Autoblogging - Pros and Cons
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Autoblogging for Beginners
Autoblogging is a term commonly used to describe a blog or website that has as much automation as possible. This means pulling in content that will post directly to your blog, pictures, videos and anything else you can find.
Then on the other side you can set your blog up to send these posts out to twitter, subscribers, RSS subscribers, digg and many other sources. This sounds very appealing to the beginner and experienced blogger alike.
The whole theory behind auto blogging is, throw as much content on the wall as you can and see what sticks. Ok, to someone looking for online income this still sounds like a good deal. Set it up and let it churn away, then move on to the next one.
These types of sites are labeled as "Little Cash Machines", the formula is build 100 of these sites, average $2.00 a day and that adds up to $200.00 a day...$6,000.00 a month. This looks really attractive and if after you make all these sites you don't have to do anything else, this looks even better.
Now, we always have to ask ourselves, if this is that easy why don't we all just make 200 or 300 of these sites, collect the $12,000.00 a month and enjoy life? The next question is, is anyone really making this kind of money from auto blogging?
On the expense side, it's easy to add up. Lets say $20.00 a month for hosting, $10.00 per domain and $25.00 misc.. All this equals $2,540.00 a year. Now, based on 200 domains the income is $12,000.00 a month, which equals $148,000.00 a year of income. Sounds like a darn good investment to me.
Lets take a closer look at both sides of the coin, that way we can get a better understanding about how autoblogging does or does not work.
Autoblogging Pros
You probably already know that Wordpress is the most popular platform used for blogs. It has a lot of functionality and this is extended with the use of plug-ins.
Lets look at a few.
UAW - (Unique Article Writer) This is a service that allows you to spin articles and then distributes them to article directories and member websites. There is a free plug-in you can install in your wordpress website which will pull these articles from the UAW database. You have complete control over how many articles you get, the categories you want and if you want them posted or drafted. In my experience the articles are not bad and like any syndicated article you have to leave the link(s) in the articles.
Auto Blogged -This plugin creates posts from RSS or Atoms feeds. This is a little more complicated because you have to find the feeds that fit your subject. Then you have quite a few options to modify the feeds with, here's a few:
- Image and video support
- Custom post templates
- Advanced post filtering
- Enhanced tagging engine
- Regular Expression Search & Replace
- Create thumbnails for images
- Override feed data with your own values
- Fully supports WordPress 2.7 and later
Wordpress Lite - You will find a few free plug-ins from the wordpress site. They mainly pull and post RSS feeds from places you choose. I have used the lite version for about 4 months and it did what it was suppose to do.
There are other tools and plug-ins that can be used to pull articles from specific article directories, the most common article directory these tools pull from is called article base.
As you can see, there are a number of tools and scripts available for autoblogging, you can mix and match them to get a ton of posts on your site. As mentioned, some of the articles are not bad at all, but as you can imagine there is another side to this story.
Take a look at this video below, it will give you some ideas about how to create content. This is an older video and there are now plug-ins that will pull data from this site and format it so it becomes a useful, automated post for your website.
I know a lot of this information can be foreign to you, but getting exposure to the behind the scenes stuff is very beneficial. Get familiar with some of the terms used in this business.
- Lifetime Online Income
Find out how you can use the Internet to build a lifetime of online income. It's a process, it's building an online business and you can do it.
Autoblogging Cons
If you are the one making $12,000.00 a month from autoblogging, then you have overcome the cons of auto blogging, Congratulations.
For this system to work you have to get these sites ranked. This means you have to get these sites on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing. Google is still the search king, but Yahoo and Bing are making strides to be competitive, every little bit helps.
Most people use adsense or affiliate products to make money online, these products don't a lot of maintenance which fits right in with the autoblogging profile. So, you're still waiting for the negative side of this plan, the big question is, how do you get on the first page of Google?
That's a big question alright. I will list some of the factors, then you will see it's not as easy as it sounds. You need to ....
- Pick the Right Niche
- Choose the Right Domain
- Get Good Keywords
- Find Good Affiliate Products
- Find Right Articles and RSS Feeds
Here's some things they don't tell you.
What happens when...
- Your Subject Trends Out of Favor?
- Your Keywords Change?
- Your RSS Feeds Outrank Your Site?
- The Feed Articles are Syndicated to Sites That Outrank Yours?
- Google Changes Their Algorithms?
You see, the problem is your dependent on Google. Google is smart, they know what's going on and you could lose most or all of your online income over night.
Don't you think there are other people trying to get on page one of Google too? What will you have to do to get your website above theirs?
I will say the answers to the above questions is a fascinating subject in itself. It is a challenge and requires learning how Google works. Now you've got to be thinking, there has to be a less complicated way to make money online, there is.
Other Online Income Options for Making Money
The fact is there are multiple ways to make money online, but do you only want to make money or do you want your efforts to count for building a business?
