If you are interested in earning extra income by selling AutoBlogged, we have now launched our affiliate program.

All you need to do to get started is sign up to become an affiliate, and place our ad code onto your website. When a person clicks on the ads from your site and purchases a copy of AutoBlogged, you earn 20% of the sale. All commissions will be paid via Paypal fifteen days after the end of the month.

To help you promote AutoBlogged, we have a number of banners available. Feel free to download these or to link directly to these images on our servers.

468 x 60 Banners

125 x 125 Square Button

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…

Tags: advertising affiliate program autoblog banners monetize

What is a single site license?

A single site license means that you can use AutoBlogged with one web site for one domain. Multiple copies can be used in subdirectories of a web site but not with a subdomain. In other words you can install AutoBlogged at www.example.com and www.example.com/support but not at support.example.com.

What is a multi-site license?

A multi-site license means that you can install AutoBlogged on up to fifty different sites. It is equivalent to ten single site licenses and the definition of a site follows the definition of a single site license.

What is a developer’s license?

A developer license means that you can install AutoBlogged on as many sites as you wish and you can resell those sites as long as AutoBlogged is part of the functionality of the site. The purchaser of the site will have the equivalent of a single site license. When you own a developer’s license, your support requests are always tagged as Urgent,  you can contact us via instant messenger, and your feature requests always get the highest priority.

Can I resell my AutoBlogged license?

You may sell your license if you transfer all rights to that license to the purchaser. You will no longer be the owner of the license and can no longer use the software. When you sell your license, you must contact us to transfer ownership and issue a new serial number to the purchaser.

Can I become an AutoBlogged reseller?

We do not have a reseller program, but if you own a developer’s license you may resell a web site that uses AutoBlogged as part of the functionality of the site. You can also join our affiliate program and earn 20% from every sale.

I bought your script from someone else in a forum or message board, is my license valid?

Your license is only valid if you received a license transfer confirmation and a new serial number from autoblogged.com. Unfortunately, if you did not receive a license transfer, your license is not valid.

If I buy a single site license or multi-site license, can I later upgrade to a higher license level?

You may upgrade your license at any time. If you wish to do so, please send your request including your serial number to support@autoblogged.com and we will give you an upgrade coupon code.

Can I get a demo copy of AutoBlogged?

We do not offer demo copies, but we do have a 30-day money back guarantee if you are not happy. You may also want to browse our screenshots to get a feel for what it does.

What is your upgrade policy?

When you purchase AutoBlogged you get all minor version upgrades for free. For example, if you purchase version 2.o, you will get 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. for free. When we come out with a major version you can upgrade to that version for a modest upgrade fee.

Do I get technical support with my purchase?

Yes, we do provide free technical support via e-mail and our support forums. Our primary support hours are 9am to 5pm MST (GMT-0700) Monday through Friday. Support is available after hours, on weekends, and on US holidays but expect a longer response delay during these times.

What is a single site license?

A single site license means that you can use AutoBlogged with one web site for one domain. Multiple copies can be used in subdirectories of a web site but not with a subdomain. In other words you can install AutoBlogged at www.example.com and www.example.com/support but not at support.example.com.

What is a multi-site license?

A multi-site license means that you can install AutoBlogged on up to fifty different sites that you own. It is equivalent to fifty single site licenses and the definition of a site follows the definition of a single site license.

What is a developer’s license?

A developer license means that you can install AutoBlogged on as many sites as you wish and you can resell those sites as long as AutoBlogged is part of the functionality of the site. The purchaser of the site will have the equivalent of a single site license. When you own a developer’s license, your support requests are always tagged as Urgent,  you can contact us via instant messenger, and your feature requests always get the highest priority.

Can I resell my AutoBlogged license?

You may sell your license if you transfer all rights to that license to the purchaser. You will no longer be the owner of the license and can no longer use the software. When you sell your license, you must contact us to transfer ownership and issue a new serial number to the purchaser.

Can I become an AutoBlogged reseller?

We do not have a reseller program, but if you own a developer’s license you may resell a web site that uses AutoBlogged as part of the functionality of the site. You can also join our affiliate program and earn 20% from every sale.

