Autoblog Profits: 90 days Trial

Autoblog Profits: 90 day trial – What we learned…

This is a follow-up article to our 90 Day auto-blogging trial. Three months ago, our 15 sites went live set up by the folks at Profit Jackpot. Our goal was to generate sufficient traffic within the first 90 days to be able to monetize the sites and make some money
If you have read any of our previous posts about our 90 day autoblog trial, you will know that we were getting mixed results. You may also have noticed that we did not post any more updated results over the summer. Nevertheless, our 16+ sites were churning away producing daily content on auto-pilot and Google and other bots were regularly visiting our sites.

First, the good news. As a whole, traffic to our sites grew from an average of 300 visits per day in mid-May to almost 1,100 per day at the peak. Daily Google search visitors grew from an average of 20 per day in May to a peak of 181 near the end of August. This was an encouraging trend, leading us to believe that traffic was nearing a point where it could be successfully monetized. To put this in perspective, our inaugural standard blog (justrw.net) was established 18 months ago and uses traditional author generated posts, now receives between 150-200 visits per day, with us producing new posts at the rate of about 2 per week.
We are starting to make a little bit of money through Google Adsense but it only amounts to about 50 cents a day. We have had some clickthroughs on our Clickbank ads but none has yet ended in a sale. Other revenue streams from Commission Junction and Amazon are also not yet really off the ground, but we have started placing more advertising in the hopes that increased traffic will eventually pay off.

Now, the not so good news! In the last couple of days of August, our Google search hits from all sites in the autoblog network plummeted from the aforementioned high to just 30 hits a day. This is too striking to be ignored. It would seem likely that Google has somehow deduced that our content is not truly unique and has penalised us accordingly   One particular site: Nokia N8 Tips & Tricks, which was receiving almost 200 visitors a day and rarely less than 30 from Google searches now gets just 6! In reviewing the auto-generated content across our network of autoblog sites, I have come to the conclusion that over 50% of the posts are effectively garbage to a human reader, even if a Google bot is not smart enough to recognise it.
Don’t forget that the purpose of any autoblogging site is to make money from the traffic that comes to it. If the reader is greeted with garbled, illegible content, what are the chances that they will click on any of your advertising?
So, what is the next step? Well, since we have been relatively successful in building traffic, all is not yet lost. We have turned off the auto-posting feature on most of the sites and will now be adding content manually. We now have several methods of generating content and will add new posts that are edited, SEO optimized and guaranteed to be unique. We will leave some of the poorly performing sites on auto-posting just to see what happens.
In a future post we will show you the different methods that we use to generate unique content from the autoblog output. In the meantime, we thoroughly recommend that you check out WP-Simplicity, since it alone will enable you to do this and a lot more besides.

How to Boost Your Blog

Boost Your Blog

Yesterday I gave an example of something I’d been putting off doing to improve my blog—even though I knew it would have long-term benefits.
Today I want to continue on that theme and being to suggest a number of areas that bloggers could be investing time into today—and enjoying payoffs from in the future. Some of them will lead to financial benefits while others are just going to improve the effectiveness of a blog.

1. Create a Product

Every time I talk about monetizing blogs by selling a product of your own, I get comments from bloggers telling me that they’re thinking of, planning to, or wondering if they should launch a product of their own.
Yes there’s significant work in creating your own product, but there are also many many tangible benefits of doing it.
Have you created a product of your own?

2. Start an email newsletter

This is another tactic that I know many bloggers are convinced of. But for one reason or another it’s seen as something they’ll do “one day”—maybe when they have more traffic, maybe when they have more time. The reality is that by starting an email list early on (and using it smartly), you’ll accelerate both the driving of traffic to your blog and the monetization of it.
Do you have an active email newsletter for your blog?

3. Optimize your advertising page

When I mentioned I was writing this post on Google+ (connect with me here), Nick Roshon suggested auditing your advertising page.
If monetization through selling advertising is part of your business model, then this one should be a task you build into your regular schedule of pages to update.
Keep your advertising page up to date with the latest options for advertisers to advertise, update your stats so that advertisers know what reach they’ll have, and make sure that this page is prominent on your blog so that they can find it.
Do you have an advertising page on your blog?

4. Optimize other key pages

Yesterday, we talked about pages on your blog, and it might also be worthwhile looking over some of the other key pages on your blog. For example, the About page is one that, on many blogs, is read a lot by new visitors. It’s also a page that many bloggers forget to keep up to date with new developments.
I recently looked over my own About page and realised that while I linked to my first ebook, I had made no mention of subsequent ones. As it’s such a highly trafficked page, I was potentially missing out on sales as a result.

5. Check your metrics for “hot posts”

One of the tasks that I build into my own blogging on a monthly(ish) basis is to dig into Google Analytics. I do a number of things while digging in but one simple task that can have significant impact is to look for “hot posts”—posts that attract a higher rate of traffic than normal posts.
Most blogs have a few hot posts in their archives, and they’re not always the ones you’d expect. These posts are real opportunities—there are people viewing them and chances are that once they do, they then disappear never to return.
Once you’ve identified your hot posts, think about how you can optimize them. You might put a bit more time into optimizing them for SEO, you might want to think about how to hook visitors of that page into subscribing, or you might want to even think about promoting a product (yours or someone else’s) from that post. Really what you do will depend upon your goals.
Does your blog have hot posts? And have you optimized them?

