Autoblogging.

 bl0g  Comments Off on Autoblogging.
Sep 142011
 

What actually is an autoblog?

Let’s start with what exactly is a Blog.

Blog is short of weB log. It can be your diary, your notes, things you want to share or something that interests you. You may share your opinion on a movie you recently watched, share piece of advice for something you did or generally just write your research in one neat page so everyone can benefit from It.

Some of the bloggers out there, including myself insert advertisement on their pages. Those advertisements generate some income every time someone is interested in them and clicks to check how much it will cost or to get additional information. This way, the blogger that shared something that can help his readers can get some small amount of money (cents actually). It is called monetizing or

Blogging for money.

What does it have to do with Autoblog and what exactly is It? An Autoblog plugin such as WP Robot, Autoblogged, or DatafeedR are not actually generating any new material for you. It is impossible. Cannot be done. It would be one of the best artificial intelligence software if It did. No. It is actually scraping thousands of RSS feeds, Yahoo! answers, WebHowTo’s and many other daily updated internet resources and copies new articles matching your chosen category to your own blog. It’s one of the new trends in making money online. It is of course…


Stealing

Remember how I defined blog monetizing? The original publisher is posting articles with attached ADs inside or beside them. The Autoblog software is attaching your ADs in their place. The original publisher does not get a single penny for his article from your blog. It is like getting a bestselling book and reselling it for profit, claiming you are the author. Suppose the original author has a small blog with Page rank 1 and your page rank is 5. Your blog will appear before his/hers in the search results. And he will lose possible readers because of you. His hours of trying to create a successful blog will be in vain. And even worse:

Some of the * Autoblog * plugins don’t even leave a link to the original article. It’s pure thievery. And as one of the bloggers I found in the network said:

It is a small world.

It is very easy to catch if one of your best articles that generate few cents per click is copied. Mark a random passage of few sentences and search them in Google. If anyone had stolen them – you will have them as result 1 HOPEFULLY after your original article.

License your work! Even a widely open license as Creative Commons allow you some hammering. Everyone can use your work as long as there is a link pointing to the original article or a credit to the original author.

You may send a note to the “blogger” and ask him to remove the article or cutting some part of It and linking to your site for the rest. You can also try my few

anti Autoblog tricks.

  • Use hidden text. Mark this with your mouse —> Original work Stoill “m0rd0r” Barzakov, visit www.m0rd0r.eu for more <—— The scraper Autoblog software will copy it without the tags and it will appear black-on-white somewhere in the article the “blogger” took from you without asking. The bad part is -> there will not be actual URL pointing to your site and you will not benefit from his page rank. It can alarm his readers that he is lazy thief though.
  • Do not enable full RSS feeds. Even if a scrapper Autoblog software aims at your RSS feed – they will only get the heading of the article.
  • If you want to provide your readers with full RSS feeds – use Yoast’s RSS footer plugin to insert links to your own article and some heavy AdSense or Chitika AD under every article text.
  • Put your license in visible place. Scarecrows can make autoblogger turn back and some of the scraper robots that want to survive are going to point a link to your site if they see you are licensed under creative commons or so.
  • Always point to your sources (e.g. your own blog) when answering Yahoo! answers or writing HowTo’s.
  • When you can, use plugins that place content only if the content is in your own site. (such as wp-table) The scrapper will only get [ table ID = 1/ ] instead of the original content. Have a look at this article -> http://www.gobalakrishnan.com/what-is-autoblogging-and-how-does-it-work/ It is autoblogged article about autoblogging 😀 Somehow the original author wanted your opinion in a decent poll with a poll plugin. The thief copied something with square brackets instead.

Autoblogging is not Blogging after all…

Do not feel bad about the people that do It.

  • They are not real bloggers.
  • They don’t have real loyal readers.
  • Search engines are not dumb, they soon drop their page rank and stop rating them on the same page as your articles.
  • Their AdSense and Chitika accounts get suspended if they get caught.
  • Google and Yahoo! often change their rating and search algorithms so the Autoblog scraper sites get behind or get caught.

Having said enough while being grumpy and bitter, I can add few more encouraging words:

  • My Yahoo! answers being scraped still point to my articles.
  • Good article that took me a week to create was stolen by a scraper. His WP account got disabled and his articles deleted after I reported him to WordPress staff.

… so, there is still hope for real bloggers to remain alive 😉

(Disclaimer: the site AutoBlog.com has nothing to do with Autoblogging software and is genuine blog. Good work guys. Keep up!)

 Posted by at 10:34 am

256-th day of the year.

 General  Comments Off on 256-th day of the year.
Sep 132011
 

This day is actually the programmer’s appreciation day.

According to Wikipedia It was originally proposed by Valentin Balt, a web designer in small company before 9 years, but  made officially instituted by  the Russian president 2 years ago with the

Указ Президента РФ от 11.09.2009 N 1034
“О Дне программиста”

Cold beer

A mug for everyone!

