Recently, Gary wrote about an exercise whereby he’d take a brand new domain, install WordPress onto it and then proceed to post PLR articles onto it with the intention of building a website with some resale value in 3 months, whilst spending a minimal amount of time on it.
I like the sound of such a test so I’ve decided to run my own version of the experiment as it’s been a while since my last and it seems like something I can fire and forget about. Gary’s approach is to load articles into WordPress and use the future posting functionality in order to publish them in a drip-feed fashion. A disadvantage when using the built-in future posting feature is that ping services aren’t called when a blog post is published. A solution to this is to use pingfix.
My own approach to this will be to use RSS to Blog 4. I’ve already loaded 30 posts, consisting of PLR articles, into a ‘text pod’ (think of it as a stream of blog posts) and configured RSS to Blog 4 to automatically post every other day so there should be enough content to keep it fresh for 2 months.
There are many benefits of scheduling posts this way:
- It’s faster and less laborious than scheduling individual posts through WordPress.
- It’s easier to see what’s been scheduled to post.
- Ping services are notified without additional plugins.
- I can introduce posts from other streams or even use this one on other blogs.
- Link pods allow me to introduce keyword rich links into my posts to promote affiliate products or other websites.
- I can mix things up even more by introducing posts from RSS feeds.
To promote the website, I’m going to use the SimpleTags plugin to generate Technorati tags with each post and use some link directory submission software.
Over time, as the website becomes more established, I’ll think about monetising it in other ways e.g. Text Link Ads and affiliate programmes.
Technorati Tags: Monetising Blogs, Monetizing Blogs, RSS to Blog, Link Submission
Now why didn’t I think of using rss2b ? D’oh.
Heh! I though it was a conscious decision not to use it
The only ‘hard’ part I found in using it RSS to Blog was formatting the articles into the correct format. Michelle (of RSS to Blog) also offers an article formatter, but I’ve been able to use UltraEdit’s macro functionality to do it all for me.
I have purchased RSStoBlog, but I haven’t tested it yet on any domain. I don’t want to make such blogs for adsense but just to keep my client sites updated. So I can not take any risks till I am sure that such blogs don’t get penalized by Google. If you have any positive results please PM me. Thanks.
Although RSS to Blog can be used to gather content, in this case, my primary use for it is to automate the manual process of submitting PLR articles to a blog on a brand new domain. I’m probably not going to place any AdSense ads on the blog, but am looking to see if the domain can be developed into something marketable in its own right i.e. PageRank, well-established inbound links, decent ranking for targetted keywords.
Although it breaks away from the concept of minmising the amount of manual intervention, I may also post the occasional blog just to mix up the PLR content a bit.