What is a WP Autoblog - And why do you want this? How hard is it to set one up?

Well, as you can certainly guess "WP" stands for "Wordpress" which shall be our blogging platform of choice.

A WP Autoblog is therefore an automatic blog which you could set up. "Automatic" because it will be a site which runs 100% automatic, it gets content 24/7 without you having to do anything and which needs very minimal maintenance.

If you never worked with wordpress - dont be afraid. I can tell you that there is very tiny learning curve, and setting up a blog with wordpress is far easier than you might think, compared to any other method of building sites i am aware of. (Even making a site with XSite Pro takes more time...needless to say that wordpress is 100x more powerful...)

Furthermore - i can also tell you that there is ways to set up a fully functional autoblog in in a matter of minutes, if you have the right tools.

Requirements:

You want your usual hosting and preferrably a domain name. For the sake of this litte guide i assume you are familiar with those things.

Once you have your hosting you will have a control panel "Cpanel", and if your hosting provider is halfway decent it also has "Fantastico" in the Cpanel from where you can easily install your first wordpress blog, right from an easy interface.

The best way to "learn  wordpress" is: Just go ahead and install one on your site/domain, and play around with it. Look for "free themes" and be surprised how good your wordpress blog can look like!  <--- ignore the plain default theme.

So - what makes our new wordpress blog a WP Autoblog?

The key is the wp autoblog "plugins" which are available, here i name a few:

* Feedwordpress

* WP-O-Matic

* Caffeinated Content (CC)

* Yaab

Some of those autoblogger plugins are commercial, many are free.

All those plugins work in similar ways: They pull content from the net, from article directories, youtube videos, RSS feeds or Yahoo answers. Some allow you to enter keywords and then "go out" on the net, collect content and fill your blog with new content matching the keyword. Day in and Day out, while you sleep.

There are some autoblog plugins i want to focus on, since they are "the best" and have proven to be reliable with great overall results.

A very good plugin is Caffeinated Content - which works in a little different way than the other plugins. The other plugins mostly use RSS feeds and go out daily and fetch content.

Caffeinated Content works that way that you give it a keyword, and it then collects a whole stack of articles or videos and it stores it on your hosting. You do this initial content fetching only once. Once the content is fetched it will drip-feed your blog from that stack of articles, according to what you set it to.

What you do, you specify a date range for Caffeinated Content to feed your WP autoblog - this date can be "from the past to some date in the future". Say, today is march 1st. I set the plugin to pull 60 articles for the keyword "acne" and set the date "march 1st to may 1st", which is a total of two months, about 60 days.

The plugin collects and stores those 60 articles, and then it will distribute those 60 articles over the next two months. Since we set it to pull 60 articles/videos over a time-frame of 2 months (60 days) it will post one article per day (on average) which it will take from the stack of blogging content it fetched and stored.

Other plugins for your wp autoblog will fetch RSS feeds in real time and you can set a schedule to check the feeds every X hours or so. This method is a little different than the Caffeinated Content plugin - but it really depends on your site and needs.

Eg, i myself have a jobs Autoblog where i use the Yaab  autoblog plugin which is very good also!

I created 50 autoblogger feeds with yaab since i deal with a lot of different job categories. I set each of the autoblogger feeds to check for new content each 6 hours.

Now - the main difference between your "normal" RSS feeds and how a WP autoblog works is that the autoblogger plugins will convert the content into "real content" of your wp blog. We're not dealing with simple links or a widget with links, but each pulled article or video will become part of your site and it will be converted into a blog post.

Advanced Maintenance and Mass Deployment of Autoblogs

There is a very great software by Edna Mendez called "WPManagerDX" which is like a central hub for deploying blogs.

You can set up a blog with whatever plugins you want, whatever themes you want, and then install wordpress remotely via the WPManagerDX interface. (It works via a remote CPanel connection). This way i am able to create a wordpress blog from scratch (!) including creation of subdomain and similar in 1 Minute!! I can use the same "template" to basically make new sites off the template wordpress install with the given plugins and themes i chose.

All what is left after installation is going to the new WP autoblog, set the various settings for the plugins, start fetching content by starting Caffeinated Content - and a few minutes later i have a 100% ready full fledged autoblogging wordpress install which i can ignore for the next few months since it will work in the background.

What other plugins would you want for your wp autoblog?

Not many, but there are some essential plugins which you really, really want:

* Google XML sitemaps

* Platinum SEO pack

* Your autoblogger (CC, or Yaab, or Feedwordpress, or wp-o-matic...)

* Optional PingCrawl or "LinkCurl" (which is a fork off Pingcrawl)

There is really not more plugins you need!

And get some nice theme.

Once you get the hang of working with wordpress and plugins (which is NOT hard, believe me!)....its up to you what kind of WP autoblog you want: You could make a niche blog featuring whatever niche like sports or health or internet.

You could make a blog with the latest news if you fetch News feeds and make an autoblogging blog with them.

You can monetize your blogs eg. by adding adsense ads, or clickbank products, add banners and similar.

What about duplicate content? I myself have pretty "new" wp autoblogs which are barely 5 weeks old, indexed with approx 4000 pages in Google. That one in particular doesnt even fetch full articles, but purely RSS feeds. All my other autoblogs are indexed also. Duplicate content is a myth - besides you can always spice up your blogs with adding additional "unique" content by hand.

The power of the wp autoblog is in the fact that you can make many of them in very short time (15 mins max with the right tools) - and even if you only make change with each of them it would add up. They are also excellent for site-flipping (re-selling) on sitepoint or ebay.

G.

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