Enhanced Internet Marketing Through AutoBlogging

Ron LeGrand

Dec 15 2010

by Antoine Moore & Paul Bell

If you are marketing your business on the Internet, or making money directly by selling online, you've no doubt heard time and again how beneficial it can be to both your marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts to write and maintain a daily blog commentary with relevance to your product or industry that will serve to draw in interested clients.

The problem is time. Many never try because they are simply too busy and have neither the time or the resources necessary to meet the demands of being a daily blogger. Many have made the effort and found the task too daunting to handle on a regular basis; but, it's not always just the time and effort. For many, it's also a matter of not having the motivation to come up with something new to write about every day or two, no matter how high their interest level may be.

If you want to incorporate blogging into your efforts to attract a bigger audience and would like to overcome time, resource and content issues, AutoBlogging may be for you. AutoBlogging allows you to intersperse your own blogging efforts with aggregated content pulled from other blogs covering your area of interest.

Properly attributed to the original authors and source, auto-blogging allows you to fill the gaps in your own creation of content with articles that maintain your blog's point of view. Once collected, you might discover that these "found" items can actually motivate your own contributions by giving you topics to react to, elaborate on and discuss.

As an internet marketing tool, AutoBlogging fills the gaps, providing site content that's always readily available to you. AutoBlogging most often uses RSS feeds to pull in the content. These "Really Simple Syndication" feeds are a family of regularly updated information such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and even video. When pulled in to automatically contribute to your AutoBlog, they can enhance both your site's reputation and the quality of your traffic; which, in turn, can positively impact your revenue generation, whether you're selling products directly or promoting others product sales or services actively as an affiliate (such as our own Gold Club Affiliates do).

AutoBlogging Benefits

The benefits to auto-blogging are many and start with how much more you can accomplish in far less time. From a marketer's standpoint, it allows you to maximum profits with less cost (in this case, labor); while, at the same time, providing more focused content to those ideal customers and buyers tuning in specifically for the types of product information you are providing.

Auto-blogging also builds solid keywords around your niche. The frequency with which those keywords are referred to on a regular basis will directly help increase your search engine site ranking. That's money saved that might otherwise have had to be spent with online ad placement sources specifically designed to boost SEO.

If you're already blogging using WordPress, incorporating AutoBlogging can be done without much effort and at little to no cost; and, perhaps the most simple to use is WP-o-Matic. Easily installed, this plug-in is fully featured and has everything you need to get the job done. WP-o-Matic is capable of sending itself out online to search for and aggregate keyword-related content, images, videos, or articles. The user retains full control over what WP-o-Matic fetches and how often it posts to your site.

WP-o-Matic has the tools and power to support any type of marketer. Even if you consider yourself a super newbie to WordPress blogging, AutoBlogging tools like WP-o-Matic or MultiPress can have you generating regular daily content in no time. You'll watch as your site becomes filled with content, generating relevant traffic and a higher site ranking on the search engines.

Misuse of AutoBlogging: Ethical Concerns

As mentioned earlier, AutoBlogging plug-ins can pull in blogs, You Tube videos, images and articles from article directories with ease. The problem is that it doesn't discriminate in pulling freely available content from that content which is author-owned. For those authors who have created their content solely for their own site use and did not originally intend it for re-publication, autobloggers may be regarded as stealing property without permission or purchase.

Reactions within the Internet community to AutoBlogging seem mixed. While the argument has been made that AutoBlogging is a form of content theft, a counter-argument can also be made that in opening up that content to anyone wanting access to it via RSS feeds, the original author has freely released that content to the likelihood of being repeated, commented upon by bloggers; and, ultimately - with the help of automated search, retrieval and posting - autoblogged.

As with other tools of this kind, ethical lines can be crossed if an autoblogger purposely strips away the originating author name and linking, leaving blog visitors to believe that the content is their own. Proponents of responsible autoblogging label that practice sblogging (spam blogging) and distance themselves from it.

Building On What AutoBlogging Starts

In actuality, there are ways to autoblog that are above-board and can be quite beneficial to all parties. By keeping the links intact and crediting the owners of autoblogged content, AutoBloggers can promote the originator in the same way they promote their own site, with each side seeing SEO benefits in the linking. Autoblogging can be a starting point rather than an end point. If your intention from the start is to discover like-minded content to add to your blog by authors whose work you admire and agree with, what starts as a resource can well initiate a true relationship.

Let's suppose that through autoblogging retrieval, you discover a series of blog articles whose content perfectly complements your own. Contacting that blog's author for permission to reprint his blog articles while giving full credit will, with his/her agreement, remove any possibility of ethical issues entirely; in fact, the request may prompt your forming a "ring" of reciprocal relationships that can work to everyones benefit in exchanging content freely while building acknowledged peers within the industry.

Many bloggers welcome the opportunity to exchange content with like-minded contributors, adding a new link to their “ring” of recommended websites, social media and blogs. For all involved, it can lead to increased SEO and an expanded audience for a particular industry segment, area of focus or influence.

AutoBlogging Safeguards

The beauty of the Internet is that just as there are tools readily available to help you autoblog, you can just as easily locate locate autoblog protection tools that can help you prevent your blog content from being scraped, if you feel strongly about the issue. You can also add protection that will restrict specified sites from copying your blog content. At the very least, you can incorporate safeguards to insure that when your content is retrieved by an autoblog, it is copied with all the linking and attribution to your ownership kept intact.

In summary, AutoBlogging is a useful automated tool that can help you fill in the gaps in providing consistent and regular posting to your blog with articles that you can insure are compimentary and support your point of view. The practice has generated some controversy due to its misuse by those passing off others creative efforts as their own; however, you can autoblog responsibly by insuring proper author credits and linking are maintained in every AutoBlog published. Used properly in this way, AutoBlogging can help you build your audience, enhance your marketing outreach, improve SEO, and even initiate lasting and beneficial article exchange relationships with like-minded bloggers whose interests complement your own.

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Related Links

WP-o-Matic:WordPress AutoBlogging plug-in

MultiPress Content Lite:WordPress AutoBlogging plug-in

Top 5 AutoBlogging WordPress Plug-Ins: article

How to Prevent Your Blog Content From Being Stolen Via Autoblogging: article

Anti Feed-Scraper Message: add a custom message & link to your post to prevent uncredited scraping