Autoblogging is a hard thing to grasp for most Wordpress users. Most don’t even know it’s an option. For the ones that understand the power of syndication, however, autoblogging is a necessary step towards open mass distribution and meaningful advertising exposure. Consider the leverage possibilities of having a blog that works as the portal of related news and information.

Autoblogging is a story often heard but rarely realized. One of the most important examples of the powers of being a centralized portal of related information: Yahoo!. While Yahoo! started out as one of the biggest indexes of information on the internet, the only reason it survived the Internet Bubble at the turn of the millennium was because of reputation. Everyone recognized Yahoo! as a central place to find the news, events, people and places of just about anywhere in the world.

Yahoo! and autoblogging do the same basic thing: the company goes out, finds interesting stuff, grabs the bits it needs, attaches it to other relevant media (categorization) and serves it through one central portal. In a blog’s case, the process of autoblogging is generally manual, as most autoblogging adaptations are not able to index random web sites.

Autoblogging is based on RSS feeds. The process is simple: grab the RSS address from a blog or a news site, enter it in an autoblogging script and watch it populate content into your feed. It’s that easy… but it’s also… NOT! Confused? This is where it gets a little more complex, because, as they say, if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it!

The above video will give you beginners a great way to visualize RSS feeds.

Then you need a reader that doesn’t just read RSS, it reformats it and reposts it in a formatted way: in your own blog. Enter WP-o-Matic, the Wordpress answer to autoblogging. WP-o-Matic reads RSS feeds and reformats them to fit with your Wordpress blog. Better still, it does what is more important than just having content: it helps categorize and brand it.

I will not go over the basic setup of WP-o-Matic; if you are not able to follow the instructions it has during setup of the plugin, it might be best to have a designer install it for you (or I might add a tutorial for that later). I will say that you will want to have hosting that offers cron job access, as the alternative, through a PHP script and cron hook, is less secure and does not always work due to issues with permissions in the cache and multiple files clogging up your valuable server space.

For instance, if I wanted to include Wordpress Blog’s latest announcements in my own Wordpress-related blogs, I could grab the RSS feed, add the feed to WP-o-Matic as a new campaign, categorize it and format the post to read, “Just in!: New Wordpress news from Wordpress Blog,” at the top of each post. Hopefully, if there are updates to be had on WP-o-Matic, there will be a way to automatically assign tags, but for now you can do that periotically as new posts come in. All the visitor sees is that they can get Wordpress updates regularly along with other Wordpress-related tutorials. I am, at that point, the Yahoo! of Wordpress information. Then they can grab my RSS feed and have it in their reader as one source, not 50 different feeds.

Sound like a “build it and they will come” story? Surely, but it’s not. You are now competing with everyone else that indexes like-titled content, from competing blogs to Yahoo! itself. The same niche market strategies and grassroots marketing apply here, from social media to handing out flyers on the street. The idea is to bring enough traffic to your site to sell advertising, because your commodity is information and your revenue comes from visibility. Basically, your content is 60% free (you should sprinkle autoblogging on top of your own writing). The rest is your own efforts and labor.

Now, what about the meat of the conversation? You’ve got a taste for autoblogging, you are ready to bring in the news, but come on, man! How do you make money already?

The answer is to make it relevant, make it free and make it reciprocal.

Let’s say you are Unilever (I pick them because they were the subject of a college paper in my Business degree). You are the center of the consumer goods universe. You want to promote green initiatives throughout your industry, even with your competitors, to show that even though you are staying competitive you want to give green credit where green credit is due. You setup an autoblog based on Wordpress, but you don’t have specific green RSS feeds from companies. What do you do?

First, grab any green news RSS feeds and write them all down (save them into a Notepad text file so they are easy to copy-and-paste). Grab some news feeds from Google News as RSS feeds of searches for “green products” or specifically “eco-friendly toothpaste”. Then find all the feeds you can related to other blogs and web sites dedicated to green initiatives.

Once you have a batch of RSS feed addresses, you can do one of two things. The first option, if you are using WP-o-Matic, is to create a new campaign and enter as many feeds as possible to one set of categories (for instance, all feeds related to new products). Setup multiple campaigns based on the topics (categories) you are filling. WP-o-Matic will combine these and post them as drafts. I recommend doing this unless you know that all posts grabbed will be relevant, and even then it would be wise to draft them first so you can add tags before publishing. You can also remove some competitor names, if you so desire, or sensor bad words that could come through, both by using the ReWrite option. Then setup a template to add your own branding to each post.

The second option, if you are just importing posts from one feed, is to use a service like RSSMix.com or Feedroll.com to combine the multiple feeds into one, but this option doesn’t offer as much flexibility.

Either way, I would again recommend drafting (saving as draft) each news item pulled from these sources, more so because there will be irrelevant posts here and there that you will want to just delete instead of posting. Tags are the most important, as they will improve your tag cloud and make your posts more relevant in related searches.

Don’t charge for a site like this. Autoblogs work best as ad-paid portals. And make sure you link back and specify the original source of the post content. There are laws against plagiarizing, and you don’t want to get into that mess of legislative gray matter.

Are you already autoblogging? Let us know as a comment to this post! We would love to see your adaptation.

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