How to Build a WordPress Autoblogging Website

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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 autoblogging website from scratch.
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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.

We recently decided to use our own WP RSS Aggregator plugin to build an autoblogging website to showcase the power of autoblogging in 2021. With our team being remote and travel being something we all love, we chose travel blogging as the website’s topic.

We then chose our domain name, purchased it along with a hosting plan, and started putting together the website. You can follow the whole process in the video below or keep reading below.

The Tools Used

All that’s needed to set up such a site is a small selection of plugins and an hour or two of work. The rest will take care of itself over time.

The Plugins

All that’s really needed is WP RSS Aggregator and its add-ons. In this project, we made use of the WP RSS Aggregator Pro Plan that combines a number of powerful features into a nicely discounted bundle.

It includes the Feed to Post functionality we’re after as well as other features including Filtering and Full Text. We’ll go into detail about these further down.

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We also implemented a few other plugins to help with other important areas of our website. Firstly, we needed the website to have backups available, to filter out spam content, and to update automatically whenever needed, so we made use of a few plugins.

These are Advanced Automatic Updates, Akismet and BlogVault. 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 across the website.

The Process

The first thing to do is to set up WP RSS Aggregator. After installing the Pro Plan‘s add-ons and activating their license keys, we started looking through the general settings available, setting an age limit of 6 months for all imported posts and setting it up to fetch new content every 12 hours.

travel-blogger-general-settings

Now, since the intention of this website isn’t to steal anyone’s content, we only want to import and display the first 150 words from each post. This will give the reader a taste of what the post is about and then link them to the original post on the feed source’s website. This guarantees that the author of the post gets the credit that they deserve.

A way of doing this is to use the Word Trimming feature in the general Feed to Post settings of WP RSS Aggregator. By setting it to Trim the Content at 150 words it will limit the content imported to just that amount, along with any images included within that part of the post.

Another way to also give as much credit as possible to the original author of the post is to use the plugin’s feature whereby it creates a new user for the author listed within the RSS feed. This ensures that he or she is given credit for the post immediately.

travel-blogger-word-trimming

Next up we started creating our first feed source. Below you can view the settings we used for the Alyona Travels blog as an example. After entering the RSS feed’s URL and choosing a few simple settings, we then created a new post category within the WordPress site specifically for this blog. This way, all imported posts for Alyona Travels can be located within one category, and they can be displayed individually should the need arise.

Apart from that we also wanted a way to link back to the original post at the very end of the 150 word limit, and this is where the Append to Content feature came in. By using the available placeholders we set up a message saying “Keep reading this article on {{feed_name}}”, where “this article” linked directly to the original post while “{{feed_name}}” displayed the title we set for the feed source and also linked directly to the feed source’s URL.

taverl-blogger-append

After setting the same author and word trimming features we mentioned earlier, all that was needed was to publish the feed source and fetch the first few available posts. Our blog now start being populated with content that was in turn being linked to its original source for further reading.

With this feed source as an example of what was needed we simply needed to add the rest of the feed sources and populate our site.

travel-blogger-feed-source

The End Result

Once all the feed sources were set up, along with the website’s about page and contact forms, the Travel Blogger Community website was up and running.

In just a short amount of time, we had set up a brand new website that provided our readers with a single source from where to find all the latest news from their favourite travel blogs.

travel-blogger-community-website

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Mark Zahra

Mark is the CEO behind the WP Mayor project. He has been using WordPress since 2012, joining the WP Mayor team in 2014. Since then, he has helped to review, test, and write about hundreds of WordPress products and services; educating the community of millions of WordPress users around the globe.

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25 Responses

  1. Hi Mark, Thanks for article learn a lot from it. Can you please write an article on how to SEO for autoblogging website.

      1. Some SEO-related posts for those looking into autoblogging and are concerned about the possible repercussions:

        – https://www.wprssaggregator.com/is-content-curation-good-for-seo/
        – https://www.wprssaggregator.com/duplicate-content-myths-content-curation/

  2. HI, this is an awesome read, however i wanna ask, can i import an RSS and still maintain the category of the imported RSS. my point is, i have several website i want to get rss feeds from, and am looking for a way to maintain the existing categories of all the Website am generating my RSS from. is that in anyway posssible

    1. Hey, yes you can. The Feed to Post taxonomy options include a setting called “Auto-create terms” which will import the existing categories from the RSS feed into your site along with the posts.

