Autoblogging, Bottle Sterilisers and Mankinis
Way back in February… no let's go further than that. A couple of years ago, I began investigating autoblogging as a potential earner. In February I actually started doing something about it.
You might now be saying to yourself "what's autoblogging?"
Autoblogging is a method of legitimately using other people's content and building a niche specific blog which you then monetise in any way you see fit. AdSense, AdSpurt, Amazon, eBay and so on.
You can get as much content as you like for almost any niche you like just by going along to one of the many article directories out there and lifting the articles for your own use with the authors blessing. As long as you leave the authors link in place. That's the deal.
Or of course you may have purchased some PLR articles which you can use without having to link to anywhere.
There are lots of methods of autoblogging, some quite expensive, some quite complicated, and some just a waste of time. I'll give over some detail to all the various methods another time.
One nice and simple (and very effective) method is to let WordPress take most of the strain, and queue up a pile of posts by future dating them. It can take a while, but the trade off is you're creating a niche specific content rich site, naturally and over time, that you can forget about.
When you've completed one and set it up to post articles for the next two to three years, you can move onto the next one.
Here's the wonderful thing, thanks to WordPress. You get your pages indexed in the search engines wihout any additional effort other than posting, and then you get traffic.
In fact, you can't stop the traffic once it starts, even if you stop posting articles to your blog.
This happens because you're building a site with lots and lots of words – Google LOVES words and is as good as handcuffed to them and the search spiders just can't help visiting to see the new words on your site.
This is because every time you make a post, WordPress sends a message out to the blogging community global update servers. The search engines are all over these servers constantly looking for content and sites that are being actively updated.
I've seen that within minutes of placing a post on one of my blogs, Google turns up, courtesy of WordPress and the global update servers.
And once Google knows about your site, the traffic is inevitable.
You may not get traffic for the *exact* search terms you'd like, but you certainly get enough related traffic to make your efforts worthwhile. And the surprising thing is, you never know what people are going to buy once they've clicked through to Amazon or eBay via your affiliate link.
Such as 50 Borat Mankinis or 20 Baby Bottle Sterilisers.
I'm not kidding. We've seen those exact products purchased via our link on Amazon, which gave us a bit of a chuckle here – so much so that we bought a Mankini for our eldest son as a joke. But that's another story. 
Let's just run over that again.
#1 – You choose a niche after doing a bit of market research and then set up a niche specific blog.
#2 – You fill it up with future dated posts using free articles from article directories.
#3 – You monetise your blog in any number of ways, including affiliate links off to Amazon and eBay. (Don't overdo it.)
#4 – You forget about your niche blog as the job is now done.
#5 – Goto #1.
Now in this process, I've found that the most time consuming part of it is adding each article to your blog. It takes a couple of minutes for each one as you have to add the title, copy the content, and then *remember* to set the date and time into the future. While you're doing this, you have to keep a record of the date so you don't release too many posts around the same time and then none for several weeks.
While I think about it, you also have to have the "Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger" installed and active to stop WordPress from notifying the global update servers with a "ping" as you add each article. It's either a WordPress bug or an oversight, but even with future dated posts, WordPress will still ping the servers multiple times even though the content isn't due to appear on your blog for weeks, months, or even years ahead.
If that happens, your site will get banned for "ping spamming" and you may as well give up there and then. Smart Update Pinger fixes that bug and will prevent the pings taking place until the date and time that each post is released.
Problem solved.
Now let's go back to the other problem of scheduling your posts.
What's needed is an automated method of future dating the articles so that you don't have to do it all manually.
Guess what?
I've finished testing out my WordPress plugin that will do the job for you, and will automatically schedule the posts for future release, and now I'm just about ready to release it.
What I'm going to do is release it in a nickel sale on Friday 25th September and then just like I did with WordPress Affiliate Pages, make it a 100% commission product. Money generated in the nickel sale will go towards enhancing the plugin to make it better.
The starting price of the nickel sale will be just $1.97, which means the first 20 people to buy will get it for under $3.
The eventual sales price will be $27, and this is a chance to get it at a fraction of that price for a short while. I'll probably close the nickel sale after the weekend.
I'll release more detail on Thursday 24th.
-Frank Haywood
Filed under internet business by on Sep 23rd, 2009. Comment. 
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Comments on Autoblogging, Bottle Sterilisers and Mankinis
Hi Frank
Interesting post.
I'll scoot on over to wordpress to take a look at it. I've heard of it but never really looked at it until now.
Look forward to getting details of the plug in.
Regards
Sean
Hi Frank,
Looking forward to your new plugin. Another time consuming project is going out and finding the articles…are you saying that you put very little original content on these blogs, yet they still achieve enough traffic to be profitable? Are you using the SEO plugin and writing unique descriptions for each article?
You also mention setting it up to post over the next couple of years…what is the frequency…once per week? Can you also past date articles with this?
Sorry for all of the questions.
Thanks,
Elise
Hi Frank,
Looking forward to your plugin. I have WordPress Affiliate Pages and have found it very useful.