I bought your script from someone else in a forum or message board, is my license valid?

Your license is only valid if you received a license transfer confirmation and a new serial number from autoblogged.com. Unfortunately, if you did not receive a license transfer, your license is not valid.

If I buy a single site license or multi-site license, can I later upgrade to a higher license level?

You may upgrade your license at any time. If you wish to do so, please send your request including your serial number to support@autoblogged.com and we will give you an upgrade coupon code.

Can I get a demo copy of AutoBlogged?

We do not offer demo copies, but we do have a 30-day money back guarantee if you are not happy. You may also want to browse our screenshots to get a feel for what it does.

What is your upgrade policy?

When you purchase AutoBlogged you get all minor version upgrades for free. For example, if you purchase version 2.o, you will get 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. for free. When we come out with a major version you can upgrade to that version for a modest upgrade fee.

Do I get technical support with my purchase?

Yes, we do provide free technical support via e-mail and our support forums. Our primary support hours are 9am to 5pm MST (GMT-0700) Monday through Friday. Support is available after hours, on weekends, and on US holidays but expect a longer response delay during these times.

Autoblogging is the term we use to automatically create content for blogs, as opposed to manually writing individual posts. In the case of AutoBlogged, you can create posts based on the contents of another RSS feed. Since you can get RSS feeds on just about anything, you can easily find content to automatically add to your WordPress blog. For example, you could get a feed from Google Blog Search that returns articles written by other bloggers on a particular topic. These articles will appear on your blog as short excerpts with a link attributing the original source.

Technorati.com and Google News are both examples of essentially how an autoblog looks.

Autoblogs are useful for many things, but they are a great way to aggregate articles on a particular niche topic for your blog. By pulling feeds from multiple sources and using smart searches and filtering you can provide valuable portals to your niche topic. Autoblogs can also work well to build blogs from multiple affiliate feeds or to augment your own content.

Autoblogs ensure keyword-rich, fresh content that will greatly improve your search engine results.

Are Autoblogs the Same as Splogs?

While many people do use autoblogs as spam blogs–or splogs–autoblogging itself is not spamming. Splogs are spam in the sense that they are spamming search engines to build backlinks or drive traffic to affiliate links, increase ptc ad clicks, or even to spread malware. Splogs quickly get blacklisted on search engines and work based on volume and rapidly creating new splogs. Splogs are a blackhat SEO technique that do not produce quality long-term results and are generally annoying for anyone using a search engine.

Are Autoblogs the Same as Scrapers?

Scraping is similar to autoblogging in the sense that it uses content from other web sites. Scraping, however, is different in that it uses a significant amount of content from targeted sites and often is combined with rewriting techniques to obscure the original content while maintaining the topical context.

Autoblogging is not about stealing content, but rather sifting through, aggregating, and linking to the world’s content to create added value.

We get a lot of questions on how to perform various search and replace operations in AutoBlogged. Because not everyone is an expert with regular expressions, we thought we would share some of the most common patterns we have found useful.
Search and Replace Overview

The Search and Replace feature allows you to modify the content of a feed based on Regular Expression searches. With this feature you can do things such as rewrite words, enforce naming standards, insert affiliate ID’s, correct non-standard feeds, create unique content, or just about anything else you can imagine. Search and Replace uses the PCRE syntax.

• Search for – The search term or regular expression to find.
• Replace with – The expression to use for replacing the search term.

Note that the Search and Replace feature uses Regular Expressions so you must escape any special characters in your search pattern with a slash (\) character. The special characters that need escaping are \^.$|()[].

Note that if your search expression contains multiple grouped matches, the Replace operation will only be performed on the primary match. For more precise control over replacement, you can use back references in your replace expression. Back references are special variables that return a portion of your match. Matches are grouped by numbers corresponding to portions of your pattern that are in parenthesis. The variable $1 refers to the first match, $2 refers to the second, and so on. $0 refers to the entire matched string.

Common Patterns

If you develop any search and replace patterns that you think others might find helpful, please add them as comments here. Here are some resources for testing regular expressions:

http://regexpal.com/

http://www.regextester.com/

For our next major release we are planning an eBay auction plugin module that will allow you to access all details for an eBay auction but for now it still is possible to work with the basic information of an eBay feed. The feeds that eBay publishes are a bit non-standard so they do require a few extra steps to get them to work. Here is a quick tutorial on how to do this.

