The following is based on some of my experiences with Twitter from building 2 different large-scale Twitter apps. One for a client and one for personal use. One of these is still running. The tips below can be applied to Twitter in general as well as WPTB specific applications. Some of the information below approaches the topic from a programmatic point of view to explain the cogs of the system. This will hopefully give you a good understanding of what to do and not do.

Firstly – WPTB doesn’t make any footprints that stand out from the sea of activity that Twitter gets everyday. The tweets made by WPTB look really good and non-spammy. The links go to your blog where there is relevant, related content. So long as you’re not trying to promote porn or pills then Twitter should be no problem for you.

That said – I don’t own Twitter and don’t control what they do. If you’re working at scale when autoblogging it’s inevitable that some accounts will get banned based purely on the numbers … BUT … I’ve only seen about 10-20 of my 1k WPTB test accounts go over the last 2/3 months. That’s a damn good percentage in my book.

What Gets You Banned From Twitter?

Lets work backwards. If we know what Twitter doesn’t like we can simply not do it. Here’s a list of factors that based on my experience help you to get the “account suspended” message:

1. Tweeting blatant spam or prohibited content
2. Getting reported by other users (probably because of #1)
3. Insane numbers of follows and/or unfollows
4. Mass account creation done wrong

That’s it. If you watch out for the above 4 points you’re going to make all your accounts last much, much longer.

What Doesn’t Get You Banned?

1. Mass tweeting
2. Mass account creation done right
3. Lots of tweets with links
4. Using different IP’s to post each time
5. Posting to multiple accounts from 1 IP (within reason)

Some of these may not be obvious but I’ve found that I don’t get banned using any and all of these 5 things.

So What Should You Do?

In any situation like this it’s about keeping a low profile and fitting in. The more things you can do that ordinary users do the more Twitter will leave you alone. So what are some of the patterns of a normal, active Twitter user?

They tweet a lot, use 3rd party scripts to tweet via the API, manage accounts with tools like TweetDeck etc. So basically they will be making lots of requests to Twitter from different IP addresses about a variety if subjects.

Twitter needs to make sure that they only ban accounts that they are 90%+ sure are spam. They can’t ban a ton of legitimate users – even if thier tweeting patterns look weird. This is where you’re able to fit in – the grey area.

9 times out of 10 when I investigate any Twitter ban the issue is incorrect account creation. This is the one area where Twitter can really crack down and eliminate accounts. It’s the one time when the account activity is most unlike that of a normal user. Once an account is up and running it’s harder for Twitter to automatically identify what they believe to be a “bad” account. With this in mind you should check out the short Q&A below and the checklist…

Do You Need Friends On Your Accounts?

Both having Twitter friends – and not having them have advantages. Obviolsy if you’ve got a bunch of friends then more people will see your tweets in their tweet streams and you may get more clicks. The other side of the coin is that with lots of friends (and auto-tweeting) you’ve only got a larger, more dedicated list of people to report you.

Ideally, lots of friends are great but you have to automate this in certain ways to avoid getting banned. The good news is that when you automate it correctly – you’re accounts get real people tweeting to them saying how great you are

Common Problems & Answers

1. All my accounts have been banned just hours or days after creation!!!
   When this happens it has a very clear cause. In 99% of cases this “early slap” means that the accounts weren’t created correctly and triggered some type of flag/filter with Twitter. If this happens you should go over the checklist to try and find out where the hole in your technique could be.
2. My accounts are vanishing at a steady rate, one by one
   Apart from Twitters aggressive checking applied to new accounts, the next best way to get banned is to have other users report your account. Enough of these reports and it seems like you’ll get auto-banned if the account is really crap. If the account is good then you might get a Twitter employee give your account a 3 second glance to decide if it’s spam of not. Slow and steady degredation of your accounts probably means that you’re getting reported by other users. Some solution to this are: make more posts without links; RT other users; slow down your posting rate.
3. Things have been going fine for months… then boom! I lost a ton of accounts!
   I’ve had this done to me a while ago during some testing and from what I can tell it’s just a case of being unluck. What I think happens is that one of your accounts gets reported enough to raise attention. Your account is then looked into by a reviewer and using various tool that they’ll have – try and find links between this account any any others. If they do – it’s bye bye time.

