"Four Figure Income from The First Month"
Auto-Blogging - Why & How?
Today, an online business definitely needs a blog to do wonders. One with fresh and tempting content for the visitors to stumble on frequently and in a large number. All that a blog needs is audience to visit, get some valuable information and interact through comments. What audience need is pretty ubiquitous - better stuff to read than they would find elsewhere!
Blogging involves intensive research and takes a lot of time. Apart from this, it requires regular posts on topics which help hold your readers’ interest. On a long run, it can often get difficult to generate new ideas for posts. This would turn your blog stagnant. Hence, you losing on your readers! This is where Auto-blogging can help keep your blog stay active with fresh content.
Auto-blogging generates regular content on your blog using feeds from elsewhere. One can co-relate it with a robot-run assembly line! There is no need for you to cut-paste articles from varying sources to get content for your blog. Of course, the content generated by auto-blogging can never match the one written by oneself. But when it comes to revenue, you can earn to satisfaction through affiliates and Adsense-like programs by using auto-blogging tools on a number of websites/blogs. This would ensure you getting things in quantity, if not quality.
How to get things done?
- Firstly, you need to choose a good enough domain name and a host. Consider a domain name which reflects the niche you’re targeting. Next in line is the choice of blogging platform. WordPress, is a undisputed winner for this! WordPress being open source allows you to change things to suit your niche. You may get a lot of plugins for wordpress like - MaxBannerAds, WP Blaster, etc. which would further help you run an auto-blog.
- The next big thing you’ll need for sure is RSS aggregator. Most of the auto-blogging applications need an RSS aggregator.
- Lately, there has been a lot of arguments over the use of RSS feeds to generate content. A lot of webmasters do not want their content-feed to be reproduced on other sites. You need to respect this and use RSS feeds which allow content syndication. I would recommend feeds from News websites, PR websites, etc.
- WP-o-Matic is a cool WordPess plugin that allows you to use RSS feeds to create blog posts automagically! All you need to do is type in the feed url and choose the categories which you want the post to appear in. Can it get any simpler?
- Another recommendation is Kathy’s Wordpress auto-blogging tool. It automatically adds attribution to each post so that readers can see where does the post originate from, keeping most RSS publishers happy as they get traffic from your website and you get away with free content. It also incorporates a auto-Ping script which shall ping a list of pre-defined websites.
- If you want your new blog to reach out the masses, you need to make sure they’re submitted to social bookmarking websites like Delicious, Stumble Upon, etc. For that matter, you may need to get a script to automate the process of submitting the posts to these social bookmarking websites.
- Lastly, you need language translation scripts to get on to the whole world with each individual posts. If you’re looking for a good Internet marketing presence, make your blogs available to each one on the Internet, irrespective of their language.
What to expect?
After having built a dozen readable blogs, each with an auto-blogging software along with some effort on SEO, you can expect a tidy sum of traffic even if each of them generates a few thousand hits each month. That’s not bad at all if you have an array of auto-blogs running for you!
Once you have mastered the art of auto-blogging on few blogs and can visualize a decent growth in traffic and income, you can think that you’ve accomplished what you had set out to do. Thinking of your own blog-empire would no more be astonishing!
WordPress Blog And PhpBB Forum Integration
Many blog owners have started to build their own forums, both to foster a community around their niche and also to benefit from user-generated content and traffic. Although paid forum software like VBulettin would be the best choice if you had a proper budget, the easiest way to get a forum up and running is to use PhpBB, a free forum software bundled into most Cpanel web hosting accounts.
Installing PhpBB is as easy as installing WordPress via Fantastico, and just by entering a few variables everything is done for you. All you need to do then is to login, create your forums and sub-forums, and get yourself a new forum "skin"
That is usually a major headache if you’re running WordPress and you want your forum to have the exact layout your WordPress blog does. The most common way to do this, if you’re not a coder or designer yourself, is to get a freelancer to build you a new PhpBB theme based on your WordPress blog’s CSS file.
However, Brian Gardner has made it extremely easy for regular people like you and me to perfectly blend our WordPress blogs with PhpBB, if you’re using any of his wonderful Revolution themes.
