Autoblogging has been around a while. The ill-fated RRS2Blog was something I used hundreds of Internet years ago. Dunno what ever happened to the developer but it was a groovy little product while it worked. Today autoblogging is fucking nuts. I trolled a few SEO/Blackhat/IM forums today and everyone wants to know how to effectively autoblog. I gave it a modern look a couple of months ago with WP-Mage and WP-Robot and came away thoroughly disgusted. I hated Mage and loved Robot but I couldn’t see the point.
You see, autoblogging is supposed to save you time. I just never could figure out how. No one in the game expects to make much more than a few dollars a day on average with a single blog. So what do you do? You buy hundreds of domains to make it worth your while. You build hundreds of WordPress, database resource hogging, blogs. So the fresh off the turnip truck folks throw 10 blogs at a time onto their shared account and are surprised when the host shuts their blogs down after their 11th gets a couple of visitors. So now they are stuck with having to get other more expensive hosting. Instead of paying $10 a month you can dispose of a Benjamin for dedicated space glory.
And you can’t just stop with WP-Robot. You have to buy all the Amazon, TweetBomb, ReviewAZON plugins to create this franken-blog full of weird shit posts designed to *hopefully* fool Google into thinking you have created a unique masterpiece.
How is this a time saver? You still have do your keyword research. You still have to get backlinks. Which by the way will be from your own efforts because nobody is going to naturally link to your franken-blog. So you have to build Blogger blogs, Hubpages, Squidoo lens, Tumblr sites, Ezine articles, etc., to create bogus interest in your blog. You have to configure the blogs with all these damn plugins.
I have no doubt there are people with the stamina to create these things making fat stacks of cash. I also have no doubt these same dudes are working their asses off and not simply setting up a blog in 15 minutes and heading to the beach to have coffee and muffins.
And to that I say to what end? They are always afraid Google will fuck with them. They pay huge for domains and hosting. I don’t read anyone talking about that on the salespage by the way. They sweat the plugins working with each daily (it seems) update of WordPress. They spend hours reviewing the latest plugins. Trying to find something lazier to use.
To all that I say, to hell with it. I continue to use and will forever be content to create static sites. I am beyond thrilled that nobody suggests creating anything but blogs in the IM sewers. Go ahead. Blog away. Keep them things filled with bullshit. Convince yourselves that dynamic sites never need updating. That spiders are somehow oblivious to the differences in dynamic sites and static sites.
My best performing sites are all static. They all have original content and serve up Adsense. They all have natural backlinks. Conversely I don’t think I can blog for shit. I create blogs and add original content. Reviews. Monetize with affiliate crap. Updates. And they still languish at the bottom of the sewer. Whatever.
I continually ride this annoying feedback loop of blog building. Everything revolves around blogs. You aren’t shit if you don’t create blogs. I somehow convince myself that I can create a blog that will be wildly popular and interesting. That I will find something that I care enough about to enjoy writing all day every day. It never happens. And I end up wasting time. Or better yet I should create niche blogs. Yea. Awesome.
I get why autoblogging is now the it thing. Blogging is mostly boring and/or people are lazy. Ironically my experience with autoblogging is that it takes a shitload of effort to make a dollar a day. That is not my typical experience with a static site. Building an XSitePro site is boring but I tend to make money with it. And it is easy. But then I read how cool blogging is or think romantically about being this gift to the blogosphere and veer off track. It’s just stupid man.
Time to zig while the masses zag.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
As always, a man of reason. You are still the only marketing email (feed) I receive that gets a guaranteed read.
I think the so-called “successful” autoblogs are tech-related and monetized with affiliate links like Amazon, so they’re focused to sell products. Cookie stuffing probably comes into play. If you get enough Twitter traffic, maybe it’s viable, I don’t know. It’s way out of my league.
I’d be interested in a plugin that could grab content and save it as a draft for later tweaking, personalizing, and optimization. But a franken-blog, just publishing zombie posts all day? That would freak me out.
Splork, you hit the nail right on the head. I just checked my Adsense stats and the sites I pull the most money from are static XSitePro sites. In fact I am building my new one right now.
I bought the auto blogging program eons ago also and could never figure it out. But I am just an old woman so what do I know?
I too keep building and investing in WP blogs with no avail as far as making money. Plus all I find are crap templates to use even though I have paid for premium templates. I am not a coder so I put up with the crap I find.
Oh well! What can one do? Quit? Not Today!!!!
My favorite part of this post is the fact that it has a trmackback fro an autoblog…
Anyway, I have a decent number of autoblogs and I won’t say that it’s an extremely profitable business model or anything, but it IS quick and easy to set them up and then just forget about them. It sounds to me like you were over-complicating things a little bit.
Getting links to them is pretty simple: Submit your site to a bunch of statistics websites (can be automated very easily), submit your RSS feeds to feed directories so that other autoblogs scrape your autoblog and link back to it (this is huge), and maybe do a quick link directory submission run with AllSubmitter and an Autopligg/BMD run. I think anything outside of that is overkill as you’re really just going after obscure long tails with an autoblog anyway. Pretty easy really…
As far as keyword research, you don’t have to do that for autoblogs – that’s kind of the point. Just pick a general topic like dogs or cats or cell phones or what have you and set up an autoblog called something like allaboutthisthing.info and you’re done.
I know you probably weren’t looking for advice on how to do it, but I couldn’t help myself…
Thanks for reading Don.
Manson, I think you’re right. The most successful are tech related.
Hi Denise. Yea, I bought Thesis, and while it is a superior product I don’t have the interest in making the most of it.
