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Autoblog Profits: 90 day trial – What we learned…

by easycash
Categories: Make Money Blogging, Wordpress, WordPress Plugin
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Comments: 1 Comment
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AutoblogThis is a follow-up article to our 90 Day auto-blogging trial. Three months ago, our 15 sites went live set up by the folks at Profit Jackpot. Our goal was to generate sufficient traffic within the first 90 days to be able to monetize the sites and make some money

If you have read any of our previous posts about our 90 day autoblog trial, you will know that we were getting mixed results. You may also have noticed that we did not post any more updated results over the summer. Nevertheless, our 16+ sites were churning away producing daily content on auto-pilot and Google and other bots were regularly visiting our sites.

First, the good news. As a whole, traffic to our sites grew from an average of 300 visits per day in mid-May to almost 1,100 per day at the peak. Daily Google search visitors grew from an average of 20 per day in May to a peak of 181 near the end of August. This was an encouraging trend, leading us to believe that traffic was nearing a point where it could be successfully monetized. To put this in perspective, our inaugural standard blog (justrw.net) was established 18 months ago and uses traditional author generated posts, now receives between 150-200 visits per day, with us producing new posts at the rate of about 2 per week.

We are starting to make a little bit of money through Google Adsense but it only amounts to about 50 cents a day. We have had some clickthroughs on our Clickbank ads but none has yet ended in a sale. Other revenue streams from Commission Junction and Amazon are also not yet really off the ground, but we have started placing more advertising in the hopes that increased traffic will eventually pay off.

Now, the not so good news! In the last couple of days of August, our Google search hits from all sites in the autoblog network plummeted from the aforementioned high to just 30 hits a day. This is too striking to be ignored. It would seem likely that Google has somehow deduced that our content is not truly unique and has penalised us accordingly :(   One particular site: Nokia N8 Tips & Tricks, which was receiving almost 200 visitors a day and rarely less than 30 from Google searches now gets just 6! In reviewing the auto-generated content across our network of autoblog sites, I have come to the conclusion that over 50% of the posts are effectively garbage to a human reader, even if a Google bot is not smart enough to recognise it.

Don’t forget that the purpose of any autoblogging site is to make money from the traffic that comes to it. If the reader is greeted with garbled, illegible content, what are the chances that they will click on any of your advertising?

So, what is the next step? Well, since we have been relatively successful in building traffic, all is not yet lost. We have turned off the auto-posting feature on most of the sites and will now be adding content manually. We now have several methods of generating content and will add new posts that are edited, SEO optimized and guaranteed to be unique. We will leave some of the poorly performing sites on auto-posting just to see what happens.

In a future post we will show you the different methods that we use to generate unique content from the autoblog output. In the meantime, we thoroughly recommend that you check out WP-Simplicity, since it alone will enable you to do this and a lot more besides.

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Autoblog Profits: 90 day trial – 21 days and counting

by easycash
Categories: Clickbank, Google Adsense, Make Money Blogging, Wordpress
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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The #1 WordPress plugin for autoblogging success!Well, I must say that I have learned a great deal within the last 3 weeks about the ins and outs of auto-blogging. I can now say without doubt that the promises made by the autoblog gurus about making easy money with WordPress, Clickbank and Google Adsense are mostly smoke and mirrors. That is not to say that there is not some light at the end of the tunnel, but rather that the money train is travelling much slower than we had hoped and driving it is much harder than those snake oil salesmen would have us believe.

Here is what we have learned so far:

  • Not all niches are born equal. If you decide to swim with the sharks, you will probably get eaten alive.
  • Some market niches lend themselves to specific physical product marketing and others to adsense and Clickbank affiliate offers.
  • Push-button sites, as they are delivered will almost certainly not attract traffic as well as those where you take the time and effort to optimize your SEO content and dress up your blog.
  • Monetization will not happen by simply putting a few Adsense ads or Clickbank affiliate offers on your page. Your content, metatags, keywords, categories and post tags must all be closely matched to all and any adsense, clickbank or Amazon offers on your pages.
  • Unless you manage to attract a significant amount of traffic to your pages, you are not going to make any money.

So let’s take a look at our results so far. We have continued the table from our previous post in the 90 day trial series, which covered the period up to the end of May and has about 2 weeks of real results. We have added a fourth blog to the results so that you can get a better feel for an off-the-shelf pushbutton site, since we have made no modifications to this site and will leave it pretty much as is.

