The Automated Website
With everything set up, you should now have a boring, basic, and empty WordPress blog site. We will now be transforming this site into an automated website that we can then sell for $100 - $300. This automated website will function as a “hands-free” content website which will update on its own. This is perfect for buyers who want to make money online through advertisements and affiliate links such as Adsense, Amazon, display advertisements, Clickbank, and more. As stated in the introduction and throughout this book, these sites are attractive to buyers because they will always be producing new content without any work so that the buyer can focus all of his/her attention towards promoting the website. To begin creating your first automated website you will be needing two things: A content WordPress template and an automatic content scraper.
Automatic Content Scrapers
The first thing we will cover is the automatic content scrapers. WP Robot is the first and most popular option, with an affordable yearly payment plan of $99 for 3 websites. However, there are cheaper options out there such as the “Wordpress Automatic” or “WP Automatic” plugin offered on the “Envato – Code Canyon” market, which comes in at $27 per site. This is the plugin I have the most experience with as it is easy to install and use, gets the job done, comes at a reasonable price, and does not require a lot of tampering with the code. If you manage to grow this business and find yourself selling many of these automated websites, I would suggest going for a larger plan with WP Robot. There is also another paid plugin called “WPeMatico Pro” for one hundred websites for only $128. However, I do not recommend this plugin regardless of the great price as it is very limited in its capabilities and from my experience, is not as good as the other plugins I have discussed. You can also opt-in for the free “WPeMatico” version although I discourage it because your site may not sell as well because of the limitations and links to WPeMatico displayed at the end of its content.
Note the three automatic content scraper plugins I have covered are the most popular, easiest to use, and most newbie-friendly ones I have had experience with. It’s important that these plugins are newbie-friendly and do not require much of a background in HTML because you may have to teach how to use the plugin to your buyer. As stated before, I recommend and have the most experience in the “WP Automatic” automatic content scraper plugin. Therefore, I will be teaching you how to use this plugin only. If you decide on a different plugin than me, the process of setting up the plugin and site may differ slightly, but the underlying process should be the same.
WordPress Automatic
If you haven’t already, go to CodeCanyon.net and search for “WP Automatic” or just click on the given link. Purchase and download the $27 plugin. You can download the plugin by being logged in, selecting your profile, and going to the “Downloads” option. Make sure to download “All files and documentations” AND the “License certificate and purchase code.” Once this is done, go back to your WordPress dashboard (http://domain.com/wp-admin) and on the left bar select “Plugins.” Select “Add New” and then choose “Upload Plugin.” Find where you downloaded the .zip “WP Automatic” plugin and click on “Install Now.” After a successful upload, select “Plugins” again and Activate this plugin by clicking on the small blue “Activate” link under the plugin name. You can also just activate it immediately once it is installed. Now you should see WP Automatic in the left navigation bar on your WordPress dashboard. Select “Settings” for WP Automatic. You will now need to open the “License certificate and purchase code” (PDF or text file) you downloaded previously and copy the “Item Purchase Code” found in the PDF or text file and paste it into the “Purchase code” box under the “License” box in WP Automatic’s settings. This is the same process you would generally take when you install a plugin or theme from a site other than WordPress.
RSS Feeds
Hopefully, by now WP Automatic is successfully installed onto your WordPress site. You should now start creating your first campaign! Before we do that, however, we will need to find a relevant “RSS feed” that you can use for your entire website. Wikipedia explains what an “RSS feed” is rather clearly.
“RSS is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator.”
WP Automatic is capable of scrapping or crawling many different types of sites, but for the sake of simplicity, I will cover the popular RSS feed. You will need to ensure that your RSS feeds can be completely extracted and that it is in English. For example, if you have a news-oriented website, you can use news websites such as ABC News for your automatic content scraper. Simply Google Search [Organization/Company Name] + “RSS feed” and you should be able to find their RSS feeds. ABC News, in particular, has everything sorted by category. This enables me to create campaigns in different categories so that I will have up to date news in different categories all at the same time. Personally, I would suggest creating separate campaigns for every category or RSS feed link so that WP Automatic will crawl everything. Don’t worry if this is confusing, I will go into more detail now!
As I just stated, you will want to create categories for the RSS Feeds that you’ll gather. Going back to ABC News, you may want to have a lot of different types of RSS Feeds. For example, you may have the following category names: “US News”, “Sports”, “World News”, “Politics”, “Finance”, and so on. To create a category, go back to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to “Posts” and then to “Categories” on the left side of your dashboard. Type in the appropriate category name and slug name (should be identical) and click on “Add New Category.” You should do this for every possible category you want to include on your website. I usually have a minimum of seven categories. Now that you have WP Automatic setup, the next post will go over creating your campaign, WordPress themes, and logo designing for your automatic websites.