I am already doing "Autobloging", but your plugin should help a lot.
Thanks
I feel that the most tedious and time-consuming part of the process is installing and configuring all the plugins. Even now that it is possible to do it all from within Wordpress it is still a brain-numbing chore. I have checked out some blog cloners and auto-setup products but they were either more trouble than they were worth or they were very touchy and often did not work on the cheap hosting I use for these kinds of projects. Do you have any advice on how to streamline the blog creation and setup part of the process?
Thank you for the heads up. I need to become more adept at blogging and I look forward to using your idea by making a purchase before the price goes up.
Once again, Frank, you've hit on something "not done before". This plugin should certainly be a hit.
I would like to be one of the first to get the plugin, but also one of the first to be an"affiliate", when you decide to launch it for sale.
For those who don't 'know' about PLR – be careful to edit the copy first. This makes it 'unique', which is what Google loves.
@Sean Durrant: WordPress is at the same time easy to use and difficult to master.
While it's a superb tool, there are a lot of pitfalls when using it, and it's possible to set up a WordPress blog and within a short time get it de-indexed and marked as a spam blog without even realising you've done it. I mentioned one of those pitfalls in the post above.
-Frank
Hi Frank,
I am definitely interested in this. I am a noob so forgive me if I am off base on this, but won't we get penalized for "duplicate" content. I have been taught so much about unique and original content to drive traffic to your site. Is this not the case?
Also, I will mention a valuable tool that I have used called Market Samurai that not only helps you research a niche, but pulls out articles you can use for your content. Does a lot of other things too. Big time saver.
@Elise: Interesting questions, and I'll address all these in a separate blog post as I think that's probably the best way to approach this. I came to that conclusion after I'd written quite a lot here in this comment!
I've now snipped it and I'll create a new post.
-Frank
@Margaret: What another really good question.
What I've been doing until recently is I install WP via Fantastico which takes about 60 seconds, and then FTP up all the plugins for a local folder. But then of course, you're right, you've got all the pain of configuring them.
What might work well is creating a single blog installation which is going to be the base of all your others, and configure all the plugins etc on there, then back up the database. Create your new WP installation and then restore the backup to there. Your blog might break and you'd need to use phpMyAdmin to tweak the database to make it work again. A bit fiddly, but it should work. Maybe I'll test that out and do a write up of it.
I've not used any of the cloners out there. But a couple of weeks ago, I bought this:-
http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/slp/
It's relatively expensive, but extremely worth it. It's designed with SEO in mind and the author has in the past written search engine algorithms and is one of the WP development team, so he really knows his stuff.
Part of that huge package of theme and over 70 plugins is a cloner. You just install it on your source blog and your target blog and it will duplicate the source blog setup for you. Very handy. There's a get-out clause that says it may not handle some plugins and themes correctly, but it's doubtful I'll ever again use anything other than one of the skins provided in that bundle for good SEO reasons. I'm using one of them on this site.
BIG TIP time. Get a reseller hosting account from here:-
http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/hn/
Worth every penny as you can create new cPanel domain accounts on several servers dotted around the world in the US, UK and Singapore. In terms of SEO, it means you're spreading your niches across several C class IP addresses.
-Frank
@Vern Brown: You're spot on there about editing the PLR for unique content, and what you could do is mix and match unchanged articles from article directories, plus tweaked PLR. It's more effort, but may pay off in the long run.
-Frank
@Robert H.: The duplicate penalty is just a myth, but unfortunately it's a widespread one. What Google says it actually does is it "tries" to find the original article source and won't index additional copies of it. In practice, this is harder to do than it seems, and there certainly isn't any penalty for sites that re-use articles.
At any rate, Google *does* take notice of sites with lots of content on – that's my experience – and will send traffic to them anyway, regardless of whether the article is a duplicate.
So there isn't a penalty for duplicate content as such, but there certainly is a *reward* for unique articles as Google will favour sites that carry new content. As Vern mentioned above, when using PLR articles, it's important to re-write them, even if only slightly so that they don't get recognised as existing content.
BIG TIP time. When re-writing PLR, you often only have to add or re-write a couple of sentences and move a couple of paragraphs around, making sure the article still makes sense. The search engines will see that article as new content – they're just not that clever to realise what you've done, and won't be for 10 years or more – at least until real AIs start to appear that can spot what you've done.
-Frank
Very interested in your new plug in. I have an auto blog post tool which works quite well, except the length of time between posts seems to be limited to about 3 days. Sometimes I want a longer interval but can't get it. Your plug in could be just the thing for new blogs I'm intending. Thanks for the news.
I love your products, they are great! What is the time difference from the West Coast USA from the UK? I want to jump on this one asap!
I realy like your work. It´s pure creativity.
Only one point of critics:
I would prefer to get to know the real time your nickel sales will begin before
as a customer of yours
i think i have the right to get to know it
before subscribers get to know.
The idea that income is completely for development is as perfect as a one time payment is foe the complete future – it is modern AND a view into the future of business relationships.
Future works for those who have products which are worth to buye for the digital representation of myself.