6. Optimize your menus, navigation, and sidebars

One task that I think many of us could benefit from on a periodic basis is a critical review of menus and navigation areas on our blogs.
I include myself in this—recently it hit me that on my photography blog I wasn’t promoting my ebooks in my menus. I just had one menu item pointing to a very dated page that was no longer relevant. I swapped the photography ebook sales page link in and again saw an increase of traffic to that landing page.
Ultimately, it’s about working out what actions you want readers to take when they visit your blog and then making sure that you’re calling your readers to those actions in prominent places on your blog.
Are you doing this? Can you optimize your menus and sidebars further?

7. Interlink your posts

Another task that I try to do on a regular basis (not as regularly as I should!) is going back through old posts in my archives and looking for opportunities to interlink them.
Many times bloggers write multiple posts on their blog on related topics, and each one is an opportunity to interlink relevant content. This benefits your readers, as you give them further reading on the topic, and helps with your search rankings (internal links help your SEO a little).
Pay particular attention to opportunities to link to your own products in older posts—this can be a money spinner.
Do you regularly go back and interlink old posts?

8. Add an incentive to your email opt-in

Chris Garrett suggested this one on Google+ when I raised the topic of this post, and he’s a guy who has seen real benefit from doing it.
Chris offers a couple of ebooks when you subscribe to his list, and from what I can tell it significantly increase the opt-in rates to his lists. Of course, increased opt-ins can lead to many benefits over the life of your blog.
Have you incentivized your list subscription? Can you do it today?

What Are You Putting Off Doing Today that Could Significantly Improve Your Blog Tomorrow (And Beyond)?

Put Your Effort into it

Do you put off doing things on your blog that you know you really should invest time into?
I do.
Yesterday I was out walking and found myself thinking about my “I’ll do it one day” list. It struck me that there were a lot of things on that list, and that while some of them were just fanciful ideas, there are also items on the list that I know are potential profits that I’m just not earning.
One point on the list was updating the autoresponder sequence on my photography blog.
I’ve talked in the past about how I’ve structured my email strategy on my photography blog. It looks something like this:

For a full description of what all the elements are, have a look at this post. In short, people get weekly manually edited emails containing updates from the blog, along with a mix of bonus content (themed updates) and “promotions.”
The promotions are a mix of promotions of our own ebooks (discounted) as well as promotions of other people’s photography resources (affiliate promotions).
The weekly updates are all done manually but the “themed updates” and “promotions” are all done via an autoresponder. The autoresponder simply sends out these emails at predetermined intervals (around every 30 days). This means you’re doing mini-promotions every day, which creates long-term sustained income.
In many ways, when you add a promotional email into the sequence, you’re setting up a small passive income stream for as long as people keep subscribing to your newsletter.
The problem is that while I do have a number of these promotional emails in my sequence, I could have more. In fact, after you’ve been subscribed to my list for around 10 months the autoresponder sequence stops and you just get the weekly updates. Right now, more than 300,000 people have gone past that ten-month subscription duration—that’s a lot of people who I could be promoting quality products to.
So last night I decided to bite the bullet and create more emails for the autoresponder.
I added the first one last night—an affiliate promotion—and it’s already started to go out. All up the email probably took me a maximum of two hours to write and set up in Aweber.
The email will go out tonight to most of the people on the list on my list who’ve been long-term subscribers. It’ll then slow, to mail to just a few hundred people per day. As a result, we’ll see a nice big spike in sales tonight, and then it should slow down to a few sales per day.

Update (24 hours later)

The bulk of the list has now received the email, and we’ve had a good sales spike totalling around $14,000. Based upon open rates and sales generated, I estimate that, since long-term subscribers now have the email, this autoresponder should now generate around $50-$70 per day in income.
That’s not a massive amount when you think about it on a daily basis, but over a year it ads up to more than $18,000. Over the next five years, it’ll go past the six-figure mark—not bad for a single email, and a couple of hours’ work.

Key points

So the main points of this post are:

• Firstly, I wanted to highlight a strategy that lets those who have email lists generate a longer term income stream from those lists. Keep in mind, we have hundreds of thousands of people on our list, so the amounts we’re talking about here might mot be achievable on smaller lists. However, the strategy will be the same. A simple email you write today that goes out on a daily basis to a segment of your list can generate daily or weekly sales for you over the long haul. And that’s income that you don’t need to do much work for after setting up the initial email.
• The second reason for this post is to motivate those of you who, like me, like to put things in the “one day” basket. I could have created yesterday’s email 12 months ago. In that time I could have created 12 more of them that could already have been mailing to my list. Instead of an extra $50-$70 per day of income, those emails could have been generating 12 times that much for me by now.

So what are you putting off doing today that could be leading to a significant, long-term improvement to your blog and business?
Over the next two weeks, I’ll suggest something new each day that you could invest some time into, to generate this kind of long-term payoff (not all of them are financial payoffs). In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you’ve been putting off that you’re determined to get done now.