rss scraping and 'auto blogging'

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machinecontrol said:
The trick is to not look like an autoblog, then you will do GREAT in the SERPS. I've got a PR5 autoblog that I am constantly getting blogroll requests from my niche in, because they dont realize it's a splog.

Customize your template, rewrite the RSS feeds, and you're in business.
Takes more time and doesn't scale, but it's worth it.
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Yes I agree with you and maybe is scalable as well. So you are using hooks from another script right?
 
will GD ban your account real quick?
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Godaddy will not only shut down your hosting, if it's with them, but they'll yank your domain. Get away from them as fast as you can.
 
Aequitas said:
Well honestly the sites don't have to be big, nor do they have to be unique but they do have to be targeted, the only real problem with a site with no real unique content is they are hard to get indexed.

Have a look at one of my sites Hannah Montana that site has no unique content, its been up for just over a month and is not indexed in Google but averages 100 unique per day just from type in traffic from video submissions to YouTube, the audince are girls who like to chat and my return visitor count increases each and every day.

This particular site only makes about .50 cents per day and takes less then 2 minutes to update each week so .50 cents per day for 2 minutes of work per week isn't bad, you scale that up and your making decent cash for sites not even indexed.

How long is a real tough question, if you have a strong link building campaign and you can get your sites indexed for longer tail terms (A couple of them) which will eventually add up your traffic to get to that $1 per day mark it can take anywhere from 1 month to 6 months (Assuming your only waiting to get indexed).

If your paying for your traffic then your basically doing the new age arbitrage model and traffic will come a lot faster but with this model requires constant monitoring, you can take traffic from the 2nd tier and 3rd tier search engines you'll get cheap traffic but if it converts you only need to break a profit, for instance if you pay 5 cents for a visitor lets hope that click is worth more then 5 cents but also remembering your not going to have a 100% CTR, to be safe average your CTR to around 30%.

Its all about the math per time when doing this, you can do your math 100% correct but if you don't take into account the time required to pull it off you'll get frustrated after 1 month and not hitting your goal and give up.

Tip: No matter what happens don't ever give up. Let me rephrase that to something more strict. DONT EVER FUCKING GIVE UP.

Ok this may be a bit confusing cause its coming out of my head and my thoughts get twisted most times so I'll try to clean some things up.

Lets say you have an initial budget of $500 and you want to earn $200 per week, what you can do is spend $300 to buy 30 domains (Don't jump the gun here), and use the other $200 for traffic and some link building.

Now when you reach your goal of $200 per week the $500 initial investment will be very small on your part and you can use any additional cash to scale from there.

The time factor with this type of thing is something most don't talk about but if your going to do it right you'll have to spend your pre-research, this means you have to research each niche for each of the 30 sites, for each niche you'll have to research longer tail terms with almost no competition but with the highest search volume, every once and awhile you'll find some Gem terms by doing your research before buying your domain names.

I'll stop there but to put it simply if you have a good model you can earn that inside of 3 months assuming your aim for traffic is on the search engines, paid traffic is a bit more tricky but you'll get much faster returns.

Its an art and in order to capture that art you have to take time. Everything above is assuming you can code, design, and SEO your own sites (I do it all on my own it took me a long time to learn everything but it also saves me tons of cash, plus the skills gained earn me cash).

If this seems like too much and you consider yourself to be confident and have half a brain try looking into membership subscription sites, something you can charge $30 per month for, think about user generated content, think Friend Finder, Think Dating Sites, Think FaceBook, Think MySpace, then think of a niche that people will pay money for, will you charge them this fee for a service or to provide them content.

This is what I do now I don't really do any of the scaling tons of sites anymore I focus on stable longer term goals which continue to earn me money each and every month. If you can build your own sites, SEO them, and Design them yourself and you can do your niche research then you can easily think up a working membership model type of website which is more of a stable income.

Scaling sites can be a stable income but there are lots of factors these days which inflluence there success or failure.