The Internet has opened doors of opportunity for anyone who wants it, but if you don't understand how it works, then how can you know it will work for you?
The real key is understanding what steps are necessary to reach your goal. If this is the direction you're headed, then long term online income is for you. Take a closer look now!
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5institutes, a few tricks is to write your own unique home page and a few supporting pages. Do backlinking to them to build strength. Pass some of that down by linking to your sub-pages. Any pages that were auto created, you would have to see who is out ranking you and check their linking profile. If your site becomes stronger than the others that are pulling the same articles, then you will rank higher.
I agree with the folks saying it’s a lazy man’s way to make money online but I think that if the autoblogging plugin or whatever they use is a good one, there’s chances one could make easy money with only spending for domain/hosting and some time to set up WordPress.
Truth is I’ve seen a bunch of sites using autoblogging plugins that were pure crap, some of them didn’t even had a link to the original content which is unacceptable. I believe most of them aren’t making anything worth mentioning.
I’ve also seen quite a few sites that looked pretty good and, judging by their Alexa rank, they do have traffic, therefore sales. It all sums up to how you use autoblogging I think, if you do your homework pick the best keywords (that are searched for but there’s a lack in promotion), one could make a great income off of it.
I’m not a lazy man and I do have my own written blogs, actually quite a few, but I was lately thinking about setting some autoblogging sites see how’s it working. Most of the successful blogs I saw were using Multipress Lite so I think I’m going to use it on this project. At first glance, looks like it takes its content from Yahoo Answers, Flikr and some article directories so it should be good to use. It also creates a link to the original content so there shouldn’t be any issues with people getting angry for their content being used elsewhere.
I’ll let you know how it works out if I have the time to get it started.
Chris, please let us know how your autoblogging trials turn out. Yes, your right, many people think they can just plug in and forget. A solid autoblogging system requires more than just a plug in. You need a cron job in the back end, you need some unique content, and you still need to promote your pages.
I've been to blogging for quite some time now. But, I still find your article very interesting. Beginners will surely know the ups and downs of autoblogging.
Hope to read more from you. Good luck.
Jesus72, thanks for stopping buy with your comments. Autoblogging, I'm sure, will be changing again in the near future. We have to stay nimble to the changes.
The problem w/ auto blogging is that if you automate the whole system even if you get a good Page Rank if your site is crap and filled with useless articles that came from some web spinner nobody is going to stay on your site more then 5 seconds. The Key to having any site is to solve a problem. IF you can solve someones problem they will buy whatever it is your selling
What I would like to know is: Is auto-blogging even legal? I mean it seems like there would be some copyright infringement going on there or something. On the ones that post a link back to the original, are they legal since they sited where the information came from?
Most of the content comes from rss feeds or article directories. I guess someone could get sticky about their rss feeds being used as content, but in most cases you would be happy to have it distributed. This is as long as the link back to your site is left there. The articles are intended for syndication, and as long as they are not modified and links are in tact it's legal. Hope this helps.
Interesting, what I am wondering is where the income comes from? Affiliate links and Ads?
What about feed posts that might contain someone else's affiliate link? Do you, or can you manually change those?
Hi Missy, Adsense is the popular ad source. You can insert affiliate links where appropriate. When you pull in someone elses content you need to keep it all in tact, if you don't like a link or something you see in the content,get rid of it. There are ways to leave the content in tact and still enhance the whole post.
Regards.
Interesting hub RB - I've always wondered about autoblogging as it seems easier than manual blogging ! Question is does it actually bring in money ? Have you done it yourself ?
Hi SI, I have a few sites I built using some autoblogging techniques. I used a wordpress plug-in that would bring specific RSS feeds and post them automatically. I also used a plug-in from UAW that delivered full articles. The problem is much of the content was not SEO friendly. Since I was targeting these sites for adsense they didn't rank well unless I did a lot of backlinking. So, in my experience you have to build hundreds of these types of sites and see which ones stick. Then take those and work with them to increase there income potential. I would say autoblogging content is not very good if you are concerned about retaining your subscribers.
Is autoblog affect on adsense account ?
Glemoh, the majority of content you bring in from autoblogging is syndicated. The temptation to remove links back to the source or modify the content is great. This is where you can find trouble. People will use Google as leverage if you are doing this. By this I mean they will contact Google and report you for this practice. Google could pull your adsense account. I have found no rules to stop you from adding paragraphs before or after syndicated content. As long as you leave the syndicated content and links in tact, you should be fine.
Hmm ok so lets say I have brand new website. Is autoblogging a good idea then?