Twitter Check-list:

Here’s a list of questions (with explanations) that can serve as a checklist to make sure you’re doing things in the best possible way.
This is the future proof ultra-paranoid list for staying safe with Twitter…

1. Hosting: Are you on a shared server, VPS or dedicated?
   A shared host could have not only other users running WPTB, but other Twitter scripts as well. These may all be sharing that IP’s hourly API limit from Twitter – meaning you might not get much action because of others using the API. Ideally you would have 1 or more IP’s one one server to use for each batch of blogs but it’s not essential. The next best option is a cheap VPS with 1 IP that’s yours.
2. Number of Blogs: Have you got other blogs on this server running the plugin?
   Same type of principle as #1. The more requests going to Twitter from one IP address the more you gain attention. On a shared host you have little control over this but on a VPS for example you can run multiple blogs with WPTB fine – just remember not to overdo it. I can’t define “overdo it” for you as it depends on a lot of factors but I’ve run around 15 blogs from 1 IP before without problems.
3. Account Source: Where (or who) did you buy the accounts from – or did you create them yourself?
   This is important. Very important. The bottom line is that if you buy the accounts you’re never sure exactly how they’re made but if you make them yourself it (usually) takes time and proxies.
4. IP Diversity: When the accounts were created, was each one made form a different IP address?
   You really should not be creating more than one Twitter account – per IP address – per day. There are many reasons for this but all of them boil down to avoiding a ban. Think about this: If you buy some Twitter accounts do you really think the seller is going to do this when they could use the same proxy multiple times and make more money? Didn’t think so. This rule applies to your dedicated IP’s – but especially proxies as you never know who else has been talking to Twitter via that IP. One final point here: if you’re using public proxies Twitter can tell as anything less than an elite anonymous proxy sends extra stuff in the header identifying it as a proxy or even gogin away your info. Do you think Twitter is going to keep accounts active for long if they were registered by proxy?
5. Profile: Did each account have a profile image, custom background and bio text?
   With the aim of acting as “human” as we can – each account should have some changes made to it once it’s setup. I usually set everything up (background images, profile pic, random bio etc) and if I suspect that this works a bit like applying for a loan. The more information you give the bank (or Twitter) the more points you get. Get over a certain threshold and you’re golden.
6. Account Name: Please tell me you don’t use names like “superman58365″ or “bill_jones85″?
   Mass account creators do this – people don’t on Twitter. This is a transparent give-away sign that could blow everything for you. What you need is (ideally) not to be checking these names first with Twitter but finding unique names each time. Weird name combos do the trick without numbers. You can also query Google
7. Verified Email: Do you verify the Twitter email address soon after creating the account?
   Why do you think Twitter has started asking for (optional) email verification? To help identify more “bad” accounts. You need to act human so you must verify this email address. This also means that you need email addresses.
8. Starter Tweets: Did each account have several tweets posted to it shortly after it was created?
   What’s the first thing most people do when they get an account? It’s a tweet like “w00t!”, “Hello World!”, or “I just ate breakfast”. Make sure you add a couple of these after creating an account. It helps. Just makes absolutely sure that this “starer tweet” is NOT a duplicate across other account or you won’t last long.
9. Waiting Time: How long were the accounts left between creation, and loading into WTB?
   This dead-time between creating the account and starting to regularly tweet another sign that the account is not human. Account sellers will register a few thousand accounts ready to sell the shift them over a week or two. During this time the accounts have already (I presume) been marked in some way so that Twitter can do some deeper checking once anything happens on that account. It’s quite common to receive a batch of “good” account only to start using them and find they drop like flies. If you’ve done everything else (mostly) right – then the waiting period will explain this.
10. Tweet Diversity: Do your accounts tweet/follow each other? (bad)
    You’ve just got 100 accounts loaded up to promote a niche. They are in a tool (WPTB or something else) and stuff is happening. All is going well for a while then you get hit hard and loose most of them. This sucks – especially when most have 1-10k followers. The advice here is don’t intermingle your account if you can help it.

Summary: Put on your tin-foil hat, load up your elite proxies and get cracking because doing this manually is a time-sucking pain. I’ll make this point one last time: do you really think an account seller is going to go through all that to create a few accounts?

Solution: A “solution” to this (at least for me) would mean I could create a decent number of stable accounts each day and stay under the radar. I don’t want to build up an account for it to get nuked days later. Unfortunately, there isn’t such a solution right now – at least that I’m aware of. It’s currently a case of trying to find good sellers who do as much of it as possible, doing it manually or using a combination of software to each to a piece.

How Can WPTB Help?

There are a number of features planned to (hopefully) help you avoid even having to worry about all of the above. Here are some highlights…

• Organic Twitter account creator – builds accounts daily and ass them to WTB ready for tweeting.
• Enhanced Twitter account management including “filler” tweets and auto RT’ing of other users
• Possibly a built in proxy collector to power & automate this section.
• A couple of cool ideas that (if implemented) will mean you don’t even have to use proxies to create accounts.
• Automatic email verification of Twitter links.

If Twitter’s So Tough – What Do You Do For Traffic?

