If you are in the internet marketing industry, this topic always raises hell. Automatic blogging, is a blog set up to parse and re-post RSS feeds. A script will extract a summary of a post, and provide a link back to the source. The auto blog does this in hopes of driving traffic from Google. The most common scripts for auto blogging run about $50.

With the traffic from search engines, the auto blog owner attempts to lure the visitor to the ads or an affiliate banner for a related niche. This will generate money for the auto blogger.

Here are the topics people start asking questions about

1. Is this ethical? You are taking an excerpt of text from an author’s post, re-posting it on your site, and linking back. This could be free promotion, or lost profits for the author.
2. It is profitable? I would have to go with, YES. Lets figure this out. A beginner hosting account with 1&1 internet, with a domain included is $3.99 a month. This equates to about $48 a year. at $0.13 a day, its easy to cover this cost with AdSense or similar ad networks.
3. Its this spam? This is up in the air for how you interpret what “spam” means. Some auto blogs are so covered in ads you can even read the short excerpt for the post. In my opinion that is a spammy site.

Please leave a comment if you run auto blogs and let us know what scripts you use and how it has worked out for you.

Typical auto-blogged post, note the link to the original source