How to Set Up an Autoblogging Website
This is a preview of a tutorial posted on WP Mayor. Read the full tutorial on WP Mayor.
The Idea
Autoblogging is a way of setting up a website whose blog is taken care of automatically, constantly updated with fresh, curated and quality content of your choice. It can also be an opportunity to make use of affiliate marketing and earn some extra cash every month.
As a way of showcasing the power of WP RSS Aggregator, we decided to do just that; we set up an auto blogging website from scratch. With ours being a remote team and our very own Alyona already running a travel blog over at Alyona Travels, we chose travel as the website’s topic and put together a long list of travel bloggers from around the world.
Once this was ready we chose our domain name, purchased it along with a hosting plan, and started putting together the website. Follow the whole process in the video below or keep reading.
The Tools Used
All that’s needed to set up such a site is a clean WordPress install, a theme, a small selection of plugins and a few hours of work. The rest would take care of itself over time.
The Theme
For this project, we used the Gather premium theme from DevPress. We chose a premium theme since we had it handy and it fits the bill for the look we were going for, however, you’re free to use any free WordPress blogging theme, and there are plenty of great ones.
The Plugins
First, we needed the website to have backups available, a spam filtering tool, and a means to automatically update whenever needed. So we made use of a few plugins to achieve these functions. These are Advanced Automatic Updates, Akismet and BackupBuddy. The latter is the only premium plugin, however, you can make use of a free alternative instead. We also set up Jetpack to keep track of the published posts, and Ninja Forms to handle the contact forms on the website.
Apart from those, all that’s needed is WP RSS Aggregator and its add-ons. Here we made use of the add-ons available as part of the Pro Plan, however, you can achieve something very similar with only the Feed to Post add-on.
The Process
Before getting started with the importing of posts, we set up the basic requirements for the website. We changed the general settings, customized the theme from its settings, and set up Jetpack to monitor the statistics as well as BackupBuddy to keep automatic backups.
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