Building Your First Website: Day 22

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Adding Content to Your Blog … Automatically.

I’m writing this post on Saturday afternoon, January 24.  Last night at around 1 in the morning, I added an automatic content feature to Laura’s blog.

The content comes from articles delivered by Article Marketing Automation.  As a blog publisher, you can sign up for free.  There is also an article marketing feature that is well worth the expense.  Learn how to get a discounted marketing membership here.

NOTE: Before getting your content, go to your blog’s administration area and click the “Writing” link under Settings and make sure that your Atom Publishing Protocol and XML-RPC modes are activated.  I have purposely not done this at the beginning of the post so that you can see the potential error code that you’ll get if you do not do so.  There’s a screen shot about how to enable these modes later in this post.

If you have a blog and have not signed up for the free version of Article Marketing Automation (“AMA”), you can do it here.

Once you have your account, log in and you will see a welcome screen such as the one pictured below.

To receive content to your blog, you will want to click the very top link, “Manage My Sites.”  If you don’t have any blogs added to the AMA system, you’ll be taken to an “Add a New Remote Site” page.  Add your blog’s URL, as shown.

After you click continue, you’ll be taken to a page of categories.   There are dozens of main and subcategories of articles that you can receive.  You can select as many as you wish. To select more than one category, hold your control key down as you click on the categories and subcategories that you want.

After you select your categories, farther down the page you’ll see the options below (I’ve taken out the password information).

When filling out the information shown in the above screen shot:

• You might want to specify the keywords (you’ll see why later in this post).
• To avoid duplicate content on the blog, you might want to auto-reject the articles that are rewritten less than 30%.
  

In this example, I did not enable the remote publishing protocols on Laura’s blog.  When they are not enabled, you will get an error that looks something like this:

To correct the error, log on to the administration portion of your blog and click the “Writing” link under “Settings.”  Scroll down to the remote publishing section and check both boxes as shown.

In your AMA membership, your next step is to “map categories.”  Had you already enabled your remote publishing protocals, you would be able to map the categories immediately.

By mapping the categories, you are assigning the articles that you are receiving to a category or categories in your blog.  In Laura’s blog, we’re going to send all of the incoming articles to her “Other Writers Weigh In” categories of her blog.

Click “Save” and you’re done!  You’ll now start receiving fresh content to your blog.  You need to leave the incoming content “as is.”  Do not remove the links because you’ll be violating your AMA terms of service.

Why Specifying Keywords Might Be Necessary.

Once you have registered your blog with AMA, you’ll start receiving articles right away.  Two came in to Laura’s blog within minutes.  Unfortunately, even though we opted to receive articles about eating disorders, obesity and weight loss, the articles that came in were not on target and not a good match to Laura’s blog.  The first was about how to gain weight; another about constipation came in.

I went back into Laura’s AMA administration area and clicked “edit” to solve this problem.

You’ll recognize the screen that shows up when “edit” is selected.  To make sure that relevant content is received in the future, I added keywords that are very specific to Laura’s blog.

Another Look at the Statistics.

In yesterday’s post, I had taken a snap shot of Laura’s site statistics shortly before midnight my time.  About an hour later, I took the following screen shots which occurred after we made our first post.

Within an hour, Laura received four additional unique visitors.

Google and Yahoo’s search engine bots, as well as a couple others, have visited the site.

This concludes the “how to build a website” series.  I’ll have more articles showing how to handle blog posts, as well as how to use PLR content in your blog.

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Yesterday:  How to Publish a Basic Wordpress Blog Post – How to Add Links; How to Add Images.