Evohosting

How To Create an Automated Blog using WordPress

Posted by: Tim M. // // August 5th, 2009 // WordPress

This post will provide you with detailed information about all of the plugins and services you will need to use to create a completely automated blog.  I’ve also provided information which is useful to every Wordpress blog owner, because it could help you SEOize your website.

There are a few reasons that you might want to create a completely automated blog: you’ve purchased a domain that you want to use later but you want to build up content until you’re ready to develop it fully; you want to build a site and sell it at some point; you want to build a network of blogs as part of your backlinking strategy.

Find a relevant domain name for SEO purposes

You can refer to our SEO guide to find a name.

Get Web Hosting

A starter hosting account will be fine for this, or you can use an Addon domain on your existing hosting plan.

Install Wordpress

Installing Wordpress with Evohosting is very easy

SEOize Wordpress URLs

This is a very important step!

Click (Settings > Permalinks)

In the box paste in: /%category%/%postname%/

This will generate very SEO friendly URLs, however, it will cause problems if you’re putting a post into multiple categories.

Install a Wordpress Theme

We’ve listed tons and tons (and tons) of Wordpress Themes on our blog.  Once you’ve found one you like, you need to install it. We’ve even written a tutorial on how to Install a new Wordpress Theme.

Install some plugins

Refer to the Installing Wordpress Plugins blog post on how to install a plugin. We will be using the following Wordpress Plugins:

• Akismet – This  checks your blog comments against spam lists and will auto-spam 95-100% of the bad ones.  It’s a pretty good plugin, but nothing is perfect! Note: Once installed, you need to activate Akismet via their website and get an API key.
• Auto Tags – This will automatically put in tags for posts.  It was written by Jonathan Foucher, and it is brilliant! This will be one of the key plugins you’re going to use because it will really drive traffic! Note: Once installed, you need to choose how many tags to automatically add and from which sources. Go to (Settings > Auto-Tags Plugin).  I’ve chosen to add 15 from each source.
• CommentLuv – This increases the amount of people who comment your blog because they can get a legitimate backlink on every comment they make.  I think this is key to having a popular blog, as, let’s face it, most people only comment on blogs to get a free backlink.
• Contextual Related Posts – This adds links to related posts at the bottom of every post, and it’s very good for driving traffic to other related articles. Note: No further configuration of this plugin is necessary.
• Do Follow – This removes the NoFollow attribute that Wordpress blogs have by default, and this will increase the amount of people who spam comment on your blog.
• Google XML SiteMaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, Bing etc.  Some minor configuration after installation is necessary, and you also need to tell Google about your sitemap (we’ll go into this at the very end of this post). We use this plugin to generate the SiteMap for our main site as well as the blog, and it is fantastic.
• Sociable – This adds social media icons to the bottom of every blog post so your visitors can ‘Digg’ you or add you to StumbleUpon (and others). Note: Once installed, you need to choose which icons you want on your post. Choose what you think are the more popular social media sites; don’t choose all of them as that will cause confusion.
• Tags 2 Meta Generator – This will convert your blog post’s tags into Meta tags, such as meta keywords (useful for SEO and driving visitors). Note: No further configuration of this plugin is necessary post installation.
• WP-o-Matic – This is the best free automatic RSS feed parsing WP Plugin that I can find; there are others, but they’re pretty expensive. WP-o-Matic does have some bugs and there has been a new version in the pipeline for ages, but the developer hasn’t released it yet; however, we can get around the bugs. Note: Pretty extensive configuration of this plugin is required post installation, but we’ll go into it in detail later.
  

Find RSS feeds to pull articles from.

Our next step is to configure WP-o-Matic, but there’s no point in doing that until you’ve found some news sources that you’re going to pull articles from.

There are several ways to do this — most blogs and news sites have their own RSS feeds, so go find them and you’re set. However, remember that pretty much all content on the web is copyrighted, so you might anger some people doing it this way. You will also need to experiment if you’re using other people’s RSS feeds as they often add their own name/URL into each post, their own Social Media icons, or even advertising. Lots of RSS feeds don’t include the full article, so you really want to experiment a lot to find the right RSS feeds (it took me a while!).

Another way to do it is to pay for your own RSS feed from a news site such as DirectNews or PureContent. This is legal, not too expensive, and pretty much hassle free.

