My autoblog story 2 months in

Hi all,
I am an experienced SEO and am currently working in London for a large agency, so I kind of know how things work. The issue is that I have been strictly 'best practice' for a long time now and not done any black hat stuff at all.

I decided to give autoblogging a go a few months ago, this is my story.

What I now have to date is approximately 15 Wordpress self hosted blogs, which I am hosting on a VPS based in the states. I also purchased many IP addresses (part of the same range) which each site sits on (only $1 p/m per IP).

The business model I am using in to using Wordpress Affiliate ***** to cloak links and automatically replicate keywords in the copy of my blog which sends them to /weightloss (for example) where that page would seem as though it's part of the site, but actually it will pull in data from the affiliate product I have chosen. I've got my hoplink embedded in there so any purchases will come to me.

I'm also using various other SEO tools and bits 'n pieces for automatic social media, blogging, link promotion.

I'm generating content from WP Robot (full package) which I bought at the outset. I'm pulling in content from a range of sources every 2 hours per blog. So a new blog piece will appear every 2 hours per site.

What I started off doing was using a re-writing service (which can also be automatic) to create 'unique' content, but it did not seem as though it was worth the money.

At present I'm getting about 30-40 hops p/d from all my sites, but not a single sale to date.

The products that I pick of Clickbank and often ones that have a good gravity but not too high for the market to be over saturated. I also try and stick to < $20 so that there is not a huge outlay for the buyer.

I was wondering what everyone thought of this model? I've been turned down from Ad Sense for a few times now and think that this is the easiest way of doing it. Unless there is a CPC advertiser out there where I do not have to approve each site that I place the ad code on..

What I need to know is...

Should I bother upscaling? I can create about 5-10 sites per day, so could be rocking on quite a few before long. The only issue is that I have already laid out about $300 + monthly hosting costs and I need to see a return.

It seems as though people clicking through to my affil pages, do not want to buy, it seems totally wrong. I've been checking this forum out like crazy to find something but nothing yet.

Here's one of my sites articlesaboutfacebookDOTcom

it seems like you're doing the right things in getting people to go to your CB product, but for some reason they don't buy. Maybe they think the cheap price means it's not a good product. Pick a little more expensive ones perhaps. Big prices make people think value

2 big problems:

1) Your costs are way out of control. You say: (only $1 p/m per IP). ... Only $1/month adds up to $120 per year! and you have hosting + domains + other crap taking your costs to almost 1,000+ a year. Thats not the wisest thing to do. If you had used our product costs would have only been ~$200 for the year and you could have accomplished 20 blogs with the same ammount of posting aka one post every 2 hours! + indexed would have happened with NO effort since these are web2.0 properties!

2) Try putting in some chitika + info links + amazon there on your blog.

3) You dint mention ANYTHING about keyword research and backlinks. I'd really recommend making sure that part is strong. Your main keyword: "articles about facebook" is not the kinda keywords you should work on... Look at the results on the first page.. do you really like you can take on the big newspapers? Go for micro niches with 4-5k searches a month..!

Thanks guys. The AFF was just a test. I totally agree about finding the right keyword etc..

I've actually got the following tools creating links for me as I don't want to have to do anything manually. Nada.

1. WPSynIT - Wordpress plugin that creates about 150 social links per post
2. Onlywire - Various accounts setup pushing to more social channels
3. No hands SEO - Always running in the background targeting core keywords
4. I did use Dripable for a little while but it was too expensive in the long run..

I'm using all kinds of SEO plugins that create cross links and relevant anchor text on pages.

Did you guys take a look at my site? Did you see that when you click through from a keyword in the copy it takes you to an affil page? There's no impressions on the order forms at all so people are bouncing right off.

I think it may be because I'm cloaking the CB URL to /product (for example). The page looks different and users may be wise to them actually being on a different site when it looks like they are not.

In any case I've got about 10-15 of these sites setup and am now getting about 100 hops per day, but still not a single sale. If I could get one sale, then I could narrow the band and tighten what I'm doing then roll out!

Thanks again

You picked a bad time for building autoblogs, google penalizes autoblogs all sites suffer.

Thanks but there's more to life than Google..