Automating Your Blog For Fun And Profit- writedeal.com

Oct 7th 10 Posted by Stephen Salaka in Blogging

Automating Your Blog For Fun And Profit

Being in the blogging industry for several years now, the one thing which I am consistently reminded of is the need to be able to produce new and fresh contents for my blogs. At first, I spent most of my time actually writing the articles myself. However, after starting my PhD in IO Psychology, the ability for me to continue to produce a high quality and consistent postings to the blogs considerably decreased. I did dabble in private license rights (PLR) site contents, however, in the end I turned to outsourcing to find writers for my blog.

In most cases, bloggers make very little money (even loosing money at times) on their blogs. Their dreams of becoming a syndicated writer are quashed by the fact that there are 35,000,000 other aspirants out there. In addition to this, well over half a billion new pages make their way onto the interwebs every few weeks. How does one justify spending hours upon hours of their time creating such unique and quality contents which, in the end, no one will end up reading. The secret, for many of these successful bloggers, is to automate a majority of this process.

One of the first keys in generating automated contents is through the use of PLR contents. While not optimum, and causes your site to tend to drop in Google rankings, the usage of PLR does help serve the need of filler content for your site. PLR (private license rights) contents are articles which are written by a third party, to which they give your re-print permission on your blog. What this does is free you up to merely searching for the article contents, and then re-purposing the contents on your site. The downside to many of these PLR articles is that they include sometimes lengthy attributions and heavy links throughout the body – further reducing your Google ranking, and at the same time possibly driving traffic away from your sites and sponsors. All negative aspects of PLR aside, it does a good job in creating updates. On average I update around 2 PLR articles per day to my site, and have seen a sharp increase in traffic as a result of my site being more frequently updated.

The second key in generated automated contents is outsourcing the article writing to a third party. Excellent sites to check for these writers are oDesk and elance. However, before investing in this path, you should ensure that you have a current base of traffic to your site, as well as a targeted audience and writing profile you can use. By just putting contents up on your site, you are wasting your reader’s time as well as your own. You should ensure that you analyze your past demographics as well as popular articles, and reproduce the same thematic elements and sourcing for future articles. Without taking these factors into consideration, you might end up with a lot of unique contents, but because the readership is against the contents, end up loosing readers in the long run.

The final stage in the automation process is to transform some of the previously hired monkeys into Shakespeare by upping your price per article to the $20-$50 range. While this might seem like a large leap, you honestly get what your pay for. The ROI on these articles will be significantly lower percentage wise, however these articles serve a hidden purpose by driving even higher traffic to your website, you increase the chance that the readers will come back as well as read other articles on your blog. The net result, is a lower click through per article with the higher priced writers, but a higher overall retention rate and higher overall return rate to your website.

All in all, creating compelling content for your audience, as well as driving traffic to your blog can be a relatively inexpensive process – with a budget of around $200 per month per blog, I am able to turn that around into around $300 worth of advertising revenue per month – having the costs pay for themselves. As I continue with this business model, and as my readership continues to increase, I will look at hiring more of the outsourcing contractors, and use less of the PLR filler contents to continue to increase the quality and quantity of blog postings.

Stephen is author and manager of several blogs on technology, business, and cooking. To read more about blog automation and outsourcing your blog writing, please see Real World Computer Science.