  1. Autoblogging Profits: This site was taken off autopilot shortly after being launched and is now only being populated with 100% personally generated content. Typically, experience tells me it will be slower to build readership but it will be loyal where autoblogging content will cause readership to be fickle and based solely on most recent content. This is likely a highly contested niche.
  2. Nokia N8 Apps, tricks and tips: As you can see, this site has really taken off and is now averaging 200+ daily visitors and 30+ daily Google searches. It took me over a year to build my food and drink blog readership to this level; here it has only taken 3 weeks. It is using auto-generated content but I have put considerable time into tweaking the site and promoting with tools that will be revealed in future posts
  3. Improve your tennis game: I have done absolutely no work on this site but it looks like a promising niche, since the Google searches are already starting to grow. This indicates that there is probably low competition for my targeted keywords, which is likely not the case for sites 1 & 4.
  4. WordPress Clickbank Guru: Again, this site is operating 100% on autopiiot with no input from me. Results so far are far from exciting. Not really surprising for such a highly contested niche. This will be the absolute control, since I have no intention of doing much to this one except letting it run.

June results from 06-01 thru 06-08

Site Visits M-T-D Google Searches
Autoblogging Profits (this site) 175 17
Nokia N8 Apps, Tips & Tricks 1361 210
Improve your Tennis Game 169 32
WordPressClickbank Guru 155 2
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Autoblogging may not be the profit goldmine you believe!

by easycash
Categories: Clickbank, Make Money Blogging, Niche Marketing, Wordpress Clickbank
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Comments: 4 Comments

Roy Wallace Autoblogger ExtraordinaireAuto-blogging is simply a method of mass-producing specific niche marketing websites that update themselves on a regular basis with fresh content relevant to the chosen niche. There are many so-called pushbutton or one click systems on offer at any given time which promise to allow anyone to get themselves set up with an instant money-making goldmine. In theory, an auto-blogger could set up 100 niche sites, each generating only $2 of adsense revenue per day and that would represent a monthly income of $6,000. Annually, those same auto-blogs, which should be largely stand-alone, could produce an automatic income of $72,000. This makes autoblogging seem a very attractive proposition to all and sundry. Therein lies a large part of its downfall.

As you probably suspected, it is really not as easy as the gurus would have you believe! In order to produce even this moderate amount of income from a single niche market site, you will have to do some substantial legwork in setting up WordPress blog frameworks, installing relevant plug-ins, finding niches that work, doing critical keyword research and promoting your sites to the search engines. This is far from a slam-dunk as sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are always changing their algorithms to try to ensure that the best, most relevant content is what the searcher sees first.

In order to prevent your site from being sent to the Google sandbox, you have to have some way of making your content at least appear fresh and unique. This may require some substantial editorial work on your end, which requires more time than most auto-blogging software gurus will admit, but it is absolutely critical if you don’t want your sites blacklisted, and the search engines downgrading your domain name in their programs. Such black marks are hard to have erased, and make any future internet ventures difficult to get off the ground.

Profit Jackpot offers a unique way to modify your content to ‘fool’ the search engines into classifying copied content as new. WP Simplicity semi-automates the process and allows you to personalise any content before publishing (our personal preference). Any automated solution that spawns many junk sites will eventually be sought out and nullified by the search engines.

Simply slapping a few Google Adsense spots on your site and attracting visitors is NOT going to make you that $2 a day. Our first blog, which is well established in its niche and attracts 200+ visitors a day does not make even half of this amount. You need to find other sources of revenue like Clickbank or Amazon affiliate offers to increase your chances of making money. However, sourcing relevant offers, setting up affiliate accounts and producing contextually relevant ads and placing them in your content is both technically challenging and time-consuming.

In conclusion, we would advise that you think carefully before you give your hard-earned cash to the next autoblogging guru who claims that they will make you the next autoblog millionaire. You can follow our own efforts in our 90 Day Trial series of posts where we have set up 25 autoblogs and track their progress using varying methods.


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Autoblog Profits: 90 day trial – 15 WordPress sites delivered

by easycash
Categories: Google Adsense, Make Money Blogging, Niche Marketing, Wordpress
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Comments: 6 Comments

Roy Wallace Autoblogger ExtraordinaireA couple of days ago, we took delivery of our 15 ready-made WordPress autoblogs from the folks at Profit Jackpot. I must admit that to set up 15 WordPress autoblogs, install and activate the necessary plug-ins, select appropriate niche market keywords and monetize with Clickbank and Google Adsense ads would have certainly taken me longer than the 10 days it took Profit Jackpot. As I have mentioned in a previous instalment of this post series, I intend to divide these sites into 3 separate categories:

