All it takes to trigger AutoBlogged's schedule is just one hit to your site every couple hours. I have never had a site that didn't at least get that. If you submit to plenty of search engines, you will always at least get hits from them. And once you add a post and ping all the relevant services you will be enough getting hits trickling in to trigger the next update.
Here's another secret about autoblogging: if you have trackbacks enabled you will always get hits from the sites you are pulling from. Plus, if you link to the original articles they will get hits referred from your site which results in them visiting back, kind of like how referrer spamming works.
In fact, AutoBlogged lets you set the referrer string when it uses when it visits the site to extract keywords.
So even my lamest autoblogs on the lamest topics never get less than 30 hits a day even when they are brand new. And I still can make decent money on those sites selling links.
Having said that, we did create an add-on (for registered customers) that allows you to use an external cron job to trigger updates.