I'll stop there cause I might as well just write a book on the subject. Ask questions if you want I'll try to keep my responses shorter then this one.
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Thank you for this great post! I found a lot of answers to those things I have keep asking in some other forums.
 
I'm working on increasing my traffic for the blogs I've got up.

How many feeds are you guys using per blog?

I've got 4-6 for each, and even though I'm building links (delicious, then exporting to other bookmarkers, finding places to comment yadda yadda) and even have one of them ranking in the top 10 in google, my traffic is dismal.

They've been up for 1-3 weeks depending on the blog, and I"m getting around 20 hits a day on all of them. Click through seems ok, it's just the traffic that sucks.

Any specific tactics that are beneficial for splogs?
 
Anybody have one of the plugins that re-writes the feed content?
Like Synonymizer

What do you guys do about dupe content?
 
Bam Bam,

I'd like to thank you first for this thread, it is truly a great inspiration for other newbies out there - just like myself. I've got one question though. I trid to download your custom WP install that you linked on the first page of this thread (http://www.artofbam.com/wordpress.zip), but the link is apparently not working. Is there any chance I could get hold of it? :) It would help a lot to finally get started!

Thanks again!

Cheers,
Adam
 
Hi guys! Great thread. Here's my scandal...

I started a "legit" autoblog called Starfleet News Service. It was designed to scrape RSS content and aggregate it in one place for Trekkies and SciFI fans to read news on the latest movie and other news all in one place.

Then, in my research, I discovered this thread.

Damn. I mean.... DAMN...

Now I am fascinated with this idea of starting autoblogs on various topics for fun and profit. Thing is, I am ethically against spam of any kind. But the more I look at this scheme, the more I ask myself "wh's getting hurt here?" I mean this truly is a "victimless" scheme. Who are we ripping off? Google? Boo fucking hoo. Kinda like Robin Hood, man, steal from the rich to give to the poor (me).

So here are my concerns:

1) Can this work with subdomains using WPMU?
2) I noticed GoDaddy likes to yank accounts and domains. What about
Dreamhost? Any warnings there?
3) How many feeds should I use in WP-Autoblog per "niche"?
4) How many posts per day is a good target per "niche"?
5) What is the best way to get your site indexed and "out there" for people to
find and use?
6) Rewrite scripts. I found one called WP-Rewriter but it really just makes the
content more gibberish than anything. Does it really matter if the content is
usable? I mean as long as it is "unique" Adsense lets it pass...

Thanks again for a wonderful thread.
 
With WP-autoblog, if you are getting the following error:

Warning: gmmktime() expects parameter 3 to be long, string given in /home/<--whatever-->/wp-content/plugins/wp-autoblog/rss_utils.inc on line 35
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Edit this line in 'rss_utils.inc' :

$epoch = gmmktime( $hours, $minutes, $seconds, $month, $day, $year);

to the following by adding +0 after ($seconds):

$epoch = gmmktime( $hours, $minutes, $seconds+0, $month, $day, $year);
 
1-5 = Read the thread. The answers (and alluded answers) lie there.

davedorm said:
6) Rewrite scripts. I found one called WP-Rewriter but it really just makes the content more gibberish than anything. Does it really matter if the content is usable? I mean as long as it is "unique" Adsense lets it pass...
Click to expand...

You said the site was to be a "legit"(your word) site for ST & SF fans.

If you want to tell those fans to read gibberish on their "legit" site, then maybe they should read Digital Point... :eek:
 
BamBam, I love you.

Quick newbie question. I've never actually run adsense before, and I've noticed something odd on my new autoblog. On the main page, the adsense blocks have nothing but wordpress-related advertisements, while on my 'About' page, the adsense blocks reflect the content of my site. How do I change that on the main page, or will it update itself automatically?
 
who to use for domains that are around $7 or less (and are not going away tomorrow)? that's what I've been paying with godaddy.

or maybe I should stick with making the domains look NOT like spam blogs and I should be fine.
 
after lurking for a while, and trying a few different things with little success, I am going to try this. Thanks for all the great information!!
 
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