The Concept and Content of AutoBlog

The Concept and Content of AutoBlog - Your ultimate goal, when setting up an Autoblog, is to make as much money as possible expending the least amount of effort. The only way this can happen is AUTOMATION. The more things you have to manually do every day, the more you eat into your overall potential. Quite simply, there is no way that you can run a network of 50 or 100 blogs manually unless you hire people to do it; and you could only do that when you have a PROVEN blog model, and know for sure that you will make more money than it costs to put people to work on it.

In order to get to that point, your blogging fundamentals must be rock solid. You need to know how to pick the right keywords, how to pick the right domain name, how to get content, how to get backlinks, how to get traffic from the search engines, how to make money from all of it, and ultimately how to automate as much of it as possible. Forget about doing that with 100 blogs, try doing it with ONE first. Once you find the right formula, rinse, and repeat.

I want to talk to you a bit about the word “Autoblog.” In my opinion, there is not one set definition to this word. Some people think that an AB is 100% set it and forget it. You upload WordPress and files, configure, and never lay eyes on the thing again. If that is what you truly want to do, then it can be done. What determines the level of automation of your AB is obviously the content source. There are a million and one plugins that serve a variety of content types into your blog automatically. Of course, content that you don’t own, didn’t write, are using illegally, and can get your AutoBlog banned and de-indexed any second of any day.

Relax; I am not a canonized Saint or anything. In fact, I started building AutoBlog’s this way. 100’s of them. For me, they were largely a waste of time and effort. Even when some managed to fly under the Google radar, and rank well for some good keywords, it was always a temporary victory. Invariably, someone, somewhere would find the blog, complain to Google, if it wasn’t Google themselves who found it, and hit the DELETE button. Do you want to work on something, only to have it completely evaporated in a heartbeat? I certainly don’t, not anymore. I want to tell you how to build an AB for the long-term.

Now I am sure you will find threads on the forums by people who sit back and laugh and have “hundreds of millions of blogs” that use nothing but imported RSS feeds, and each one ranks number one on Google for every keyword, and they are 100% unaffected by Google’s tightening of the duplicate content ranking filters. They obviously are so special and unique that it wouldn’t be worth your time to try and copy from, you wouldn’t have the same luck, and you’ll likely be beamed down to Earth where all of us realistic people live instead.

If you want to build an AutoBlog network on duplicate content, then I hope you don’t want to actually make any money from it. If you’re okay with that, then you are good to go! You have only a few choices for content: you can scrape it from somewhere else and do a number of things to “spin” or rewrite the content in some way, or you can do a mixture of unique content written by you or outsourced and spun content, or you could use your own content written by you or outsourced. Personally, I outsource cheap article content in bulk. If you go on Elance, Scriptlance, MTurk, Craigslist, or any other job or freelance board, you will find plenty of writers willing to write articles cheap in bulk. Obviously, this is the optimal choice, but not everyone can afford to do this off the bat. If you go on some of the black hat forums like Blackhatworld, you will find tons of bulk PLR articles that you can rewrite with plugins or desktop article rewriters like Magic Article Rewriter.

The less effort you put into this step, your chances of making even a minimal dent with the AB goes down dramatically. You can rewrite content with software to the point of having it read like gibberish, but that accomplishes little or nothing. Google knows what rewritten content is, and they have developers that are way smarter than guys who release these rewriting apps. If you are working on a low budget, take a set of 200 PLR (Private Label Rights) articles, and hire someone to rewrite them. That should be cheap, less than a hundred bucks, then you can put your content on drip feed. If you have ZERO dollars to spend on content, why not rewrite it yourself? I know it may sound crazy at first, but it is a great way to get started for nothing but sweat and labor. I’ve done it, and still do from time to time. I am not talking about writing the next War and Peace here, but rewriting articles already on the web elsewhere. Why not set aside a week, and do nothing but rewrite content the whole week? The difference in revenue results will be amazingly better.

What I mean by “drip feed” is to use a WP plugin to slowly post your articles at random intervals over however long a period you specify. There are many different plugins that do this, such as WP Autoposter, or WP Content Magic, and they will give you the “Auto” in Autoblog because you import the content once, then configure it to post for a year or month, then leave it alone. The more content, the better. Don’t post more than 4 articles per week. You will hear many bloggers telling you to post 3 or 4 times a day, the more the merrier, but that is wrong. It looks unnatural to the search engines, and is an obvious red flag that your blog is an AB.

If you want to use auto-content plugins anyway, maybe to learn the ropes or something, some of them (such as WP Robot) are quite extensive and customizable, but just using them at all is not my recommendation. Like I said though, if you want to learn how to build and run an AB, you could use them to get accustomed to running them.

You will see all kinds of methods of spinning content on the web for AB’s, from using plugins and rewriters, to using RSS and Yahoo Pipes, or even hiring a coder to write a script for you. I can tell you that I have done them all, and the results I got with them don’t even come remotely close to the results I got by outsourcing cheap content and drip feeding it. These choices are entirely up to you. At this time, it would take a NEW, freshly developed AB plugin to make content plugins a viable option to having content rewritten or outsourced. I am actually working on one now, but it isn’t ready yet, but when it is it will not resemble any of the others. That is what will make it effective.

Posts related to The Concept and Content of AutoBlog

30 Day Blogging Action Plan

Blog Content Brainstorming: Blogging (Part 3)

Setting Up Your Blog: Blogging (Part 1)

3 Quick And Easy Ways To Build A Profitable Opt In List