I recently had a question asked by a client about auto-posting blogs and what they were exactly. When a client asks me a question, even one that I think is obvious, it reminds me how little the average person knows about the internets. So I thought I’d try and explain here.
Auto posting blogs are basically automated setups. There are countless plugins and programs that will do this kind of thing for you – no matter what format you use – wordpress, blogger, drupal, or even regular old html sites. What they will do is post content at specific times, or random times – that may end up ranking for search terms and bring in traffic.
There are a few places these kinds of automatic blogs pull articles from – the most popular being PLR (private label rights) articles or just searching the internet and stealing content and posting it to their site. PLR’s can be found online either free or for sale (usually a couple bucks will buy you 100k+ different articles) – and automated searching is either from RSS feeds or just regular old search engines – these will scour for the keyword you want and find everything it can (there is even a blackhat method of building entire sites like this and then showing search engines a heavy content page while showing real users something entirely different.)
The goal for these setups is to make money… as is the goal for probably 90% of the sites out there – but there are a couple main ways these sites work – Ads (from an ad network like Google adsense) or affiliate links.
The idea is to put as much content as you can – even if it’s just stolen – and hope you rank for some searches. Generally these types of automated sites don’t rank very well but if you can get enough traffic to make just 1$ a day in ads… then you have 300 of these types of sites… you can bring in a pretty penny – and best of all it is all automated.