Making money with auto blogs

Greetings moolah fans.

Today, I am going to talk about a method I have put to good use to make a pretty penny over the last year.  It involves autoblogging and affiliate links.

Essentially, an autoblog is a blog that, once set up correctly, periodically pulls its content from designated sources and drives itself.  It can be forgotten to ferment and earn while you move on to other ventures (or set up another auto blog!)

First things first.  I’ll assume you have hosting, a domain (or sub domain) and have installed Wordpress, and a niche and affiliates in mind.

Next, load Wordpress with the handy-dandy plugin list. 

The next stage requires you to make an informed decision!  “Ohhh, no!” I hear you cry.  But yes, my friend, you are not going to get through this without a little bit or work and accountability.  The decision you must make is which RSS feed to post plugin you will use.  There are two good free options: WP-o-Matic and FeedWordpress.

WP-o-Matic is, apparently, undergoing a re-write.  Or has been for the last umpteen months.  However, the current stable release works just fine.  The plugin has a useful feature that allows you to replace phrases for your chosen text (or links!).  However, there are two small disadvantages particularly for the not so tech savvy.  The plugin uses the unix crontab to periodically run so you’ll need access to this functionality on your hosting account (ask your host about it, but with many unix/linux based shared hosting accounts it is a bog standard feature.)  The second small inconvenience is that the plugin seems to run only at 20 minutes intervals (or longer).  This shortcoming is inconvenient while testing, but doesn’t really impact in-the-field usage much.

FeedWordpress is also functional and does the job well.  It has a sister plugin that helps prevent pulling in duplicate material (i.e. publishing the same content more than once on your blog.)  This is very useful if you plan to set these things up and let them run autonomously.

So, you have your blog set up and your choice of feed plugin installed.  Next, let’s grab some content.  There are numerous places you can look for free public domain content. Let’s take a another look at that last statement: “There are numerous places you can look for free public domain content.”  Public domain content usually means content liberated of any reproduction restrictions so you are free to re-publish it.  Article directories are a great source for public domain content.  Head on over to Google and type in “free article directory” and you’ll be dealt a good hand comprising a list of hundreds, if not thousands, of sources for free content.  Many article directories have certain caveats regarding content reproduction (usually that you must retain a link to the original author) so be sure to adhere to these.

If you consider yourself a budding bard and of moderate ability when it comes to spinning a sentence then, with a little bit of elbow grease, you have additional and potentially more lucrative options available to you when it comes to autoblogging.

If this is the case, then you could use the articles pulled from article directories to seed your own re-writes. Pull in a few articles on a given subject, read them and then conjure up your own summary in your own words.  Why is this a better option?  Well, simply because you will have original content.  Google does not appreciate duplicate content.  So if your content production dynamo is simply pulling it in from other published sources, you’ll be getting second dibs on everything. This is not a bad thing per se, however, you will not compete on an even footing with the Shakespeares of the blogosphere who burn the midnight oil rustling up original works. If you were a silly boy in school and didn’t listen up during English lessons, if you preferred a queen’s rear to King Lear, if grammar was that bald dude in Fraser, then fear not, all is not lost!  There are plenty of people who’d be more than willing to rewrite material for you for a small sum (in fact, I have seen people offering to do it for as little as 0.5 cents per word over at Digital Point forums! Ok, you might not get Shakespeare or Milton for that sort of lolly but, hey, ESL students need to eat too!)

If you do go the original content route, then here is what I suggest.  Set up a feeder blog on a sub domain.  Make it invisible to everyone but you.  You can do this by using .htaccess control lists and/or robots.txt exclusions.  The important thing is that the search engines are completely oblivious to this feeder blog’s existence – they must never see it or spider it. This is because you do not want to receive any duplicate content penalties for your own original content.  Anyhow, write your original content to your feeder blog (or paste in the ESL student’s magnus opus as and when you receive it) then drip feed it to your main blog. You can aim to stay ahead of yourself then, always having, say, 12 articles ready to go down the pipe. When you get a spare half hour on the subway, in the library, or elsewhere then forget the daydreaming, forget the voluptuous specimen sat opposite and tap out a few articles for the feeder blog. This will keep you ahead of the content creation game. Most articles only have to be in the region of 250 words, although I recommend occasionally laying down something a little longer, perhaps in the 500-600 words bracket.

(One small point I should add here is that I do not recommend the use of “content spinners” or “article spinners” as they are sometimes known. These are programs that scan a piece of text and suggest a series of synonyms for certain words or phrases in the text. The user then chooses (or permits the software to auto-select) which substitutions to use. Whichever way you do it you invariably end up with incomprehensible balderdash. There’s only one thing most people would hate to read even more than duplicate content, and that is duplicate content that reads like it has been re-written by a dyslexic hamster. Remember, affiliate sales require real people to find, be interested in, and use your site!)

Whatever content source you commit to, whether direct feeding from already published sources, whether drip feeding from your own (invisible!) feeder blog, or a hybrid approach, it is important to realise that you must post daily.

Over a few weeks, build up a head of content on your main blog.  You want the SE spiders to be visiting and indexing your content within 30 minutes of publication.  You can check this via Google Blog Search. Publish an article, then head on over to the blog search and punch in the title of the post.  On the left there are timeframe graduations that allow you to filter by predefined time periods. Choose the “Last Hour” link and see how long it takes for your post to show up.  Once you regularly see your posts appearing within about 30 minutes then you are good to go.

Next step is to introduce a few adverts.  If it’s a niche blog you are rustling up then you’ll have your own ideas about affiliates within your niche. Adsense works ok, as does epn. I’ll refrain from banging on about which to use, in favor of offering a few pointers on how to do it.

One way is to use WP-o-Matic’s regex engine to substitute affiliate links for keywords or phrases. So on a digital camera blog, you might substitute affiliate links for all instances of Nikon camera in your article. Don’t forget to use GoCodes to mask your affiliate linkage.

Also, be cautious at the outset.  Do not pepper your blog too readily with outbound affiliate linkage. Although I have no black and white evidence, I would suggest based on my own semi-empirical findings that loading it up too densely at the outset can work against you when it comes to SERPs. The last thing you want after putting in the above blood, toil, tears and sweat is to be promptly de-indexed (and believe me it does happen!) so go easy on the links.

If you put this method to good use, or have any supplementary questions, then feel free to post below.