1. Create a Feed

The first step is to create an RSS feed for the keywords you are searching for. To do this, go to http://search.ebay.com/ws/search/AdvSearch?sofindtype=1 and enter the details you wish to filter on. Notice that near the bottom of the page is an option to enter affiliate tracking tracking information so that you can earn commissions from referrals.

Click on Search to get the results and look for the orange RSS icon on your browser’s address bar. Click on that icon to go to the RSS feed URL. This is the URL you will enter into AutoBlogged.

When you configure your feed in AutoBlogged, you will want to edit the default post template. Near the bottom of the feed settings screen is a post template box. Since the eBay feeds don’t provide a description, you may want to make your post template simply the title and show a thumbnail by entering this as your post template:

%thumbnail%<br />
%title%

2. Update Your Modules.php File

If you are using AutoBlogged 2.4.22 (the current release as of this writing) or earlier, you need to download the Modules.php file attached at the bottom of this article and upload it to your autoblogged directory. This file contains the namespace to access the special eBay fields.

3. Create Custom Fields

At this point you can use any of the following variables in your post template:

• %rx:CurrentPrice%
• %rx:EndTime%
• %rx:BidCount%
• %rx:AuctionType%
• %rx:ItemCharacteristic%

Although you can use these directly in your post template, you will find that the data in the CurrentPrice and EndTime fields aren’t properly formatted for display. For example, the CurrentPrice will not display decimal places so a value of $14.99 will appear as 1499. Furthermore, the End

Time appears as a number timestamp, not a formatted date. For that reason, the best solution is to save each field as a custom field on the post that we can access later.

To do this, at the bottom of the feed page in AutoBlogged, fill out the Custom Fields section as shown below:

Note that the Custom Fields section only provides two new entry boxes at a time so you will need to save the feed to get two more. Also note that if you don’t plan on using any of the above fields in your post, you may leave those out.

At this point AutoBlogged will not display any of this extra information but it will save the values to each post as custom fields. If you run AutoBlogged now and edit one of the posts, you will see these values as custom fields. To display this information on your site you will need to modify your WordPress theme.

4. Modify Your Theme

To view the eBay custom fields, you need to modify one or more files in your theme, depending on where you want these values displayed. For example, if you want them shown on your home page, you will need to modify index.php, or whatever file your theme uses for the main loop. If you want to modify single posts, edit the file single.php. Note that not all themes are the same, but these instructions will work for most themes.

When you edit the file, you can usually find the place where posts are displayed by searching for the_title(). Once you determine where to place the information, you can access the post’s custom fields with this code:

Current price:
<?PHP echo number_format((get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), ‘CurrentPrice’, true)/100), 2, ‘.’, ‘,’); ?>

End Time:
<?PHP echo date(‘M j g:i a’, doubleval( substr(get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), ‘EndTime’, true), 0, -3))); ?>

Bid Count:
<?PHP echo get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), ‘BidCount’, true); ?>

Auction Type:
<?PHP echo get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), ‘AuctionType’, true); ?>

Item Characteristic:
<?PHP echo get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), ‘ItemCharacteristic’, true); ?>

To see an example of this in action, we have attached to this post a modified index.php from the Default WordPress theme. Below is a an example of how this would appear:

Of course not all themes will be this simple so it may help to know HTML and/or PHP to tweak this how you need it.

