AdfLly/WordPress/Autoblog - Techtruth

Howdy all, I had Friday off and began putting some new life and direction into an idea I had over the weekend.


My original idea was to have a Wordpress blog which reposted google news articles. I have learned that this is called autoblogging, correct? I would then place banner or sidebar ads on the site and make money. ... well. that made me about a dollar. Probably because I was using a bad ad provider for the site, which went out of business last time I saw. I considered that the death of the project since I didn't want to lie to a bunch of 'real' online advertisers.

So, as I said, I had Friday off and wanted to modify my code a bit to use a different approach.

It occurred to me that having banner ads and such clutter up the screen real estate, especially for websites intended to be seen from a mobile browser (I'm into mobile, I think it's promising) so after seeing adfly on the forums I decided to use shortened links as ads. The clever bit is that all of my scraped content is "fair" in that it gives a route to the original article. I think that this isn't common practice, so I figured I would mention it.

Now, I use adfly to shorten the links to the source, and make the article image link to adfly - source.

What we have after the code runs is an article posted to wordpress that has been scraped from google news using a theme (keywords). An image is also scraped from google news using the article title and included as the main image of the post. The main image is enclosed in adfly that goes to the article source.


Code can be found at pastebin: 4M5MFDQ3


you will need to change a few things, and set up a MySQL database called proxies, with a table called proxy, and one column called ipAddress. Also, be sure to set your Wordpress username and password to post with inside the code. Your own adfly link needs to be inserted as well, unless you want to make me money. I intend to expose these things through command line flags, but that's a little later on for me. My apologies in general to whoever tries to make sense of this code. I promise a rewrite is coming soon, even for my own use.


The only thing that bothers me about the code is how I extract the article content from the sources. It's a nightmare of regex and string replacements that yield an ok output, but don't expect it to be perfect. That's next on my list of things to improve on this.


My question to the forum is has anyone had success with adfly or any other similar service? Does reposting news articles from google have the potential to supplement my beer fund? Is mobile-based web marketing all it's hyped up to be?

Note: Can mod please move this to Blogging or Journeys? I tried to work out why I was being told my post was spam and now I can't figure out how to delete this post to put it in the right place. lol sorry guys.

I spent the better part of the day cleaning up the code I posted above. Most notably, Proxies are now loaded from a file "proxy.txt" instead of having people mirror my database setup. The output is much clearer as well.

I have two domains up and using this script to post articles. I am using the site name and motto as the -s flag, which includes it as the alt attribute of the main image.

I will let you know how my adfly goes.

Here is the pastebin token for the code: q94Tqc3f

great share buddy, but if u can show us more precisely how to edit and upload the script? that would be great...i would also like to know, how u auto generate content from google news to ur blog?

To download the script, go to pastebin and enter the token I provided after the last slash in the URL. ... Or just message me on IRC and I'll give it to you.

As for how I get content, I just curl the news page from my script through a proxy. Google already collects the articles, I just copy them.

Back with an update.

I now have two websites geared towards mobile browsers. They are Wordpress blogs using my article scraper to collect google news articles and repost them adding an image (from google images) and an adfly link in the picture linking to the source article.

I also installed the newsletter plugin for wordpress, and so far 5 emails have been submitted in one day. To be honest they smell of fakeness... but whatever. haha

Traffic is at about 100 people per day, but I can't give meaningful numbers because it's only been up over the weekend. So far so good though. No one has clicked the images to trigger the ads though... I suspect a good number of the hits are robots sniffing about. 50 hits a day from china? ... yeah.

Back with an update.

Summary of Results:
Newsletter Subscribers 21
Traffic Last 24 Hours > 200 hits, Total > 500 hits
Redistributed Content Facebook Twitter Delicious

Question: Is there an advantage to using google twitter or Facebook shortened links to go to my web page? I make a shortened link with google for each post that I include in the Facebook and twitter posts... My idea is that if there is no advantage, I can change them to direct links after a few months and measure the impact of the real links being included, and how effective they are at driving traffic.

