Roy Wallace's AutoBlogging Profits

After an approximately five year hiatus away from Internet & Affiliate Marketing, I decided to start a self-hosted WordPress blog: “JustRW – Canada’s Un-Chef” . This was about 15 months ago now, and the purpose of the blog was to write about a subject near and dear to my heart: Food, principally cooking and dining out. A secondary purpose was to advertise and promote my book: “The Un-Cookbook, The Art of Cooking without Recipes“.

Since this was mainly ‘a labour of love’ rather than an attempt to generate income, it did not bother me at first, that Google Adsense, Clickbank and other advertising venues were only bringing a trickle of revenue. However, once the traffic had built to a level of 150-200 visitors per day, I began to realise that I was missing the boat. A foodie blog that is specific to a relatively small geographic area is probably not the best vehicle for making money from blogging, however, I was starting to see evidence that serious profits could be made from blogging using Niche Marketing techniques should be completely possible.

As I started doing some research, I came across a plethora of products offering me a turnkey autoblogging business with one or several autoblogs operating on auto-pilot and producing easy cash on an ongoing basis. My first impulse was to disbelieve all the hype, but I was nevertheless intrigued by the notion that it was possible to build a meaningful, professional-looking blog or web site filled entirely with automated content. I figured that since I have been operating a couple of WordPress blogs for over a year, I had a good enough background to be able to sort the chaff from the wheat. My biggest fear was that as these autoblogs become more and more prevalent especially as some companies are recommending that each new member set up from 25 to several hundred sites each, that the market would soon become saturated.

The further I looked, the more I realised that the majority of the new  would-be autoblogging emperors were destined to failure. Let’s face it: for any given market niche, there can only be a single #1 spot in each search engine. My own blog stats show me that Google traffic outranks its closest competitor by a factor of 75:1. To get any appreciable traffic from an organic search engine listing, you must be in the top 5 spots and the #1 spot apparently gets more than 50 of the search visitors. So, no matter how great your autoblog looks and how great your content is, without a considerable amount of additional promotion, backlinks, SEO optimization, social bookmarking, article marketing etc. you are not likely to be ranking highly in your chosen niche.

So here’s what I decided to do: I purchased a package for just under $500 that would supply me with 15 ready made, fully functioning autoblogs in market niches of my choice. They would be WordPress based and pre-monetized with Clickbank affiliate and Google Adsense advertising. In theory, once they are handed over to me, I should need to do nothing but leave them alone and collect my cash from Google Adsense and Clickbank.

I have decided that I will run 2 control groups: Firstly, I will take five of the autoblogging sites and tweak them by adding additional plugins to improve their income potential. I will also promote them through backlinks, social bookmarking and article marketing. I will build an additional 10 sites from scratch, taking everything that I have learned and continue to learn and NOT use autoblog content. I will generate or glean all content myself to make sure that it is high quality, relevant to my niche and totally unique.

Over the next 90 days, I will fully document my trials and tribulations here on this site and you can follow along and share in my triumphs and defeats. At the end, we will both know whether building successful autoblogs is a myth or reality and how much time, effort and money one would need to build a functional, profitable autoblogging business.