I’ll tell you something I didn’t want to mention – and I’ve even thought about changing the plugin name because of it. The plugin’s called “WP Tweet Bomb” so you would assume (and rightly so) that it’s main punch would be in it’s power with Twitter. With TweetGazette I’ve had awesome success with Twitter of course, but when I was building the plugin I supprised myself with this…

Whilst WPTB is pretty damn good with Twitter – it’s better with Google traffic. Here’s a screen shot from TweetGazette’s stats. It shows where all the traffic came from for the life of the site (it was setup with the plugin on 15th Nov, 2009):

It’s obvious that Google was the king daddy for traffic here. TweetGazette has got many thousands of pages indexed in Google (about 7k last check) and just recently the traffic has shot up to 2.5k uniques or more every day. The thing I find most interesting here is that on this domain I only actually used the plugin for 2 weeks in November and it’s been off since. The traffic has grown on it’s own.

If I had to I would pinpoint these 3 things as being the most beneficial to the traffic TG’s getting:

1. A very high post frequency with WPTB content
2. Professional WP theme
3. Smart collection of WP plugins

Those 3 were the main winners. There were extra features that did have positive effects like the Tweeting, the auto indexer feature and the “Instant Links” button in WPTB – but imo the best feature about this plugin is the autoblogger.

You can discuss any of this info in the forum.

Read this guide.

Buying Twitter Accounts

Here are some sources that other users and I have used with success. You should contact these people in person using the details below. Any deals you arrange are between you and them – WPTB has nothing to do with it. They are provided simply as a reference point

They are listed in no particular order. You may like to contact them all to test accounts from different sources.

Name: SeoWorks09 on WickedFire (or TwitterSeller on the support forum)
Pricing: See this thread
Email: rapiddealer {at} yahoo {dot} in
YM: rapiddealer
Skype: rapiddealer

Name: Leonid
Pricing: See here
Email: golansm {at} gmail {dot} com

Name: gfxsetup
Pricing: See this thread
Email: twitter {at} buildbacklinkscheap {dot} com
YM: gfxsetup
Skype: gfxs3tup
MSN: gfxsetup {at} hotmail {dot} com

If you sell Twitter accounts and want to be listed here then submit a support ticket and supply 100 demo accounts. Once I’ve checked they are of good quality I’ll post your info in the forum and list you here

This is one of the most frequently asked questions about WPTB. I’ll attempt to answer it here allowing for a variety of different situations…

The aim of your whole operation should be to generate as many pages as humanly possible – whilst staying under the radar. The more pages you have that more power you have. Pages = power.

How often you post will depend on several factors:

• What’s your hosting like?
  If you’re on shared hosting then posting less could be beneficial. Lots of other people on your IP could be hitting Twitter every second and it might not look good to post regularly if your tweeting each post.
• What Niche are you in?
  Some niche’s don’t have as much content being produced each day as others. Mega niche’s like weight loss will have an endless supply of content to be scraped – but “lizard farming” might not. You should try and post less if you’re in an obscure niche so you don’t exceed the amount of content being produced. If you’re in a mid-high scale niche then go crazy.
• How much traffic do you want?
  More posts equals more traffic. Ideally everyone would be posting 500 times each day – and Google would love it. The trick is to lower the posting level to one that’s sustainable (depending on the other points mentioned here.)
• Are you using proxies?
  This is mainly directed at the your (automated) tweeting habits. If you use proxies you can tweet more – simple as that. Just make surr not to use public proxies if at all possible as they are pretty rubbish (for many reasons.)

So how often should you post? I would start low and build it up until you feel you’ve hit the “sweet spot”.
If you’re unsure about where to start here are a few pointers:

• Posting 10 times per day is a solid place to start out. (run cron every 144 minutes)
• The most I’d recommend is around 500 daily posts. You may need proxies if you’re tweeting heavily at this rate. (run cron every 3 minutes)
• A good mid figure to pull some nice traffic is 50-100 daily posts. (run cron every 15-30 minutes)
• If you’re on shared hosting you probably shouldn’t post more than 50 times daily (go wild with a VPS or dedi)

REMEMBER: If you’re posting high volumes daily you should try and keep your tweets_per_post and follows_per_tweet to less than 3. You don’t want to be drawing attention to yourself when working at scale or getting nailed for duplicate tweets.

Quick Tip…

Get an idea for what a safe number of posts and tweets is by using the tweet safety calculator.

The point of this page is not to spark endless argument about the benefits of one plugin vs another. The point is to hopefully inform you about some cool new plugins that you don’t currently use – that will boost your autoblogging efforts. There are some really solid ones here that you may not have heard of

Before the list, here are 3 solid steps to a successful autoblog that these plugins will help you achieve:

1. As many pages as possible
2. As much traffic as possible (hopefully targeted)
3. As many clicks to your offers as possible.