1. Each participant may submit as many unique entries as desired.
2. Participation is free of charge. Employees and immediate families of AutoBlogged.com, contest sponsors, or any affiliate companies, or contest judges may not participate.
3. You must be at least 18 years old or have reached the age of majority in your country/state of citizenship, whichever is older, to participate in this contest. Entries received from individuals under the age of majority will not be judged.
4. The site you submit must use AutoBlogged as a significant feature to create content on the site, although it may be used to compliment regular content. All entrants must own or have rights to a licensed copy of AutoBlogged.
5. You may not use copyrighted material without permission. Your site must respect the copyright of others, attribute and link to all sources, and take in to consideration fair use doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use) by using only a small excerpt of content unless given permission to do otherwise. AutoBlogged.com is not liable for any copyright infringement on the part of the entrant.
6. The site should add value to the original content and include content from a variety of sources.  A generic feed aggregation won’t impress us much.
7. The winners of the contest will be decided primarily based primarily on creative and original use of AutoBlogged. Other deciding factors are concept, innovation, usefulness, and visual presentation. We will also take into consideration the votes from other users.
8. AutoBlogged.com reserves the right to deny any entries deemed to be abusive, harmful, harassing, pornographic or in other ways unsuitable for display at www.autoblogged.com. We reserve the right to use our discretion on this point.
9. AutoBlogged.com reserves the rights to, if necessary, modify the rules and/or proceedings of the contest, in order to address unforeseen cheating, fraud, etc.
10. By submitting an entry to this contest, the contestant grants AutoBlogged.com and its affiliate companies the rights to freely publish screen captures of submitted sites in printed or online media in relation to the contest, without remuneration and the contestant hereby irrevocably grants to AutoBlogged.com all right, title and interest in and to such creation of screen captures.
11. Privacy is of utmost concern and the contestant’s personal information other than the contestant’s name and web site URL will not be distributed outside of contest sponsor companies unless authorized by the contestant. Upon request we will also withhold the contestant’s name and web site URL.
12. Competition Prizes: The winning entries will receive the following: First Place Winner receives a USD $200 Visa gift card, a developer license for one premium theme at WooThemes.com, a license for one premium theme at Press75.com, one license for Movie Automator at goscript.net, one lifetime developer license of AutoBlogged, and one link to winning site from the AutoBlogged.com home page for a minimum of twelve months. Two runners-up will win each win one lifetime multi-site license of AutoBlogged, one license for the WP Uniquefier plugin at www.goscript.net, and one link each from a page at AutoBlogged.com.
13. Entries not complying with the contest rules are subject to disqualification without prior warning.

RSS Feed Sources

• Configure multiple RSS feed sources with the ability to enable or disable individual feeds.
• Support for RSS 0.9, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom 0.3 and 1.0 feeds.
• Integrated feed caching, HTTP Conditional GET support, and support for GZIP-compression to improve performance and reduce bandwidth usage.
• Support for dozens of RSS modules including Dublin Core, GeoRSS, ITunes, Media RSS, RSS 1.0 Content, W3C WGS84 Basic GEO, XML 1.0, and XHTML 1.0.
• Numerous pre-defined searches to locate articles via Google Blog Search, Technorati, Blogdigger, Blogpulse, MSN Spaces, Yahoo! News, Flickr, YouTube, and others.
  
• RSS Feed autodiscovery–if you don’t know the exact feed URL, just enter the page address and AutoBlogged will find it for you.
• Built-in feed viewer to help with setting up and troubleshooting feed sources.
• Ability to override the automatically extracted feed data, such as author or source, with your own static values or values.
• Set the default post status to Published, Pending, Draft, or Private

Feed Processing

• Process feeds automatically using built-in pseudo cron feature so an external scheduler is not required.
• Set a range of intervals for random update scheduling.
• Manually process all feeds or one feed at a time.
• Preview feed processing without importing any posts.
• Disable cron operations without disabling the entire plugin.
• Allow other feeds to notify your autoblog of updates using an XML-RPC ping.
• Configure individual feeds to update every time AutoBlogged runs or after every each number of runs you set.
  
• Include all posts from each feed, set a limit on posts added per feed, or have AutoBlogged select random posts based on a percentage you set.
• Automatically create text-only excerpts based on number of words, sentences, or paragraphs.

Post Filtering

• Domain blacklist blocks posts from certain domains. Excellent way to block sites with spammy content, invalid HTML, or to allow webmasters to exclude their site from your blog.
• Block posts based on any portion of the URL to prevent posts from a specific type of sites such as forums or to block feeds from certain types of software.
• Keyword blacklists to exclude posts that contain keywords you specify.
• Duplicate post checking based on title and/or URL.
• Automatic filtering of malicious content in posts including SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
• Feed-specific filtering based on all words, any words, exact phrase, or none of the words specified.
  