  1. The first will consist of sites like this one that you are reading. Although it was designed and set up as an autoblog by myself, it does NOT run on autopilot. The majority of the posts are written by me and supplemented by specially selected and edited content gathered using article jackpot or some other means. At this point, Autoblogging Profits (this blog) is the only one currently set up. I will take three or four more from the 15 delivered and convert them over the next few weeks.
  2. The second set of autoblogs will remain essentially as they were delivered except that I will add other methods of monetization using Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, Amazon etc. I will carefully monitor the autoblog content and remove any ‘ garbage’  posts which will be profiled in a later message. I will also enhance the visual aspects of the pages to make them look more distinctive. Finally, I will develop backlinks through social networking, article marketing and other methods. You can see the results of our first tweaked WordPress blog here: Nokia N8 Apps, Tips and Tricks. Eventually, five of the fifteen autoblogging sites will be modified in this way.
  3. The final set of sites will be the control set (approx. 5). On these remaining sites, I will do little extra customization except to tweak the keywords and add new methods to increase profits. Google Adsense alone with a few hotlinks to Clickbank affiliate offers are probably not sufficient to generate real money. You can see a sample of a WordPress Autoblog EXACTLY as it was the day it was delivered here: Improve your tennis game

All three sites were started at approximately the same time give or take a day or two. Here are some relevant stats for them so far:

Site Visits M-T-D  Google Searches 
Autoblogging Profits (this site)  1051  28
Nokia N8 Apps, Tips & Tricks  602  13
Improve your Tennis Game  165  3

 Of course, it’s early days to make any judgement about the relative success of the sites after only 3 weeks but there would seem to be some evidence that the totally manual blog has the edge over the semi-automatic autoblog which in turn exceeds the results of the fully automatic one. In our next post we will highlight some of the plug-ins that were auto-installed with Profit Jackpot and those that we have added ourselves that we feel have increased our traffic.

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Autoblog Profits: 90 Day trial – 2 weeks in

by easycash
Categories: Clickbank, Make Money Blogging, Niche Marketing, Wordpress
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Comments: 3 Comments

A quick recap of the story so far: For the last 15 months, I have been operating a couple of WordPress blogs: JustRW: Canada’s Un-Chef and W3Junkie: A pot-pourri of Photography, Philosophy and Prose. Although both have been relatively successful in terms of garnering a reasonable amount of traffic, neither has yielded anything more than a trickle of income.

Having previously been involved in Internet Marketing to the point where I had a personal mailing list of several thousand subscribers and made a full-time living from Affiliate Marketing, principally thru Clickbank sales, I decided that it was time to get serious again about generating some real profit from my blogging efforts. My prior success did not come easily. It took a couple of years to build from nothing to where I was making enough money to be comfortable. This time, starting again from scratch, I wanted to shortcut the process.

As I started doing some research on what methods and tricks others were using to generate significant income, I came across the terms autoblog and autoblogging. In concept, this is simply a blog that operates independently of any individual writers and uses various software modules to collect or generate posts from existing Internet content. Of course, there are various systems with varying degrees of sophistication but they all have the same general end goal. The main concept is to use auto-generated content for a specific niche market to rank highly in search engines (principally Google) and thereby drive sufficient highly-targetted traffic to a web site or page that has been monetized with Google Adsense and Clickbank affiliate ads.

I was fascinated by the concept of autoblogs and autoblogging but was not convinced that it truly would live up to the hype of the autoblog gurus. I picked one of the most popular, Profit Jackpot and signed up for a special limited offer to have 15 niche market WordPress blogs fully set up and monetized with Clickbank and Google Adsense for just under $500. Since I was not fully convinced that these blogs would perform as promised, I also decided to take a number of them and tweak them myself and also, in parallel, to set up several niche blogs from scratch.

This very blog is the first of my own started from scratch. Although I originally launched it as an autoblog using Profit Jackpot templates and software, I subsequently converted it to standard WordPress site as you see it now. In the meantime, the Profit Jackpot team has started to produce my sites. 13 of 15 are in various stages of production. I can already tell that some niches are better suited to autoblogs than others. The smaller more specialised market niches are much more likely to have unique and well-written content than the mass market areas like affiliate marketing and make money sites, which often end up posting articles that are spun to a point where they are garbled nonsense. Below, you will find a screenshot of one of these blogs. Bear in mind that the site is not yet finished but you will see what we mean about the quality of the content.

Sample autoblog posts
Click image to view full screen

As for this very site, we are quite pleased with the progress. After just 14 days of switching to manual mode, we are already starting to get a few Google searches and daily traffic is also averaging almost 50 visits. This is largely as a result of the collection of plugins that we have implemented which we will introduce in a future post. Below, we have posted a screenshot of our webstats.

autoblog profits webstats
Click on image to view full screen

In addition to keeping you up-to-date with this blog and those set up for us, we will also build another one completely from scratch and show you in detail exactly how we do it.

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