Performance

• WP Super Cache
  Should be on all your blogs. Speeds them up massively.
• WP Minify
  This is currently broken with WP2.9 but it’s worth mentioning as it will rock once it’s fixed. It combines all your css and JS files into one – meaning users have to download less files from your server.
• TanTan S3
  If you’ve got an Amazon S3 account to store files online then this plugin integrates your account with WP. All images uploaded to WP are stored with Amazon. This helps takes some of the strain off the cpu and your bandwidth.

Autoblogging

• WP Tweet Bomb
  I can’t not mention this. Does too many things to mention in a couple of sentences. Should be the only “core” autoblogging plugin you need.

Admin

• Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu
  Gives the WP admin area of horizontal admin bar across the top of the page. This gives more space to what you’re doing and makes things neater.
• Redirection
  Useful if you need to redirect people from one place to another. Probably a bit like using a chainsaw to crack a nut, but it works.
• WP-DB-Backup
  Schedule daily or weekly backups of your entire autoblog’s database to be emailed to you. Can be a lifesaver.

SEO

• WP Tag Bot (coming soon)
  WPTB does this automatically but I’ve been wanting to make a (free) WP tagging plugin for a while. The alternatives are either broken, overly promotional or lacking features.
• KB Linker
  Once setup will link any keyword in blogs posts to a specified url. Great if you want to link to a specific affiliate each time “weight loss” is mentioned, for example.
• Platinum SEO Pack
  Some basic improvements here. The other big one in the “All in One SEO Pack”. Which ever you use – make SURE you UNCHECK any “no index” checkboxes. This is crazy – especially for an autoblog as the category pages (and sometimes tags pages) can be some of the most powerful on your site. Make sure they are indexed.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  Automatically rebuilds your site map regularly and pings Google, Ask, Yahoo and Bing.
• Global Translator
  This is good for 2 reasons. Firstly it lets people read your blog in different languages. Secondly – it multiplies your number of pages by something like 50. More pages is a good thing.
• WP 2 Ping.fm
  Looks interesting as it will update a bunch of services and accounts with each post. 2 downsides: you’ve got to create all the accounts yourself (although this can be outsourced) and you can’t do it in bulk.
• SEO Super Comments
  This is a damn fine plugin. Very simple as well. It just gives each comment on your blog it’s own page as well as being displayed in the normal place. This means more pages with content on.
• SEO Image
  Gives images nice alt tags and title attributes. Helps nicely for getting image traffic from Google.

Enhacement

• Lightbox Plus
  Will automatically link all in-post-images to a lightbox, which looks nice. Helps to give your autoblog a professional fell.
• WP Greet Box
  An in-post JavaScript popup asks your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. It trys to target th welcome message to the visitor’s referrer as well.
• Contact Form 7
  Depends on the autoblog, but sometimes you’ll want a contact form. If so – this is the one.
• Sexy Bookmarks
  Pretty cool (and now efficient) plugin that gives each post some sexy bookmark-this-post options.
• WP-Cumulus
  This is a widget that uses flash to render a floating ball of your tags or categories. Looks pretty cool and it just appears as a list of links to Google and friends.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
  Great for Google and better for readers. Adds a decent quality “Related Posts” block below each post.

Here’s the solution:

Caveat: This only works for web based cronjobs (which WPTB uses) and not all cronjobs. Anything that’s triggered through a url can use this script.

<?php
 
// WPTB Mass Cronjob Script
// http://wptweetbomb.com/strategy/fast-cron-job-setup
 
// How To Use This Script
//	Save this code as a PHP file. Something like "wptb_cron.php" will do.
//	Enter your WPTB cron urls below, one per line in the "$data" variable.
//	Upload it to your server. Any server, in any location.
//	Setup ONE cronjob to run this script on that same server.
 
 
$data = '
 
http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wptweetbomb/wtb_go.php
http://otherdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wptweetbomb/wtb_go.php
http://somedomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wptweetbomb/wtb_go.php
 
';
 
 
// Don't edit below here unless you feel like tweaking some code.
 
 
$urls = explode( "\n", trim($data) );
 
foreach( $urls as $url )
{
	get( $url );
}
 
function get( $url )
{
	$curl = curl_init();
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)" );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5", "Cache-Control: max-age=0", "Connection: keep-alive", "Keep-Alive: 300", "Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7", "Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5", "Pragma: ") );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "gzip,deflate" );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 1 );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, 1 );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1 );
	$html = curl_exec( $curl );
	curl_close( $curl );
	return $html;
}
 
?>

How To Use The Script

1. Save the code as a PHP file. Something like “wptb_cron.php” will do.
2. Enter your WPTB cron urls, one per line in the “$data” variable.
3. Upload it to your server. Any server, in any location.
4. Setup ONE cronjob to run this script on that same server.

