This 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.