This is how your WordPress blog / PhpBB forum pair would look like with the Revolution CMS theme:
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WordPress Blog Theme
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PhpBB Forum Skin
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This is how your WordPress blog / PhpBB forum pair would look like with the Revolution Pro Media theme:
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WordPress Blog Theme
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PhpBB Forum Skin
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This is how your WordPress blog / PhpBB forum pair would look like with the Revolution Magazine theme:
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WordPress Blog Theme
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PhpBB Forum Skin
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This is how your WordPress blog / PhpBB forum pair would look like with the Revolution City theme:
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Wordpress Blog Theme
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PhpBB Forum Skin
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As a result I can get massive site that looks professional and clean.
You can see the updated list of all available PhpBB forum skins or themes here. If you don’t have any Revolution WordPress theme, I recommend that you at least get the single-user license to the Revolution Magazine theme or the Revolution CMS theme. It’s a great bang-for-buck and with just a few changes you can make your blogs look great..
How to Create A Single Login for WordPress / PhpBB
One thing most site owners want is to create a single user id and login for both the WordPress blog and PhpBB forum. Before you even try to do this, consider for a while if it’s really worth your time:
- Does your blog require registration? Unless you require people to create their accounts and log into your WordPress blog before making comments on the blog, there is no use trying to integrate with PhpBB.
- Can you handle tech stuff? If you cannot, or don’t have access to someone who can help you, be prepared for nightmares when you upgrade WordPress or PhpBB, or both.
If you decide to integrate, then what you need is a PhpBB / WordPress integration tool called "WP United". Although WP United is free to download and use, it may requires a certain amount of fiddling around before you get it right. Plus, once you DO get it right, make sure you don’t regularly update WordPress or it might just all break down.
According to the site:
WP-United is a new integration package that glues together PhpBB, the leading open source bulletin board, and WordPress, the popular blogging tool.
WP-United is for PhpBB users who want to integrate WordPress into an existing community — perhaps using it as a content management system for articles, perhaps to offer their members personal blogs, or perhaps as a portal page. The choice is yours!
WP-United ties WordPress to a PhpBB community, with login to WordPress (optionally) handled automatically by the integration package.
View a useful forum topic here on WordPress / PhpBB integration issues.
"Expert WordPress" Course By Alex Sysoeff
Alex Sysoeff and ho previously released Web 2.0 Wealth, has a new and interesting product. "Expert WordPress", as you may expect, will reveal everything you’ve always wanted to know about installing, using and maximizing the WordPress platform.
Overall, this is a comprehensive course on blogging with WordPress, and Alex goes to great lengths with his videos to show you how to overcome all the common technical hurdles that are great obstacles to the newbie blogger.
Blog Banner Ad Management Plugin: Max Banner Ads
Pawan Agarwal has released yet another monster WordPress plugin, and this time it’s something all blogger, black hat or white hat or "gray hat", can benefit from.
Max Banner Ads is a plugin that will help you manage, rotate, organize and track advertising on your site, including Google AdSense, banners, JavaScript ads (like from CJ) and even flash-based ads. As a matter of fact, you can actually use Max Banner Ads to rotate, manage and track almost any kind of content you want.
The really cool thing about Max Banner Ads is that it’s 100% plug-n-play and trust me you don’t have to copy and paste a single line of code, although those codes are still made available for more advanced users.
Create Your Own Banner Ad Zones
This is what makes this WordPress plugin totally plug-n-play. You can effortlessly create banner ad zones for your blog, and you can choose to either:
- Display ads before the first post of your blog
- Display banner ads at the bottom of the last post
- Display banner ads within the post content
You can choose the layout, either:
- Fixed alignment - left, center or right
- Randomize the position (great for Google AdSense within the post content)
- Display it as a WordPress widget in your sidebar
- Edit the CSS and match your blog layout
Adding New Banners and AdSense
Adding new banners is really easy too. A cool feature here is to just copy and paste the advertising codes given by the publisher, and Max Banner Ads will automatically extract the image as well as the URL into the system. You can also easily upload banners from your PC.
Adding javascript ads (Google Adsense or codes from networks like CJ or PepperJam) is simple, just copy and paste into the space provided. However script ads don’t produce statistics and it’s not possible to track clicks on them.
