Autoblogging promises that you can simply add a plugin to a WordPress site, edit a few settings, press go and – hey presto – you’ve got a profitable site!
Does it really work?
Most of the time nowadays, the answer is no.
It has worked in the past but if you’re simply buying a $97 script and expecting to find the internet equivalent of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you’re likely to be disappointed.
Let’s examine what autoblogging does:
You decide on a series of keywords
You decide on the sources you’re going to use for your content – RSS feeds, articles, Yahoo! Answers, Flickr, YouTube, etc.
You decide how you’re going to monetise the site (AdSense, if you don’t care for the longevity of your account), Clickbank, CPA offers, etc.
You maybe delve more into the features of the software and make a few tweaks that the plugin provider claims will mean that Google won’t spot any footprint, so won’t penalise you
There are some variations on that theme – you might join a private blog network instead of using a plugin for instance – but that’s the gist of it.
Automated content, untouched by human hand.
And that’s the problem with autoblogging.
The software doesn’t know things instinctively because it’s not human.
It’s only a computer program and – unless it is expensive or human moderated at some point in time – it’s very fallible.
Let’s take a look at one example to illustrate the point.
I’m going to assume that your main autoblog niche is to do with fish and aquariums.
And that one of the sub-topics is seahorses.
But it could be any other type of fish.
If one of your autoblog feeds is from Amazon, you’d have to drill down in their subcategories. Otherwise you’d get childrens toys, necklaces, ornaments and lots of other things that are only loosely related to seahorses.
Or, if you limited your results to books, your autoblog would run out of content after 32 posts.
Hmm.
Not too automatic there.
Google, which is arguably more sophisticated – and definitely cost more to develop – than any plugin you’re likely to buy gets equally confused.
The first page of results gave me a Wikipedia page about seahorses, a National Geographic page, a magazine about seahorses. All results you’d expect.
Then the fourth result was a piece of freely available software that deals with encryption and decryption but happens to be called Seahorse.
Next up was a site about instruments used in bioscience.
Then a YouTube video – which despite the search result saying it was unavailable actually did exist.
A news story.
And then a sea food restaurant called Seahorses.
That’s just in the first page of the results. By the third page, it had strayed as far as a resort and a collection of clothing. Page 5 gave a result for iXBRL tagging (whatever that is), page 6 included something about getting divorced, page 8 included a water taxi service, page 9 included a soccer team and a firm of underwriters and page 10 included naval architects.
So in the first 100 results, Google has strayed a long way from what you’d expect if you just wanted to talk about the fishy type of seahorses.
In a nutshell, that’s why autoblogging software doesn’t work.
You or I could go through those results and decide whether or not to include them, just by looking at the titles.
But software can’t.
Because it doesn’t know any better.
And that means that your dream autoblog is completely unfocused after a very short space of time.
It just isn’t something that software is good at.
With that Google search, you’d probably add a word or two to your search to drill down.
But unless you’ve got a lot of control with your autoblog software and a lot of time and patience to weed out the “wrong” results, at best you’ll end up with a bunch of unrelated stuff.
That’s not to mention the footprint you’ll be leaving.
$97 software needs to sell lots of copies to be able to make its developers a decent sum.
And it often allows you to use it on more than one site – sometimes for an extra fee.
So there are thousands of other sites, all with the same kind of mix, all with the same “powered by…” messages, all with lots of other things that Google’s algorithm doesn’t need to break a sweat to identify and push out of the search results.
Which explains why you may have hundreds or thousands of pages on your autoblog but the only traffic you get is if you log in to check your site. And you probably don’t do that either, so the site gets no traffic.
It’s far better to spend a bit of time each day on building a real site rather than one that’s created by an autoblogging program.
It can be as little as an hour a day, so long as you’re consistent.
Or more than that if you’d like to grow faster.
It’s not sexy.
It’s not server melting traffic.
It does need work.
Which is good – it puts off the vast majority of your competitors.
I know – the products I’ve launched that promise even reasonably fast results sell much better than the ones that promise you’ll have to do some work.
So you’ve automatically got less competition when you go down this route.
If you’ve got this far – congratulations!
The next step is to take some action.
I’d suggest that as a minimum it’s your own site with your own content.
Which might sound scary but doesn’t need to be.
If you’d like a road map for doing that, check out Internet Marketing in an Hour a Day.
Follow the simple ideas in that – actually putting them into practice – and you’ll be well on your way to beating countless autoblogs and starting to earn some cash from your internet marketing.
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