You’re done. You now only have to change 1 cronjob and have it apply to all your blogs.
Each time the script runs it will trigger all the urls you’ve entered as part of the “$data” variable. Also this script will take one second per url to run. If you need more speed then make sure you’ve got cURL v.7.15.5+ and PHP v.5.2.3+ then change “CURLOPT_TIMEOUT” for “CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS” and it will go much faster.

I may bring something like this into the plugin in the future as well to help with bulk blog management.

“I would like to reach a goal of $100 a day, what do I need to do?”

- asked on the support forum by Rayche

I started writing a reply in the support forum but it got pretty long and I’m sure others would benefit from reading this, so it became a blog post. Here’s some pointers that should help you Rayche, as well as everyone else…

What’s This Guide?

Much of what this guide covers is beyond the scope of WPTB but after Rayche’s question I thought a few would find this helpful. The main purpose of the following is to point you in the right direction and get your cogs turning. It’s not the only way you can do things – it’s simply 1 outline in a sea of possible methods. You don’t have to follow it to the letter.

The one most important aspect is:  keep trying and you’ll get there. Get a clear picture of what you’re trying to do and keep it at the front of your mind. Every action you take should support this picture.

No One Cares

It may sound harsh, but the bottom line is that you’ve got to do everything yourself. No one else really cares about you, except you. This means you shouldn’t expect anyone to give away their whole strategy that makes them money for 2 main reasons. Firstly if they did more people would use it and reduce the effectiveness.

Secondly they have spent time, money and effort working out something that works – why would they share it for free? This isn’t directed at you Rayche, but more at others who expect the world for a few dollars. Treat this like a real business, which by the way you should be. How you expect to run this like a business, if you’re not a business?

What WPTB Does

It’s important to know this. It won’t make you breakfast, tuck you in at night or tell you the secrets of the universe. WPTB also isn’t designed to achieve SERPs for specific keywords. That’s simply not what it does. In essence, what WPTB does is “get niche traffic”. You point the blog’s theme in the right direction with more general keywords, and WPTB will use these to find specific content.

Of course, as with anything you need use use it correctly. If you buy a rifle to hunt deer and shoot yourself in the foot, is it your fault of the rifle’s? The point is: learn to use the rifle and you can drop an elephant.

First Step: 1 Domain

Pick 1 blog. Just one, on a unique domain. Ideally it will be on it’s own IP, but it’s not essential. If possible you should make sure the other residents of this IP aren’t too noisy so you get a clean slate to start with, but on shared hosting you can’t always do this. So the message here is to use a VPS if possible.

The reason you’re picking just one domain is so you can put all your energy into it. When you’re trying to nail down a core strategy you don’t want the admin hassles of trying to constantly make changes to lots of blogs. Pick 1 and stick with it until you reach your goal…

Define A Goal

You mentioned $100 daily, but you didn’t say (and I imagine you’re not too bothered) how many domains it takes to achieve this. You can do this with 1 domain or 1 thousand. Pick a figure you want before you start. It’s not really important as almost anything is achievable.

For this example lets say we have the goal of $100 daily across 10 sites – so $10 per site, per day. The advice given below is therefore tailored to this goal. The strategies and specific tactics you employ would be different for different goals. If you use common sense you can adapt these points for almost any other goal however.

Set A Starting Point

It’s going to take testing and tweaking to hit any given goal but you’ve got to start somewhere. The 2 fixed variables here are that you’re running WP and using WPTB. Everything else is variable and needs to be tweaked to align with your goal. So to begin with you need to take best guesses at the variable stuff. It’s not important what you choose for other stuff like the WP theme, monetization options, tweet settings etc.

The important thing is to keep it simple. If something like a plugin or theme doesn’t directly support your goal then don’t use it. Keep it brain-numbingly simple, as you can always add bells and whistles later once you’ve got the core strategy working.

What Niche?

Eventually you’ll want to sink your teeth into a large, competitive niche as that’s where the money is. I don’t necessarily mean a super niche (Casino, Porn, Pills etc) but one where there’s enough pie to go around. The more competition you’ve got, the more money there usually is.

Before that though you should always start with a very small niche. “Purple Lizard Farming” is the level you want to start at. By doing this you’ve got a much more flexible platform on which to experiment, make mistakes and tweak results. Plus it’s easier to rank. For the purposes of this first blog it doesn’t mater too much what niche you pick, but follow these guidelines:

1. Pick a small niche. “Small” is relative and subjective, but use your judgement.
2. Make sure there’s competition. Competitors mean there’s money.
3. Make sure there are affiliate programs in the niche. Check the SERPs, ClickBank, CJ etc.