• Feed-specific search and replace features using regular expressions to rewrite words, URLs, fix invalid content, replace affiliate IDs, etc.
• Truncate or filter out posts with long titles.
• Filter out posts where the titles are in all caps or where they contain multiple consecutive exclamation points or other punctuation.

Categories and Tags

• Assign each feed to one or more blog categories or subcategories or have AutoBlogged randomly select from a list of categories you specify.
• Search each post for existing blog categories and add them as additional categories or as tags on the post.
• Visits the original URL to extract additional tags not found in the feed using our own powerful tagging engine–an important SEO feature that will load your blog with related keywords.
  
• Add extra tags using the Yahoo! tagging API.
• Include categories from the original post and add missing categories to your blog if you choose.
• Tag blacklists prevent certain tags from appearing on a post.
• Common tags list increases the frequency of popular tags used by Technorati and other tagging sites or modify the list to add important tags for your niche.
• Provide a list of tags to randomly add to each post to increase the density of long tail phrases and other targeted keywords.
• Set the maximum and minimum tag length to ensure consistency and readability of your tags.
• Set the maximum number of tags to add to any post.

Authors

• Specify the author to use for new posts, assign a rando m author or use the name of the original author.
• If the original author does not exist as an author on your blog, add it, skip the post, randomly pick another author, or specify a default author.

• Use additional author information from your blog when adding new posts.

Post Templates

• Post templates let you randomly select from one or more post formats to ensure variety and to accommodate any number of site requirements.
• Apply different post templates to each of your feeds.
• Insert variables from the post, original feed, or any values you define.
• Random Select Lists to add variety to each post.
• Conditional Select Lists to show alternate fields if one is empty.
• Include images, video, flash and other content in your blog posts using an embedded video players.
• Specify a custom player for playing FLV or MP3 files.
• Build custom post templates to use with affiliate and other non-standard feed formats.
• Include text-only summaries or entire feed content as your post.
• Add custom HTML to each post to include NoFollow tags, Javascript, or even WordPress quick tags.
• Custom fields allow you to create your own post variables and include items as additional custom fields fin Wordpress.
• Automatic image, logo, and favicon extraction.
• Include any elements from the original feed based on dozens of supported RSS modules.
• And of course, you can simply show the original feed content untouched.

WordPress Integration

• Takes advantage of internal tagging and category engines to ensure strong keyword coverage and site navigation.
• Full integration with WordPress security and user permission features.
• Attribute posts to WordPress authors when incoming posts use that author’s name.
• Uses site information from WordPress blogroll when that site already exists in your blogroll.
• Automatically adds fields for images, videos, and thumbnails to support a variety of premium themes.

Other Features

• Set the HTTP Referer and User-Agent strings to use when visiting the original sites to advertise your site or provide opt-out instructions or contact info to other webmasters.
• Huge speed and performance improvements over previous versions.
• Commented PHP source code included.
• Support forum and e-mail support for all registered users.
• Free minor version updates included.

System Requirements

• PHP v4.3.2 or later
• WordPress v2.5 or later
• SimplePie Core Plugin v1.1 or later
• PHP cURL extension required
• PHP Zlib extension recommended

Note that servers with safe_mode enabled or an open_basedir set will have reduced image retrieval and tagging capabilities.

The Feed Settings page allows you to individually configure and customize each source feed. From this page you can configure settings such as the category, tagging, filtering, and post templates.

General Settings

• Enabled – Determines whether the feed is included in each script run. Use this to temporarily disable a feed for testing or during feed configuration.
• Feed Type – This setting allows you to use one of the built-in handlers for various search engines. These handlers allow you to quickly configure a search without having to figure out the feed URL for the particular search engine.
• Search Keywords or RSS Feed URL – When using an RSS feed use this box to enter the full path to the feed. If using one of the built-in search handlers use this box to enter keywords or tags for your search. Note that if you do not have the exact feed URL you can often enter the web site’s main page and AutoBlogged will attempt to discover the actual feed URL.
• Title – The title is there for your own use to label the feed. This title will only show on the Feeds management page. IF you do not enter a title, the Feeds page will create a title for you.Default Status – When adding new posts from a feed, you can choose to have them automatically published, saved as a draft, saved as a private post, or with a status of pending.