Created social network profiles for Facebook, twitter, and delicious. Then I used NextScript SNAP wp plugin to post all incoming Wordpress posts as posts on social network sites I just setup. Now all of my posts from wordpress go to Facebook as page posts, twitter as the title and URL of post on Wordpress, and delicious adds them as bookmarks. Basically this is an attempt to push as much of my domain name as possible into the relavent topics in my area. A lot more things for people to click on out there now. And I understand Facebook and twitter have their pagerank greased up and ready for them by google, so that things that appear on them "count" way more than other websites.

Before the changes above were made, I noticed some non-spammy looking addresses in my list. woo! (maybe) I am currently using single opt-in for the newsletter subscription, in the interest of collecting data, not so much a valuable list.

I do think that I will incorporate the auto-post to twitter/Facebook into my own code I am using to get the Wordpress articles found and posted. I wish there was a way to do it without the developers API. Getting cURL to do all that will be tricky... Not to mention I'm sure there are bunches of dances I must perform to appear like I'm not a crazy international traveler with my current proxy list. *sigh* maybe it's time to go private proxy... I would like to make more money before I invest in something that will cost about $20/mo.

Thanks for sticking with me. haha

back with an update. I recently picked out 5 keyword phrases for both autoblog websites. I used online tools like ubersuggest and the google keyword planner. I am using the yoast SEO Wordpress plugin to make the SEO a bit more simple, and so far it seems to do the trick.

Has anyone in the forum had success using the yoast plugin? Once the keywords were put in, I saw a huge boost in the websites PR for those searches. So with that I assume it does something right.

The newsletter subscriptions are growing every day, and so are the page views.

I have added a page for advertisements that is linked from the main menu. The idea is that these advertisements were approved and rated by the people who use the website. for example, if the autoblog was about cars, the menu link would say "Driving Tutorials" or some such thing. I went over to click bank and picked out the ads I thought would convert on the sites. Now more waiting.

looking around,nI think it would be more straightforward to look at clickbank ads and then make a website around the ads. Instead if making a website and putting ads on it, it may be better to get a set of related ads and make a website specifically designed to sell the ads... But that's for another thread.

All in all I have gotten about 40,000 hits. 700 Newsletter subscribers, and well, not that much at all actually from adfly. I didn't expect to make much, but the problem I had was that the API would give me errors. I can list them for those interested, but I think it was happening that most of my posts weren't getting links to adfly. But oh well.

Have been working on these autoblogs and other projects for some time. I've modified the output of the autoblog so that copyrights couldnt be claimed easily. Holy balls who knew so many people could be pissed about this. :-> All delt with, thus the modifications I am not spinning, only showing large excerpts to the public. No "publicly linked" page links to the full post page ever, so no regular user could see it. But google will eat it up in my sitemap, and achieve lessened but satisfactory ranking results. Google counts the number of internal links for a sites pages too It seems.

In an interesting experiment I shut off the blog updates to one website. The site was still up, but the content was not updated. Traffic went from about 110 a day to 60 or so, but has stuck at 60ish for the last week. I get the feeling they are robots.

Anyone still alive on this one?

techtruth said:

Note: Can mod please move this to Blogging or Journeys? I tried to work out why I was being told my post was spam and now I can't figure out how to delete this post to put it in the right place. lol sorry guys.

Click to expand...

PM a mod and I'm sure they'll be happy to move the thread. Journeys section seems the best.

Good luck with it, I hope it pans out for you

Your pastebin tokens aren't working.

Well, after 4 months of letting these guys run, I don't see that great of progress... I am getting continuous website hits but hardly any adfly hits. I did learn a good bit about targeting keywords and such but no profit it seems.

Altogether I have roughly 200,000 visitors for both websites combined, but only 1,000 adfly hits. Why aren't they clicking the title?!

I can say this journey is over, but I will keep the code for future use of course. Currently, I don't see any harm in letting these guys run for a while just to see what goes on.

I have moved to performing large scans of the internet.

For those who want the code, PM me and I will reply.