The Wikipedia link  cites some other sources, but for the Russian speaking folks – the most important link is actually in Kremlin’s site and is visible everywhere. http://graph.document.kremlin.ru/page.aspx?1026111 I can think of at least 10 reasons anyone would choose to develop programming skills:

  • It rocks!
  • The community is awesome!
  • There is information about everything 2 clicks away.
  • There are no idiot programmers.
  • The salary is good.
  • Beer, junk food and coffee are part of your diet plan.
  • You are highly prized by your friends.
  • Girls like nerds as much as nerds like girls.
  • You will finally understand the binary jokes 😛
  • You will be excused for creating Chaos. It’s part of the job description.

Happy hacking everyone!!!

 Posted by at 2:01 pm

Is it easy to make a blog?

 bl0g  Comments Off on Is it easy to make a blog?
Sep 092011
 

No.

It is not.

First, you need time.

Then you need determination and motivation.

It is definitely NOT an overnight next-next-next-finish job.

And it will not pay you a penny in the first months, if you want to monetize it.

Actually in the first 4 months, this blog made less than 1 Euro.

Why?

Because of article quantity. And article quality.


Why would anyone expect that making 2-3 articles per week is more than enough to make a living from a blog. It is impossible. At least not in the beginning. And if anyone in the Internet tells you, that you will start “earning” $4000 per month NOW, they simply lie because they want your money. This is most definitely SCAM!

For the four months I mentioned (16 weeks) this means 30-50 articles. What if every article is visited once per day? How many of those visits will actually make money? (make people click on ADs)

None.

It takes 100000 visits to determine accurate CPM (Cost per 1 thousand visits). And believe me. No Chitika, no AdSense, nor any affiliate program can make you rich from 1000 visits.

What do you need to make a Blog profitable?

Readers.

How can you get readers to your blog?

Content, pictures, videos, puzzles, FUN, HOWTOs, curious stuff, game walkthroughs … whatever you are good at… and you are good … DAILY.

If you can do it, you will probably meet with successful “blogging-for-money” one day. But if you think that writing 100 articles and leaving your blog to make money will actually work – you are wrong.

A blog does not go alone by itself. The so called “automated moneymaking” – without human intervention is impossible. It takes months to establish some position as a blog-site and can take twice as long for the people to even notice you. My first few comments (happily) were friendly advices. Those advices kept me motivated and led me to find some online data about SEO (Search engine optimization). Search engines are driven by few factors. Here are few tips:

  1. Uniquity of an article. If all of the articles are copy&pasted from somewhere – you will fail. Search engines hate copied content. If you are not the original writer – you will be indexed too, but your articles will not go high in the search results. And you may get warning from the original owner to remove the article.
  2. Key words. If you don’t speak about what you mean – you will fail. You can’t stray from the base article heading. If you speak about trains, use the word “train” all the time, without spamming or getting weird and annoying.
  3. Page [short]links SEO (search engine optimization). If you have article links www.blah.org/?p=8129 and www.blah.org/cute-mini-train-stations the second article link will show above the first in the search engines, regardless the content in both article is about “little train stations”. If the link name and article name are relevant to each other and the article content – the search engines will push you up in the results, when someone searches the keywords your article is about.
  4. Usefulness. If someone clicks “Like”, “+1”, “Stumble”, tweets about you or simply posts a link on his own blog to your site – you will feel it soon. If your friends and readers tweet about your articles and link to your blog, their friends and friends of their friends may come too.
  5. Page rank. Whatever site links to you – your page rank will raise a bit. If  a big site posted a link to your site – your page rank will definitely jump. And that means higher place in most search engines. If you don’t know what page rank is, refer to the Wikipedia article.

It actually took me 4 months to go from page rank ZERO to page rank 1. When Google increased my PR – The raise in visits to my blog was like 300%. I can’t disclose exact numbers because of the policies I agreed with, but it was visible in my graphs… So. To make It clear – Advertise your site to your friends and readers owning blogs. Let them link to you to quick start you a bit. You may not get High levels of traffic by just few links, but this will pay in time. This is important, regardless what the others say. If you are often linked and discussed – you WILL be noticed. And Page rank DOES matter.

If you are interested in how many backlinks do you need to attain page rank 1 with Google, have a look at this blog post.

The hard task I had put on my shoulder was to make a blog that speaks about EVERYTHING that interests me. I did not plan to make a “niche website” enslaved by few keywords. The good part is, that more keywords will enter the search engine criterion. The bad part is – big part of the blog is irrelevant to most of the readers. I am sorry to say, but part of my RSS subscribers expect new Slackware howto or game walkthrough, but instead of this – they receive a recipe for a food or some story about Me going somewhere with the bike and shooting few photos.

Sorry folks. Please come back! Don’t leave! 😀

Another important thing – You must be aware that 1 blog post takes the attention of the people interested in it for no more than a week. Than the visits drop back to normal. I’ve already seen that when going to a see resort and not posting for 2 weeks. If you don’t update your blog regularly, the search engines will put more recently updated blogs in the same niche before yours. And search engine traffic is very important. You may have some dedicated readers, but you want them to grow. And if no one can find your blog – you can’t get more readers. You will only grow by “word of mouth” from your readers that tweet about your posts or post links to your blog elsewhere.

And that growth is simply not enough.

 Posted by at 5:09 pm