Keywords & Content Blocks

With WPTB blogs I usually base a blog around a keyword. The homepage is optimized for the main niche keyword (like “Purple Lizard Farming”) then the content blocks will be other related or narrower keywords. The content blocks don’t all have to be stuff like “Purple Lizard Farming in TX”, “Online Purple Lizard Framing” etc. They can simply be related keywords if you like, for example “Blue Lizard Farming”, “How To Farm Lizards”.

I use the Google Keyword Tool to find keywords. You may have other favourite tools but here’s what I do, from keywords to content blocks…

1. Set the region to “All countries and Territories”
2. Enter the main niche keyword
3. Make sure “Use Synonyms” is checked
4. Sort the results by advertiser competition
5. Pick 10-50 money keywords. (i.e. keywords that are product related). I usually start with 10 and add more later. Also I manage this in 1 excel sheet with a separate tab for each blog.
6. All keywords need to be short. “Best Lizard Farm” is good, while “Best Lizard Farm in TX” would not be good. Remember you’re only directing the blog’s theme, not specifying the keywords you want to rank for. More general keywords have more content available.
7. Add them to the mass cat & content block creator. I sometimes use just 1 keyword (the exact same one) as the category name. Sometimes I add a few closely related ones. For example, if the content block is “Funky Lizard Farming” then I would enter the line like this:
   funky lizard farming # funky lizard farming
   Or sometimes like this…
   funky lizard farming # funky lizard farms, funky lizards farm, very funky lizard farm
   The reason I’ve recommended using tons of keywords in the past is that most people haven’t got the hang of using the keywords with WPTB. The aim isn’t to get ranked for these keywords – they are simply used to find content and ads. So keep them as general as you can whilst still maintaining the theme you want.

Monetization

Very important. There’s no point in burning through bandwidth, time & traffic without making sure you can squeeze some money from the visitors. This also means that you should have ways to monetize your traffic from day 1. Don’t get the site built up then do monetization – do it immediately.

Monetization is also very open ended. There’s so many ways to get cash from an autoblog with more arriving every day. I’ll mention a few here…

• Contextual Affiliate
  There’s an implementation of this included in the plugin as “Ad Blocks”. The benefit of using this is that you can have relevant ads next to content – when you can’t predict the exact keywords used in the content – or you don’t want to pre choose lots of ads. The CTR’s you get will be largely based on visual appearance. The images used and formatting of them is what will get clicks, assuming the images are at least semi-relevant to the content. WPTB comes with a selection of ad block formats built in (see the “premade template” link) but you can make your own if you know some basic html and css. The current WPTB version as of writing this is v1.5.9.1, and in future versions I’ll be adding more premade templates for you. I prefer this monetization option over AdSense, but you can always use AdSense as well.
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• AdSense
  It’s easy to use and provides relevant ads for almost any content… but it pays peanuts. It’s a valid option to generate revenue from your blogs but you will undoubtedly make more from a well placed affiliate ad. If you plan on using AdSense with an autoblog know that you’re treading on shaky ground. Best case scenario is that you get fat pay-checks and no problems. Worst case scenario is that someone discovers your autoblog, recognises it’s an autoblog and whines to Google, which may risk your account. The amount you can make here is in part dependant on your keywords. Big, competitive niche’s tend to have higher CPC’s so AdSense might not be a good match for your first blog.  I read a good quote recently (think it was Eli @ Blue Hat Seo)… “The day Google starts giving a damn about my business is the day I start caring about theirs”. That pretty much sums up my attitude when it comes to AdSense.
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• Link Selling
  You’ve probably overlooked this option, but it’s a valid one. I’ve found that when you use WPTB right some nice PR builds up. Now, normally I don’t bother with PR as it’s another one of Google’s magic veils to obscure what’s really going on. Really the only time to pay attention to PR is when you’re selling links. If you build a nice PR 3/4 blog then by selling sponsored posts and blogroll links you could pretty easy hit $10 per day per blog. Also because of the lag with PR updates (usually every quarter) you’ve got time to build more and sell more. The downside with this method is that it’s tough to sell links on a new blog, so you may want to use another method until the blogs accumulates some PR. You’ll get more money selling direct to end users, but it’s more automated going through a link broker/network. You should probably test both to see which fits with you.
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• Flipping
  What a blog sells for depends on many factors, but if it’s generating income through whatever means in an automated fashion then flipping is an option. You can even pretty easily flip blogs that don’t make anything – ones that just have a bunch of niche traffic for example. When flipping a blog like this making it look pretty helps a lot. That means smoothing off any rough edges on the blog, making sure you’re using a nice theme, a custom logo etc. To give you an idea of potential, if you’ve got a nice site that’s doing somewhere near the $10 a day goal then flipping it for $1-5k isn’t out of the question. If you pick an achievable mid point of around $3k then liquidating one of these blogs would produce the same income you would otherwise get in around a year. If you can build up these in 3-6 months then keep flipping them you’ve got a reasonable model right there.
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• Single Affiliate
  Pick 1 affiliate product. Make sure it’s a good product with a nice sales page, high payout etc. Where you choose the product from will depend on the niche. Clickbank doesn’t do much other than “make money”, ebooks, software and membership sites. The payouts can be pretty high, but so can the refunds. Amazon and CJ are good for commercial, physical product based blogs but the payout is lower than other options. You should pick 1 product/merchant and put a big ass banner on your blog. Ideally have it in the header so it’s on every page of your site. You can put similar banners to the same merchant in the sidebar, post content etc as well. The whole point of every page will be to get a click on this banner. To refine this strategy you can try getting your own banners made for the merchant to improve CTR’s. Using this method CTR’s of 10% may be average. Conversions will of course depend on the specific product.
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• Self Promotion
  Got a something to sell? Use autoblogs to syphon traffic to your main site, similar to the “Single Affiliate” option. As you’re both the merchant and publisher in this case it does give you extra flexibility as to how you promote our stuff. You can get traffic, but you can also grow autoblogs for links. Personally I don’t bother with this as the admin hassles of managing IP’s, domain registrations, link patterns and everything else is a pain.
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• Opt Ins
  You can put custom html in an adblock with WPTB, so you could simply use  an Aweber optin form. When you combine this with WPTB’s popup box option to display the form it can work nicely. If you’ve got a list for your own product or an auto responder packed with affiliate links then a bunch of autoblogs designed to build your list can pay off big time. Don’t overlook this option as you can kill it with this If you decide to run with this make sure to have 1 list per niche, then build a bunch of blogs each based around a relevant keyword for the niche. With 10 blogs each getting 10 optins daily you’re growing a list by 100 people daily. This is worth more than $100 a day to you as good email marketing works great. You can promote stuff many times to each person and the whole thing’s cumulative. Once you get a big list in a niche you’re set. A 20 part AR sequence, 1 every 3 days with good content and recommended affiliate links throughout will probably knock it out of the ball park for you. You can outsource the AR copy if you like, but make sure it’s good stuff. Another benefit of this method is you only really have 1 focal point – your list.