Jonathan, it depends what your goal is. If an authority site is your goal, then autoblogging is a bad idea. Once you define the purpose of your new website, then you can determine if autoblogging fits your needs.
good article for new ones
Good hub. So you are saying it is completely safe if I syndicate the content from an RSS feed and give a link back to the source. Is that what you are saying? And how do one know that a particular site allows for syndicating their feeds?
Eapen, RSS stands for "Real Simple Syndication" so if someone offers rss they are syndicating their content. Now, if they want to split hairs they could say the feed is for your own personal use, but why? If you follow the rules they get a link back to their site, they get traffic, in short they are getting exposure, this is the reason to offer RSS feeds.
Most RSS feeds are snippets of the first few sentences. There is software that scrapes the entire feed, this may be infringement on the content since the person only offered a few sentences in their RSS module. Plus this software will remove their link back to the site and replace it with a self serving link, this will get you into trouble.
Very interesting article and the comments are golden too.
I don't know how profitable is it to build a hundred automated websites, maybe some of you can share some numbers, how much time you dedicate, could it be a nice part time job?
I think choosing the right topics can be key, some that are not to broad, not too narrow.
Anyway... my commnt was to ask you what do you think about what I have in mind: Building a couple well targeted, demi-automated sites, add some original content now and then, specially in the home page and use these to promote my own brand.
Any experiences? any advice?
As per my little experience, I had a website that took me several months to build about a quite narrow concept, I wrote some articles, promoted the site, all in an old fashion way, no automation at all, it took me a couple months, traffic was decent for such a narrow topic but not enougth to mame any money so I decided to automate it and see... Traffic grew by a 5-10% per month for a few months then stabilized and it's been there for 2 years or so.
Bottom line, automation, even done poorly as I did, not only has no penalty on Google, they also send you more traffic, this traffic you can use to catch people on to your real content.
BTW, how does the Criteo perform?
Hi Mike, you cover a lot of ground in your comments, let me try to condense some of them. Everyone is different, what works for me may not work for you. There are many ways to make money online, look at some and then try the ones that seem like a good fit for you. The worse that will happen is you'll learn something, not all that bad.
Most people use this automated process to build micro-niche sites and make money from adsense. It's called "build and forget". The non-exact science of finding the right topic (keywords) is a cool subject which can be discussed for weeks.
Before you build anything choose a niche you have interest in, check the keywords out to see if you can compete in that niche, then start the process. If your intention is to build a bigger, brandable type of website, I would start there.
Criteo - I never heard of this before. I looked them up, the adverts look similar to Amazons carousal banners. I didn't read all the details, the two important issues are: relevancy to readers wants and what percentage of the ad revenue do you get.
Regards
I think online business strategy using autoblogging has been overhyped by those Internet Marketing Gurus. The objective of search engines is to deliver contents to the searchers and in doing so to provide as best as possible the original source.
Google does not want to return duplicate contents regardless of whether it is syndicated articles and if those who republish those articles include the link to the original source.
Check out the following googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html
It is clear that Google is going to do something about duplicate contents
Great article very informative thank you. I just entered the affiliate market arena and chose autoblogging as my niche and so far so good.
Lisa
Lamavridis, good luck. Google's recent changes has affected a lot of the autoblogs. I cannot disagree that the Web needs a cleaning, but this is a good example of why you need diversification. I am looking at new areas for traffic and trimming down my efforts with Google. Don't get me wrong, Google is still the king and must be included as a traffic source, but it's just not good business to give control of your business to one source.
Regards
I agree thanks.
Lisa
By the way, Google itself runs an autoblog - Google News.
Ashutosh, yes you're right. Google is the biggest re-distributor of others information. Kind of ironical that they penalize others for that.
My understanding is that using autoblogs to drive people to Google ads is against Google's T&Cs and can get your site blacklisted - is that the case, or is there some kind of threshold for original content that will avoid falling foul of Google's rule?
Ominae, I'm not sure that Google would yank your adsense account, but they could kill the rankings or you would get irrelevant ads, both would kill you adsense revenue. I've never heard of anyone getting their account terminated for autoblogging, clicking your own ads and placing ads with little or no content seems to be the biggest reasons.
Hi, rb. Thank you for for the clarification and a belated thanks for the article!
Ominae, you're welcome. Don't be a stranger, come back anytime.
Regards
Hi rb11. Thanks for enlighten us about autoblogging. One question though, I was thinking if you start autoblogging but don't have adsense account; do you think google will approve you adsense application if you use your autoblogging site?
thanks,
Janzell, I do believe Google is tightening up their systems in many different ways. If you filter the content you bring in through autoblogging and post relevant content, and mix it with some original content, then I believe you are fine.
I still think the best way to get adsense approval is by creating a couple of good solid hubs, then apply for adsense. After that try out the autoblogging route.
Regards.
5institutes 22 months ago
How does a site like that get ranked with all the duplicate content? Such a site would get lost in the supplementals and never be found.
What do you do to work around that?