Here how the tracking and reporting page looks like. At a glance you can see not only the impressions and clicks, but you can also see the actual banners (unless it is a javascript).
Free or Paid?
Max banner ads is available both as a free or paid plugin. Both version work the same except that the paid version allows you to remove the "Powered By Max Banner Ads" link at the bottom of all your banner ads. However, if you do upgrade to Max Banner Ads Pro you can still use it on an unlimited number of blogs, so $47 is well worth the price of looking like a professional.
Other reviews:
Blog Mastermind By Yaro Starak
Originally launched in 2007, Blog Mastermind has undergone some great changes and as a result your have the new Blog Mastermind by Yaro Starak, all geared up to provide you with mind-boggling information on blogging. Lots of it.
Yaro is an expert in blogging, building RSS subscribers, and getting traffic to your blog. He makes money online mostly from affiliate marketing, selling advertisement, Google AdSense and also selling his own products and membership sites.
If you’re new to blogging and the idea that you can make money from your blog, Blog Mastermind is the perfect site for you to join. You’ll get a wealth of audio / video coaching materials, access to the private forum area, audio interviews with successful bloggers and much more.
Blog Mastermind is a members-only coaching program. Click here to sign-up.
WP Blaster: Blogging Automation Tool for WordPress
There’s a new autoblogging tool on the market, and it’s called "WP Blaster". It works as a WordPress plugin that you install on one blog. You specify the URL of the other blogs you want to "blast" your posts to. Then when you publish a post, the same post is then syndicated to all the other WordPress blogs you’ve specified.
Essentially, what you’re doing is creating multiple copies of the same post and this raises the issue of having duplicate content. That’s why this plugin is meant to work with another plugin from the same developer known as Synonymizer.
The Synonymizer plugin will take any article, and spin it around while replacing word with synonyms, therefore creating a more unique version of the article itself. On it’s own Synonymizer is a great tool if you want to use PLR articles and content on your blog as this solves your duplicate content worries to an extent, although you cannot really get a 100% unique article out of it.
With both the plugins installed, this is how the process looks like:
It goes without saying that not everyone would agree to the "morality" of doing something like this as you may get "penalized" by Google, become an outcast of society and eventually go to hell.
If you think that’s all crap however and prefer to beat your own path, make sure you also understand what it takes to be successful using autoblogging techniques. Not recommended for newbies who are still struggling to set-up their first blog.
Contextual Advertising With NoFollow
Contextual advertising is a great way to gain more business. Since the inception of this advertising model, webmasters all around the world have benefited from this, until…
…Google slapped them last year by taking their PR away. According to Google’s TOS webmasters are not allowed to sell advertising by dofollow. Google search engines basically don’t want to have to crawl advert pages as this takes up room and effort, even though it is automated.
If you have been online late last year when mayhem struck you know what this is all about. Many bloggers have been slapped and lost substantial page rank. The only way to stay within the rules of search engines is to use contextual ads with a nofollow attribute.
This means you still send traffic to the “link” being advertised on your site, but you don’t pass on page rank which is fine with Google.
One such service has recently launched what people were asking for.
LinkXL has now included an option to either make your links dofollow or nofollow which is great if you are concerned about this. And you should be by all means.
The whole process of LinkXL is automated once you have signed up, been accepted and installed some code on your site.
Advertisers can buy links within any of your posts and all you need to do is collect the 60% earnings every month. By default, the cost of a link is set to $5, but you can change this within your LinkXL admin if you wish.
You can choose from a wide range of categories to suit your need as seen on the image to the right.
Billing is automated for advertisers allowing them to concentrate on other aspects of their business. See what LinkXL says about their service for advertisers:
This is natural advertising loved by search engines. To me, this is certainly the best option as a webmaster if I ever wanted to try contextual advertising myself. Even if I was to sell 10 links a month at $10 each, it could mean a difference of $60 in my pocket.
For webmasters the following apply:
From what it’s worth, I think LinkXL might be onto a winner with their new nofollow rule as it will entice a lot of webmasters/publishers to their shores. Whether advertisers see the same value without a follow attribute remains to be seen.