Tracking

You need to do this. Don’t ever skip this step as it’s one of the most important things you can do. This guide isn’t about tracking systems so you’ll need to do your own research – there’s lots of info out there. Without tracking you’ll never know what’s working and what’s not. You’ll just be wondering blindly through the darkness like so many others. The key metrics you want to be tracking (daily, per blog) are…

• Overall unique visitors
• Breakdown of most popular pages by unique visits
• Search keywords used to find your site, broken down by page
• Impressions, Clicks & CTR for each item that makes you money
• Search keywords that visitors who clicked on your banners/ads used
• Conversion rate of the offer/product
• Keyword the converting visitor originally used to find your site

The above should give you a good starting point but there may be other things you need/want to track as well. You basically need to know exactly what’s working so you can improve on it, and probably more importantly – you need to be able to cut the dead wood.

WP Template

The template you use depends on your monetization strategy. If you’re aiming for click-throughs choose a very plain theme. Lots of white, lots of space, simple black text. When doing this you want your banner/offer to be the most visible and colourful thing on the page. It should also be the only interesting element on the page.

If you’re flipping a site you want it pretty. Pick a theme that’s well designed, with strong colours and get a custom logo done. Use some sexy widgets and flashy plugins. Make it look like something worth owning. Woo Themes do some great ones – I’m using one on this site in fact.

The comments about a “pretty” site also apply to vanilla autoblogging using AdSense or contextual affiliate stuff. You want it to look like a “real” blog so it doesn’t attract negative attention. You may have to balance the plain style (for click throughs) and the sexyness of the theme.

On-Site SEO

Most people should already know this, but I’ll mention it briefly. Kind of linked to the WP template you choose as well. Make sure keyword rich titles are H1 tags, that HTML titles are enticing and contain keywords etc. Use H2 and H3′s for bonus points. Get around 500 words of relevant text on each page and use the DeDuper to help posts stick in the index.

Don’t concern yourself with nofollow or JS links for most purposes. We want Google to crawl and index your site in this case.

Plugins

See here for plugins to use for autoblogging. You don’t have to use all of them (in fact you defiantly shouldn’t). Try and pick out ones that support your overall strategy. If something doesn’t add to your goal then don’t use it as more plugins = more bloat. If there’s just one I’d say is mandatory it’s WP Super Cache. Stuff to help automate SEO is always tasty as well.

