WordPress is a powerful blog platform for individuals who want to write on any subject. It can also be used by webmasters who want to build auto blogs, or automatic blogs for autoblogging, that post on a regular schedule using content available online. Autoblogs, or splogs, have been called a scourge or bloodsuckers for scraping and stealing content from legitimate publishers who take the time to create fresh unique content. For years now black hat webmasters have been scraping and scrambling content from top ranked websites and churning our useless text to feed the search engines insatiable appetite for the latest and greatest.
Things are a bit different now. Syndicated content is a legitimate website business model and publishers have established that proper attribution of the original source is a value to both the syndicater and also the source which gains a valuable inbound link for every syndicated post. Giant content farms like AssociatedContent.com or any of the many article directories warehouse tons of free website content that webmasters can use to mix in with original content to create a larger more useful resource for readers.
Using WordPress, a webmaster can build a blog that syndicates news on any keyword topic from a huge range of sources. With a few simple and free WordPress plugins you can build an automatic blog to syndicate relevant content and automagically update your website. Pure autoblogs are limited in how much traffic they will draw using only duplicate content and you’ll have to really mix things up with articles from many sources in order to gain any respect with Google. Of course all content needs links so having some inbound links to your syndicated content is key to real performance but if you want a quick and esy way to setup a free auto blog you have to check out Wp-O-Matic.
Using the Wp-O-Matic WordPress Plugin to AutoBlog
Our first and most important plugin is Wp-O-Matic which “makes autoblogging a snap by automatically creating posts from the RSS/Atom feeds you choose, which are organized into campaigns” and can be installed from your plugins administration panel.
Wp-O-Matic Setup Step One – Create and Add Campaign
Your campaign title can be used as a keyword variable in the content of the posting template so pick your title to reflect a targeted keyword phrase such as Hollywood California Apartments which I am using for an apartment related domain I have. These template variables are important to building a unique and seo ready blog post so choose your text wisely.
Wp-O-Matic Setup Step Two – Add RSS Feeds for Syndication
The second step requires a bit of pre-planning. You’ll need some available RSS feeds that you can most likely find in a good RSS Directory. Test and then use these feeds to import content to your blog. You can import any blog you want and risk the owner complaining or you can do a little research and see if they have a specific copyright notice on their website which will usually be included in the site footer. Understand we will only be using a portion of the syndicated article and we will be referring the reader to the full article at the original source should they be interested in knowing more.
Wp-O-Matic Setup Step Three – Select WordPress Categories for Syndicated Articles
As you can see I have a WordPress Category made to match my targeted keyword. You can chose to do the same or you can integrate the posts into your existing categories for established blogs or even better you can create a new category for syndicated posts and manage them all with the built in WordPress category features or even a separate Category plugin.
Wp-O-Matic Setup Step Four – Rewrite Content With Regular Expression
Wp-O-Matic is a powerful tool with a built in Regex engine for searching and replacing selected text including keywords, urls, affiliate id numbers and even Google Publisher codes for more complete personalization. Use this tool to create truly unique articles for syndication and better search engine indexing by replacing identifying code in the source article but please abide by copyright restrictions and leave source referrals in place.
Wp-O-Matic Setup Step Five – Template Setup and First Import of Wp-O-Matic Content
Wp-O-Matic offers a posting template with variables that can be used to create very unique and professional looking article imports. Using the {campaigntitle} from the first step we can mix the targeted keyword phrase Hollywood California Apartments into the blog post along with the syndicated content, blog title and source feed url. Using the available template variables you can build any number of unique article formats.
After setting up your template you can complete other settings such as desired post frequency or feed date based based on how you want the posts to show up in your blog.
The final steps in the setup listed below will allow you to chose how many blog posts to create on each run and who the author for each post should be. Each campaign can only have one Author so you can create an account for each syndicated source if you wish or you can just assign them all to the Admin account. “Post links to source” will set the WordPress blog title Permanent link to the source url which is the best way to stay clear of the Google Duplcate Content Filters because you don’t have any internal pages of content and only refer each blog title to the original source. Of course doing this creates a 100% bounce back ratio on all visitors and you never get to keep any of your traffic so most people instead create a link to an internal page by unchecking this box. Discussion options determines if you want to have comments open or not and trackbacks of course help secure more inbound links so use as you wish on those.
Wp-O-Matic Setup – Content Tools and Post Management
Wp-O-Matic offers you the option to Remove All blog posts by Campaign so you can use a campaign for each content source. This way if someone complains about you syndicating their content you can easily remove it all with one click on the mouse. Even if you have permission to syndicate an article people change their mind and if you had to manually remove 100′s of blog posts it would be a real hassle. Leave yourself a way to fix any mistakes by breaking up your syndicated content by source so its easier to remove if necessary.
Use these other WordPress Plugins to Customize your AutoBlog
Wp-O-Matic alone is an awesome tool but for autoblogging but for best results you’ll want to use a few other plugins to make your autoblog perfect. Look for reviews on Simple Tags for autotagging blog content and Delete Duplicate Posts in the next two posts for running a clean seo friendly autoblog.
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