If you like to find out more, visit LinkXL.
Revolution City Theme By Brian Gardner
Brian Gardner has done it again. He delivers a state of the art WordPress theme enticing users to make a switch to something more cool and funky. The Revolution City Theme is not only light, it offers a lot of exposure to blog owners by means of navigation.
The theme offers a lot of room for showcasing the best you have to offer which in turn should keep traffic on your site for longer. The new Revolution City Theme is also an upgrade from earlier theme releases and you can see these outlined below:
Some of the features of the theme are:
- Featured tabber and thumbnail section on the homepage
- Drop down menu navigation
- All 3 sidebar areas are widget-ready
- Theme options page inside WP dashboard
- Comments section coded for Gravatars
- Google AdSense integration in between posts and comments
- Blog page template
The new theme options page gives users time saving options to simply insert their code into the relevant fields.
I don’t know about you guys, but I really love Brian Gardner’s stuff. I’m currently using a couple of his themes on my other blogs but will probably end up buying this one too. It’s just too cool to ignore.
What do you think? See a live demo of the theme.
Learn more about the Revolution City Theme.
Blog In Record Time With Utility Poster
Utility Poster is a groovy blogging desktop software released by Jack Humphrey. Jack lists clients such as Mike Filsaime on his sales page who benefit from his 60 Day Social Marketing Plan, included in the product. Utility Poster is a software working on your desktop in conjunction with your blog admin to help you discover relevant blog post in no time and insert them into your blog within seconds with a drag and drop function.
As you can see, Utility Poster runs side by side if you are logged into your blog admin. It works on all blogging platforms if we are to believe the sales page and requires Windows XP SP2 to function properly with the .NET Framework 2.0 (free) installed.
From what I saw so far, this software is great for link posts as well as niche marketers by the looks of it.
For instance, if you want to search for related post entries, you simply search by keyword and it will return the latest 100 entries. To choose one or several excerpts just click on them and drag them right into your blog editor.
When you watch the video you can see how easy this actually is. Even newbies can do this within seconds.
The idea of Utility Poster is to help you design new posts fast. The software does cost money. At the moment it is listed at $67.
Personally I can see that Utility Poster has some benefits and I would be tempted to try this software. However, since I run Vista I can’t. I find this a huge negative, since most new computers are now being released with Vista from what I see. Maybe they might change this in the future, so more people can use Utility Poster.
WP Plugin: SEO Smart Links
How often have you had the desire to link a particular post’s content to a previous post which has relatively similar information? What do you try to do in such cases? May be, hunt for old posts, use the search option within your own blog or use the related posts plugin.
But now, we have something still more pleasing. A better way to interlink your posts to key pages deeper into the site! SEO Smart Links plugin can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags. All this pretty seamlessly!
Eager to know how does it happen? Cool! The SEO Smart Links plugin actually figures out the keyword phrases which match the title of your posts and pages by default with a special option to enable categories and tags matching too! These phrases are then turned into links which refer to the related posts from within your article. The matching is case insensitive and the original case is preserved. This shall help in giving a well researched look to the post!
So If I mention Top 10 Most Useful “Make Money Blogging” Blogs, which is the title of one of my posts, it will be automatically converted into a link. All this happens in a completely transparent manner, and you can always edit the options from the intuitive administration settings panel.
Let’s look at some of the key features of this plugin:
- Lets you link the keywords in your posts, pages and comments to your other posts, pages, categories and tags.
- Gives you full control with customizable options.
- An incorporated ignore list for keywords you do not want to link ever.
- Gives your weblog a good interlinking, effortlessly.
Installation:
- Download the plugin from here.
- Upload the plugin folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
- Query caching - set define(ENABLE_CACHE, true); in your wp-config.php file.
- Go to the Plugins page and activate the plugin.
- Use the Options page to change your options.
- There is no 5th step!
I am sure you’re going to love this nifty plugin. Try it out for sure!
Gobala Krisnan is a direct-response marketer turned blogger who makes over $10,000 a month from his blog empire. If you want to make money online from blogs, he is the only person who can reveal the secret of merging time-tested direct marketing strategies with web 2.0 traffic. Read more about him >>