Tweeting

The whole tweeting angle in WPTB serves 2 purposes. Firstly it gets you a small boost of Twitter traffic which is nice. These guys can be tough to convert so if you’re basing a strategy around Twitter traffic promote general offers/products or “get more follower” software.

The second reason to tweet posts with WPTB is more important. It’s to get links to your posts. Each post will have multiple external links pointing to it immediatly. This won’t really help you get ranked – it’s to get the spiders moving through your site. The search engine siders will come crawling, which is the first step towards getting indexed. Also the Twitter scrapers will come and steal your content – and some of them will link back, which is nice.

Links

There are 2 ways to play this. If you’re going for some specific rankings in conjunction with WPTB (even though this isn’t WPTB’s speciality) then you’ll want to do the usual – get focused anchor text from other sites. You’ll be pointing these links to separate (non WPTB), seo optimized pages. Don’t worry about nofollow by the way

The other way to do it, which is more in-line with WPTB is to simply create some link noise. By creating more entry points into your blog you’ll get indexed quicker and some of the mystical green pixels (aka PageRank) will appear as well. Good stuff to do here would be directory links, blog comments, RSS subs, the “Instant Links” feature in WPTB etc. If you include links to other blogs in your post content you’ll get some natural pingbacks as well. Also when you tweet each post the Twitter scrapes will help to promote your content through tweet search sites/aggregators. Stay away from Xrumer and similar power linking tools for new sites (or at least go very slow).

Whatever you do – make sure you get some type of external links to your site for best results.

Do More of What Works

I would have said “testing” but lots of people seem to be scared of that word, so simply “do more of what works”. If something doesn’t work try something else – but only after going deep and exploring the idea all you can. Once you find a particular tactic or strategy that works it’s important that you do 2 things. Firstly – don’t tell anyone. Don’t even speak it aloud as things that work have a habit of spreading quickly. You’re not safeguarding an occult secret, but you don’t want to take any chances either.  Secondly make sure you do more of it. Expand on the idea with your first site until the ROI has been raised as high as you can get it.

If you’ve tried various things and you’re still not hitting the goal of $10 a day then guess what you need to do? Right, more of the above

Setup Blog No.2

Do everything again for a second blog. At this stage you don’t want to scale to 100 blogs. You shouldn’t even try that yet as you don’t know if this strategy of yours will scale across niche’s. Don’t try to mass scale the idea until you’ve setup 5-10 sites yourself. This will help ensure that the idea is rock solid and will work in different niche’s. It will also give you a very good picture of all the processes involved so you’ll actually know what you need to automate/outsource. You don’t get this complete picture by just doing a couple of blogs.

The other way of looking at this is that 1 niche is all you need to know. By building lots of blogs in the same niche you start to build leverage which is key. What you can do is do your first site in a small niche, then try multiple larger ones. Find one that you like (and one you can generate revenue from) and start to cut a larger slice of the pie for yourself by building more blogs.

Then there’s 1 thing left to do…

Scale

This is last for a reason. Don’t run before you can walk. At this point you should have about 10 hand build blogs each making $10+ per day and you know the exact steps, plugins, themes etc that work for you. Now things get fun as you can do less and make more.

There’s only so much 1 person can handle and if you want to build a substantial asset you may have to hire people. If you’re in the West then outsource to the East. If you’re in the East then you have an advantage as the cost of living is usually lower and you’ll be generating dollars, so hire people in your location.

Before doing any of this make sure to write down the steps you go through to create a successful blog. Then give different tasks to different people. The last thing you want is an entrepreneurial employee duplicating your efforts

By the way, I’ll be making more posts like this on the blog soon. If you want something specific addressed let me know in the forum. Any comments use the form below…

1. Auto Unique Content
   There’s now an checkbox in your admin panel to “DeDupe” all content that’s posted. What this does is swap a random amount of stop words for their html unicode equivalents. For example, “of” would become “and”. This means that the page is now more relevant to it’s core keywords and some fluff has been removed and more importantly the code of the content is now unique compared with where it has been taken from. Google likes this.
2. Auto Follow Feature
   You can now choose to automatically add friends to each Twitter account after they tweet. This is really nice as it will boost the effectiveness of the whole site. It’s obvious that you will get more traffic and better CTR’s from people who are following your Twitter account than just from public search’s. By adding friends to each Twitter account they will naturally get followers back – getting you more traffic.

Any questions about the update email me or comment here.

I was just about finished putting together the first forum posts for the launch when I checked the bit.ly stats and it’s got 529 clicks already!

It will be interesting to see what the average daily number of uniques is once this has been running for a few days.