Can you make money with autoblogging

What is autoblogging and can you make money from it? That is the question posed by one of my readers. He also asked about why would someone sell an autoblog on Flippa given that it is 100% automated and you can make money from it?

Fortunately, I have a real experience in buying a autoblogging wordpress site to make money. As I mentioned in my post on buying websites to make money, investing into income producing web property is something I am very keen to do now. I bought this site in April this year and the site is:

http://guitaramplifiersreviews.com/

When I first bought it, it was doing well. Without any work, search traffic was increasing and earnings was great. See screenshots below for proof.

 Click the image to enlarge

In  May alone, I earned USD200 from Amazon. I was thinking to myself: wow, what a great buy. I paid 1k for it and it has already paid 20% back in the first month. 

Unfortunately, things don't turn out that well. One fine day, traffic suddenly dropped and I lost all my rankings. See the drop in traffic below:

 Click the image to enlarge

Why did it drop? I had no idea and that is the risk you will be taking if you want to create or buy an autoblog. Ultimately, there is no free lunch in the world. Without any effort, i don't think the site will sustain itself.  

How does autoblogging work

It is pretty easy to set up an autoblog. I looked through the site that I bought and it was basically a wordpress autoblogging plugin called wordpress robot doing the work. You just need to install this plugin, chose the keywords you want, the source of the content and the plugin will start to pull the feeds into your site. 

 Once that is done, you just need to give the site a few links to get it indexed and crawled. Over time, the accumulation of the content will draw in mountains of longtail traffic.  That is how my site manage to pull in nearly 400 visitors per day without actually ranking for any major keyword. 

To understand why this happen, you need to understand how black hats that started this whole autoblogging thing works. Most of these guys are coders. What they did is to build computing scripts and infrastructure that can let them scale up as many autoblogs as they want. They understand that most of these autoblogs will be gone but they don't care. They just make the money and with a touch of a button, create the next batch to replace those that might have suffered like mine. 

So, going back to the question of whether autoblogs make good investment, the answer is no. It is better you learn to create them in mass and make some short term cash. As to why they are being sold, I hope the answer is straight forward. They want to cash out because they know these type of blogs will not last. 

If you are interested to know more about my experience in buying websites for investment, my next post will talk about them in detail.