Thanks for your responses, Frank. Looking forward to your next post.
If you're ever in the mood to make a video on how to do some of this more technical stuff…you mentioned configuring all the plugins and then backing up the database, and then creating the new WP installation and then restoring the backup…that would be helpful! Not clear on how to go about that part.
Thanks again,
Elise
I would also like to know how often you post and if you
just post one article at a time
Thanks,
Diane
Hi Frank.
I was under the impression that the ping issue with WP had been fixed in the latest versions so thanks for the heads up.
I had better go and activate Smart Update Pinger again.
Ade
Frank,
Fascinating comments on this post. I have never had enough content to push out over a really long period of time, so this has never been an issue, but it sure sounds nice to use when I am building content for clients over an extended period of time.
Plus, the idea of a "set it and forget it" really suits my style.
I look forward to hearing more about this plugin!
Susan
Like your creativity.
SDD is wonderful for instance.
Today is one day after pronounced sale.
Hopefully that everything is fine with you.
BUT despite of that it get me on my nerves that i am obliged to wait AND look again and again and again … on your page and in my mail account.
As i said before i like your creativity.
@Frank Haywood:
Not wishng to argue any point – I agree that dupe content is little more than a boogey man in the closet – likely conjured for the purpose of selling some kind of software.
But if comment by Robert H. is a given …
"The search engines will see that article as new content – they're just not that clever to realise what you've done, and won't be for 10 years or more"
… then how does Copyscape.com locate and rate duplicate content by percentage of uniqueness – all in 5 or 10 seconds?
@Dan B. Cauthron: Hey Dan, that's precisely what keeps the myth going, and it works in our favour. As long as people are running scared of duplicate content, they're making the task easier for Google, which is really cool for you and I who aren't scared of it.
As for CopyScape – Five or ten seconds is a lot of CPU just to check one article. Plus I know for a fact it doesn't work.
I've seen TWO exact copies of one of my sites which have been put up by affiliates. CopyScape hasn't found them, but I know they're there as affiliates are using them to promote and I can see the incoming traffic. Additionally, if CopyScape is relying on Google (I don't know if it is), and Google is busy stripping out dupes, CopyScape is going to have an increasingly hard time of it.
And let's not forget that CopyScape is just there to make money out of other people's fear.
Please keep spreading this though as it will stop everyone else from even attempting to use articles that were intended to be used on other sites. And it makes it easier for us.
Taking it logically (and unrealistically) a step further, there's no point in article directories existing if everyone is too frightened to republish any of the articles. The article directories would then become self-serving content sites. Okay, they're already self-serving content sites, but you know what I mean.
Going back to my original thought, I'm still very confident that if you take your PLR, change a couple of sentences, and re-order the paragraphs, that's enough of a change to get by the dupe checkers. A human would spot it, but I just don't think there's enough CPU out there to make it worth a search engine's while.
-Frank
Haven't read thru all these comments yet, so I might have more to say in a moment, but (LOL) I have a suggestion re: uploading plugins.
The very first plugin I upload and configure is the WP Easy Uploader. Once I've installed that one, all I have to do is use it to browse my hard drive for the plugins I use, and the Easy Uploader will unzip and install them. all I have to do then is activate.
Makes my life easier, anyway.
I can see very valid and positive comments here and I must say, Frank you rock
Not only your products are top notch, your reply to the concerns and the decision to include a report with the autoblogging plug is nothing less than superb.
I for one am so looking forward to the plug and want to be one of those who get it in the initial sale, lol the launch announcement email can't come soon enough.
@CJ from Article Writing News: Aha! I didn't know about that plugin – I guess there's so many out there it's impossible to keep tabs on them all.
What I tend to do is keep all my favourite plugins in one place all ready to be uploaded. After WP has installed, I FTP them all up and go make a coffee while it's running. Then I just activate the ones I need for that blog.
I suppose if I got a little more organised about it, I'd separate out the plugins I use for different types of niche (and non-niche) blogs into different folders. I'd keep copies of plugins like Smart Update Pinger in every folder as I use it on every installation.
Then depending on the type of blog I was creating, I'd upload only the relevant folder of plugins instead of all of them, which would save a slug of time.
I'll get round to it one day.
-Frank
@Zulfikar: Well, thank you very much. It will only be a short report covering the key areas.
The topic of autoblogging could really do with a more detailed ebook, and I'll do that if there's enough demand, which I think there probably will be.
It's sometimes a little difficult when you know something, to expect that everyone else knows it too, which is just plain daft but I do it all the time. Then you have the problem of knowing when to stop and exactly who you're addressing.
Is it total newbies? Or is it thoroughly at-home bloggers with technical knowledge who just need a little detailed info about that topic?
I often buy ebooks only to find that much of the information I either know, or in some cases I know more about the subject than the author.
I'll try to get that balance right, but we'll see.
-Frank
I purchased the Autoblogging plugin and will let you know how it's going. I would like to know this. Do you recommend a person have multiple Wordpress blogs or use only one?
If multiple WP blogs then I assume domains for each as well as opposed to sub-domains.