Categories and Tags

• Assign posts to this category – All posts created from a feed must be assigned to at least one category. This setting determines the category for all posts in this feed.
• If other blog categories appear in the post - When processing a feed, AutoBlogged will check to see if any of the existing blog categories appear in the post. If they do, you can choose to 1) assign those categories to the post and 2) add those categories as tags for the post. This feature is particularly useful if your blog has categories with subcategories. You can assign the feed to the main category and let AutoBlogged automatically add the subcategories if found. For example, you may have a blog category titled Windows with subcategories XP and Vista. You can assign the category Windows to the feed and allow it to automatically assign the categories XP or Vista if those words appear in the post. This feature can add true value to your blog by intelligently gathering and categorizing content found on the web.
• Additional Tags – With an autoblog that does nothing more than show excerpts and point to other sites your site offers little value for users and little uniqueness for search engines. The Additional Tags feature allows you to create a list of keywords, phrases, or search terms that will randomly be added as tags to each post. Not only does this improve your search engine results, it helps users to find relevant content based on the additional keywords you provide.

Include Posts that Contain

This section allows you to perform additional keyword filtering on your feed when the source does not provide such a feature. For example, you may be using an affiliate feed and only want to display those posts that contain the keyword coupon.

Note that any extra processing you perform will affect the load, overhead, and speed of the script. If possible try to use any filtering capabilities of the source feed before using the feed-level filtering.

All of these searches are performed on each field extracted from the feed, it does not do any filtering based on the content of the original page.

Enter lists of words separated by spaces or commas. To enter a phrase that includes spaces or commas, enclose that phrase in quotes.

• All these words - All words in this box must appear in the feed in order for the post to pass filtering checks.
• Any of these words - If any of the listed words appear, the post will pass filtering checks.
• The exact phrase - If the exact phrase appears in the post, it will pass filtering checks. Note that if you would like to enter multiple phrases in this box, each phrase must be enclosed in quotes.
• None of these words - If any of these words appear in the post it will not pass the filter checks.

Custom Fields

Custom Fields are a power feature that allow you to override field values, supply values for empty fields, or create new fields that you can use as variables in templates. For example, you may have a feed where all authors show as Admin, which is fairly common with blogs. If you know the author’s real name, you can create a custom field named author and enter the name of the author you wish to use.

All custom fields will also override extracted values or will be added as additional fields to the WordPress post so you can modify your WordPress theme to display these values.

Note that Custom Fields are processed before Post Templates and therefore the fields you create can be referred to from within your templates.

• Custom Field – This is the name of the field you wish to set.
• Custom Field Value – This is the value you wish to assign to the field. This can be a static value or you can use the post template syntax to create more complex scenarios.

Post Templates

Post Templates are the key to customizing your blog and giving it a fresh and natural appearance. Post Templates have a flexible syntax that allows for random selections, conditional content, variable insertion, and loops. For more information on Post Templates, see Post Template Reference

Search and Replace

The Search and Replace feature allows you to modify the content of a feed based on Regular Expression searches. With this feature you can do things such as rewrite words, enforce naming standards, insert affiliate ID’s, correct non-standard feeds, create unique content, or just about anything else you can imagine. Search and Replace uses the PCRE syntax.

• Search for – The search term or regular expression to find.
• Replace with – The expression to use for replacing the search term.

Note that the Search and Replace feature uses Regular Expressions so you must escaoe any special characters in your search pattern with a slash (\) character. The special characters that need escaping are \^.$|()[].

For example, if you want to seach for autoblogged.com and replace it with www.autoblogged.com, you would use these values:
Search for: autoblogged\.com
Replace with: www.autoblogged.com

If you want to turn all instances of wikipedia.com into a hyperlink, use these values:
Search for: wikipedia\.com
Replace with: <a href=”wikipedia.com”>wikipedia.com</a>

Note that if your search expression contains multiple grouped matches, the Replace operation will only be performed on the primary match. For more precise control over replacement, you can use backreferences in your replace expression.