Hey Bunny, no I get it. Autoblogs are really about scraping the bottom of the long tail keywords. Hopefully if you can get the thing indexed you can eventually rank for some Amazon product with a freaky keyword description. You hope for a dollar a day in revenue and build 300-500-1000 blogs and let them auto-build. True, I would over-think the keyword aspect of the game but I simply have no interest in slinging blogs against the wall to see what sticks. Honestly I have much better luck simply creating a 15-20 static site with original content. Simple and no bullshittery. Some make a dollar a day and some make $30 a day. No database issues and I can host as many domains as I want since they are static. And not from a plugin. It just makes more sense to my feeble mind. I have no beef with auto blogging- it’s just not for me.
I beg to differ that “tech” autoblogs have the upper hand at being the most successful.
Before I started selling off my lot of niche websites, I assessed my earnings, and those earnings from autoblogs have proven themselves to be contenders.
Unfortunately, a great deal of them were sold because I have a goal when it comes to autoblogs and if it wasn’t earning over $50/week, I sold it off…and yes, they did sell.
While my Adsense numbers weren’t the greatest (around $5-$10 per month) per autoblog, my Amazon figures were killer as were my conversions.
I think it boils down to how you structure your autoblog and I actually put in the work to make the ones I owned successful.
There are a lot of guys (including me) making good money building auto blogs using WP Zon Builder, WP Robot, etc. It’s definitely not a waste of time.
I don’t think it’s a waste of time nor do I think it is easy. These things take work. I’m sure everybody autoblogging is making fat stacks with Amazon. Folks just don’t have to worry about me competing with them. As a matter of fact, autoblogging is the best way to make money. Set and forget. I’m just really kind of dense. I bet you could throw up 50 quality autoblogs in about a day and be making $1 day per blog within a week or so. Put one of those fantastic cache plugins and hosting sites will never know the difference. Everybody knows how much Google loves blogs and definitely autoblogs. They feature so much varied information on there, how could they not? I highly recommend anyone that wants to make a ton of money to try autoblogging. There are so many people autoblogging now that you have to figure it is working right? Idiots like me who are still stuck in 1999 making static sites are all failures, or soon will be. Everybody knows that the only way to make money online is by building blogs and/or selling your own products. Blogging is great but autoblogging is the future. Failure is a static site. Success is autoblogging. I just like to bitch and moan about stuff I don’t understand so that is why I’m not an autoblogger.
Question. Couldn’t you just make your blog like a static site? I don’t mean autoblogs, I mean a simple 20 page blog set up like a static site. Is there any difference?
I see a lot of people talking about xsitepro fo building websites. I personally use artisteer to create themes although I’m not in love with it all that much.
Thanks
Hey Rahman. Sort of but not really. The blog (assuming we’re talking Wordpress) will always be dynamic using a database. Even with pages. You can make your blog look static but it won’t be. You can fool the server into thinking it is static with a cache plugin. It will help with the utlization.
Ahh, I see. Thanks for the explanation.
Researching and writing original content is brain dead easy (for me at least). The only thing I need to do is speed up my typing some more. I have two blogs that pay my bills. They’re all original content written by me. I recently
purchased Autoblog blueprint and after learning what goes into setting up several hundred blogs, I think I’ll pass.
I agree, and appreciate this post…
I have been thinking that I am way behind the times in terms of jumping on the auto blog train. Everyone seems to be pushing the Word Press for everything except grilling tasty steaks..
I still use DW and stick with the static stuff. I just don’t like making landing pages that are database centric. Call me provincial..
Just sayin..
Robert C – The Wholesale Products Guy
Yea Marc, the little secret about autoblogging is that it takes a huge amount of work to do it right. Sure you can turn your plugin on and let it post videos, Yahoo answers, Ebay and Amazon products among other stuff with little effort. But you still have to promote the thing. Still have to find the right niche to sell into. And like you, creating content is the least of my worries. I am simply over creating and maintaining blogs.
Hey Robert. I’m rather happy that everyone uses blogs to build sites, big and small.
I will say though that blogs have their place and if you are inclined to do so then creating your own blog network is actually a good thing. In fact, if you are making well into the 4 figures a month you should probably do just that. Nothing wrong with monetizing it with Ebay and Amazon either, but for backlinks and indexing it is very useful. Autoblogging can be very useful for that. But I have no use for autoblogging as a means for primary income collection.
I for one have noticed in recent weeks a change in Google’s SERPS to where they seem to be ranking large (i.e., tons of pages) static sites at or near the top instead of the blogs of yore that we’ve all been building and loving. I think Google has been in the process of pimp slapping a bunch of these autogen sites (some of which I have made), probably due to the obvious footprints, and on the other hand maybe due to the crappily assembled nonsensical content. I think that for the future, large, content-heavy, “authority” sites (and by “authority” I simply mean crap-loads of pages) will rule the engines, and even though many times it’s just not fair (ever been outranked by a crappy article on about.com, associated content, or buzzle, or even worse, cha-cha?), authority sites will begin to gobble up all the long tail action out there. This is why sites like wisegeek absolutely kill it with Adsense…it’s not b/c they’re building insane amounts of external links to each & every page; it’s b/c they have such a high sheer volume of content with a VERY good internal linking structure that they’re able to pass juice without even having to ask anyone on the outside for it. Just something to think about…I’m tired as crap.
Well I think you won’t make money with autoblogging per se. Meaning if you think you can simply slap up 100 autoblog and rake in $300/day I think you’re probably delusional. It’s not that I don’t think you can’t make that money, right now, I just don’t think it will last. It’s like every other easy money tactic, it never lasts.
Quality large or small is where it’s at. But folks will need to get the easy shit out of their system before moving on to the hard shit.
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