      You can find some more details here:

  3. Hi, we have a couple of FAQs dedicated to this topic here:

    https://kb.wprssaggregator.com/article/276-the-impact-of-imported-content-on-the-source-sites-seo

    https://kb.wprssaggregator.com/article/283-duplicate-content-and-search-engines

    1. It does not seem like there is a winner in either case. If I import content on my site, then the post may be penalized for duplicate content, and if I tell Google that this is a Canonical post, then I will not rank anyway, because Google ranks the original source.

      Even if I add original content to the post, and tell Google this is a canonical post, then I am just telling Google I am not the original source of the content.

      am I missing something?

      1. With aggregated or curated content, the idea would be that you become a go-to source for a specific market or niche, so importing content and leaving the site to do all the work will rarely be enough.

        I’d recommend adding your own original content alongside the imported articles and videos, promoting the site within the market or niche you’re focusing on, and winning over repeat visitors that way.

        The idea is not to import an article and have your version rank on Google, that would be stealing the content outright.

        You can potentially have your version rank on Google in another way – take the imported article, add your own view of what’s written in it (within the same post) before publishing, possibly only using parts of the original article that have value, and then it becomes a sort of a reaction or analysis of the original post.

        There’s a number of ways you can apply all this, so let me know if you’d like me to elaborate on any of them.

  4. Can I show “full posts” on my website from various different feeds without duplicate content issues?

    1. Hi Michael,

      We have an article dedicated to this topic here: https://www.wprssaggregator.com/duplicate-content-myths-content-curation/

  5. Hi – is it possible to only display a main image and excerpt, and then link to the original post, meaning to not import the posts?

    I’d like to make a site that only displays the main stories on a topic, gathered from various sources, and then refers to the original sources.

    1. Sure John, you just need to set your theme not to show the excerpts of each post in the blog page, then use the filter below to make the titles link directly to the original source. That way, no one visits a post directly on your site.

      https://kb.wprssaggregator.com/article/295-f2p-filter-make-post-titles-link-directly-to-the-original-article

  6. Hey. Any ideas on how to improve performance and maybe also auto-delete older posts and media?

    I believe the WP media gallery gets a lot of images really fast and becomes overpopulated.

    1. Hi Juan, WP RSS Aggregator gives you the ability to delete posts that are older than a certain period of time. For example, you can have all posts and their content deleted when they’re one week old, or even 6 months old. It’s a feature within the core plugin that also applies with all premium add-ons.

  7. One other thing; this plugin is made up of many different components,add ons, where as the customers would have been better served with one comprehensive plugin made up of all the “add ons” that must be purchased separately.

    1. Hey Don, thanks for the feedback! We separate our add-ons as that would make the plugin more expensive, and not everyone requires all the features 🙂

      For support please contact us on the link below and we’ll be more than happy to help!

      https://www.wprssaggregator.com/contact/

  8. When I first publish the feeds they are not immediately on the site, they show up in “recent post” but are not showing on the site unless I go to “recent post” and bring them up there.

    1. Hi Don, what do you mean by “feeds moved to the website after being published”? Care to give me an example please?

  9. Thanks for this! Very useful article as I’m in the process of creating my own blog. I definitely learned a lot and thanks for the recommendations!

  10. Mark, for now I just have the core-plugin set up. It generates a short list of just 5 posts at the bottom of my website homepage ). The same list is duplicated at a child page (/pump-business/) and then the full list of posts is available at another page (/pump-business/pump-news/). In the next few weeks I plan to create a newsletter that picks 5 or so of the most interesting reads generated by the feed and send those out as a weekly update (similar to The WhiP from WPMUDEV).

    Anyway, thanks for the great plugin!

    1. You’re welcome Jon, glad you like it! We’d love to see what you come up with once it’s ready 🙂

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