Configure WP-o-Matic!

As I said, WP-o-Matic is a great plugin which parses RSS feeds and turns them into blog posts, however, the current version is buggy.  The main issue on Evohosting with WP-o-Matic is that I cannot for the life of me get the cron jobs to work automatically.  I initially gave up with it because of this, however, I have a workaround.

• Go to (Settings > WP-o-Matic)
• Click ‘Add Campaign’
• Choose a title for your group of feeds: Example: Holidays in Spain
• Choose a category slug: Example: holidays-in-spain
• Click the Feeds Tab
• Paste the URL of your feeds into the boxes
• Click the Categories Tab – This where you choose the category your posts will go to
• Click ‘Quick Add’ (At the bottom), as an example enter: Holidays In Spain
• Click the Rewrite Tab – This can rewrite words or phrases, you might want to use this extensively to ‘spin’ your content (make it different to the source), however this feature isn’t great so I haven’t bothered
• Click the Options Tab
• Change the ‘Frequency’ to: 0 D, 1 H, 0 M. This means WP-o-Matic will grab news stories from the feeds every hour.
• Tick the box for ‘Cache Images’, this should make WP-o-Matic download any images from the RSS feed, but a bug in stops this from working right now so you’ll be hotlinking, which is not great.
• Tick ‘Use Feed Date’, this will re-date your blog posts to the original date of the post (rather than the date that you parsed it using WP-o-Matic, thus blog posts will have their original posting date on by the original author)
• Skipping a couple of options now… On ‘Max Items to Create on each Fetch’ leave this as 10, if you set this to infinite you may cause CPU/Memory issues on the server while you’re picking up posts, this may lead to suspension.
• Now click ‘Submit’ at the top right

Now Click ‘Campaigns’ on the left, and you’ll see the campaign you just created. Give it a test by pressing the ‘Fetch’ button. It will wait around for a few seconds, but once the page refreshes you can visit your blog’s homepage and hopefully it will be populated!

Now, a problem with WP-o-Matic means I cannot get it to fetch the campaign automatically via cron. I gave up working out why as I don’t have the time — I did try every possible combination that I could think of, but it just ended up with me pulling my hair out.

My workaround for the WP-o-Matic Cron Job problem

Click on ‘Options’, and select and copy the ‘WebCron Ready URL’ into your copy buffer (CTRL-C on a PC).

Sign up for a free account at this website: SetCronJob — Once you’ve registered you can paste the ‘WebCron Ready URL’ from WP-o-Matic and set it to run once per hour. This will just run every hour and you can forget about it– by the way, it’s free!

Okay, so now you have a completely automated blog– got another hour or two to spend on this? Read on!

Further steps to increase your visitors

Tweet your blog posts!

• Create a Twitter user at http://twitter.com/
• Create a TwitterFeed account at http://twitterfeed.com/
• Tell TwitterFeed your blog’s RSS Feed (usually: http://domain.com/blog/feed/)
• Tell it how often to check (I set it to every hour)
• Login to Twitter, add a ton of people who have relevant interests to yours
• A lot of people you follow on Twitter will follow you back, and therefore see your blog posts, if your site is interesting then your follower list should naturally grow.

Ping Multiple Sites!

What is pinging? I’ll explain. Every time you post a blog, Wordpress will ‘ping’ a site and tell it that you’ve posted a new blog post. Why stop at pinging one place?

• Click (Settings > Writing)
• Scroll to the bottom to where it says: ‘Update Services’
• Paste in this list of places to ping:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/

http://zing.zingfast.com/

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping.php

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.britblog.com/

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://pingqueue.com/rpc/

http://ping.blogg.de/

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.wpkeys.com/

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://www.imblogs.net/ping/

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://www.zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php

http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/

http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php

http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php

http://www.catapings.com/ping.php

http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi

http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://www.catapings.com/ping.php

http://fgiasson.com/pings/ping.php

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

Tell Google About Your Website!

It is very important that you tell Google about your site. Sign up at Google Webmaster Tools and tell it the URL of your Sitemap which is generated by the XML SiteMaps Plugin for Wordpress. This will continue to be automatically rebuilt every day and Google will check it often too.

So that’s it… Now you can just leave your site for a few months to gain content and visitors, and then decide what to do with it later!

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