feeds magically become "inhuman"? People wrote it, right? What's wrong with using their RSS to pull a snippet of their article and linking back?

All the content in RSS feeds is unique and human generated. Especially if you pull content from lots of places and assemble it together as I've described in the other thread.

Anyways, hope that clears some stuff up. I don't stop by here much lately, but it's nice to see people still checking out that old thread. As far as I can tell, it's actually the most viewed thread on the forum (since the migration anyway).

Maybe I should get around to selling something one day and not squander all that attention, huh? Maybe one day.

Hummm...what was it that got you sandboxed? I pull in approx. 150 articles and content a day to one of the auto-blogs and never got penalized for anything.

I have only one and it's a site I bought from someone... I probably wouldn't have set this up myself but having bought it, seen how it works and seeing the results. Nothing spectacular but it does make money! about 1 minute of work a month (just basically telling the system to create posts for the next month... I could actually just set it for for a few months or a year and it would then just be a minute a year :p )... so any kind of money is good for 1 minute of work, it's currently making around $50-100/ month. So seeing this, I might just be creating some more of them and thinking of ways to bring more auto traffic to them
The way it's setup is really clever though so I think it needs a good setup for it to be able to bring traffic and create posts that are interesting enough for people to read.

We appraoch this about the same way...

I like to call it "Semi - Auto Blogging".

I still use some of the traditional auto content sources (though I'm not sure I would call it stolen when the TOS allow it to be reposted elsewhere) but I add the occasional piece of unique content here and there, I also manually check the content from the "auto" sources before I schedule it to post.

For me this is a better approach than just setting up a site in a few minutes and walking away and not knowing the quality or relavance of the content that is going to post after I have gone.

It's still mostly automated as far as the process but the content itself is about an 80/20 mix of auto VS unique.

' Does it work?' depends on what you want to achieve

I have blogs that are 100% automatic and on 1st page
in google serps for medium competitive keywords, getting
1500-2500 unique visitors per month.

However, setting up an autoblog correctly demands
patience and some wp and rss knowledge.

Sorry if I misunderstood. I see now that though you were talking about adult sites, you didn't really unfairly dismiss the methods for being garbage or whatever. Lots of folks do, for no real good reason. Sorry to have misunderstood what you meant, but glad to discover we actually agree.

I don't see why not. WordPress Mu is what WordPress.com runs on and all of those sites tend to rank okay and get traffic if they're any good. It's not the way I've done it, but subdomains should work. The downside of that is being able to use "failed" sites as rank builders for your later sites. If all your sites are on the same main domain it'll probably not be as easy to push around page rank. I'm not an SEO expert, so take any advice along those lines with a grain of salt.

I agree that most autobloggers fail, but it's more a matter of not being discriminate enough in picking content sources, or spending enough time organizing and setting up for intelligent automation at the beginning.

People tend to forget that just because a tool allows automation doesn't automatically mean you have no editorial or quality control. You can be very precise when creating "recipies" for sites that are useful to visitors (as a resource), valuable to the sites you syndicate (as publicity/traffic source), and profitable for you (based on the inevitible ad click or sale from an affiliate promo.

I find a useful way to think about building good autoblogs is to think of the system as a robot reporter, and you're the magazine editor/programmer. You tell the reporter what kind of stuff you're looking for, he goes out and grabs a bunch of info and links back to where it came from.

Seems pretty logical to me, but for whatever reason, people hear "automation" and "RSS" and "blog" altogether and they automatically presume spam.

For example, this guy can't see past his "spam" alarm to think about how the tools of the scammer can save a legitimate webmaster a lot of time and money. I want to build lots of dynamic, interesting VRE news sites to collect decent size niche audiences. I also don't want to pay an army of writers, or editors, or bloggers, or anyone really. I am physically and mentally able to "edit" and manage the content on over 100 blogs because I do all of the heavy lifting during setup, and then just tweak along the way.

Much like a real blog investor with a staff, I can focus my entrepreneurial interests on the marketing and growing of the sites without having to worry about the content. Whatever good content occurs in my niche will automatically be spotted by my "robot reporters" and posted to my sites (or queued as a draft for review/commentary).

So yeah, what this guy says is what you would do if you WERE trying to approach this as a black hat traffic driver or search engine scam. But if you're referencing my stuff, I only ever recommend building a real site through automation, not ever solely for "scamming" the search engines or my content providers, or my readers.

auto blogging is super cool coz it's easy. You can improve an auto blog though when you add value in the form of some unique content, some seo love etc and this can all be automated with wp

Sometimes auto blogging works but sometimes I guess they said it's
critical...

why?

Cannot see anything against Google or any other search engines when autoblogging. The point is to use good quality content - why can't we automate it?

I offer good quality content for visitors even if I'm away for a week or two

So yes, it works and don't know why it wouldn't....

Marian