Today I want to talk about blogging software. Technology that saves you time and effort and enables you to get your work done more quickly and easily.

WordPress was excellent several years ago, and has been steadily improving. Not only do bloggers love it, but so do search engines. Internet marketing gurus have tested and determined that new websites built using WordPress as their content management system get indexed faster and ranked higher by search engines than traditional websites.

Not only that, but WordPress websites can go up lightning fast, especially if your hosting service offers Cpanel and Fantastico. Then your WordPress setup can be done in just a few minutes.

As easy as this great software makes it to set up a new blog, there still remains one problem; having to take the time to log-in to your blog every few days and post new content. Now, obviously, if you only have a couple of blogs, and you personally write the content every day or so, you pretty much have to do it manually. But if you’re doing blog marketing and operating one or two dozen blogs with pre-written content, then it becomes a big, time-consuming chore.

At least it used to. But not anymore.

Imagine a WordPress plug-in that would let you upload dozens or more blog posts at a time, and then automatically publish them every two or three days, or whenever you wanted to. This is software that lets you put your content publishing on total auto-pilot. You just set it once and then forget it. You sit back and relax while the software grows your blog steadily week after week. That is the power and beauty of Blog AutoPilot. And it’s as easy as or easier to install than most WordPress plugins.

I started using it about a week ago, and I totally love it. There were a couple of blogs I had started and then sort of let fall to sleep that I renewed with this plug-in. After getting the hang of it, I found I could load in 8 or 10 weeks worth of content and get it all ready to be published totally automatically in about 5 minutes. It felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

So that is why I am recommending Blog AutoPilot. It’s not free, but you can get it for about the same price as a large pizza. The website is www.blog-autopilot.com.

Next time I’ll share a couple of tricks I figured out that make the posts you publish with Blog AutoPilot even more profitable.

Once you decide you are serious about wanting to earn a steady income from blogging, the challenge starts to arise regarding where you are going to get enough editorial content. Of course you will start by writing your own posts, but as your network increases into various niche topics, the time is going to come when you will want to outsource your writing services. For example, some of the most profitable niches, in terms of monetizing your blogs, are financial topics, such as investing in stocks, forex trading, mortgages and personal loans. Well, I for one are much more comfortable writing about travel, culture, folklore and food than about business and investments. But that has not stopped me from making money blogging on financial topics. I simply get the articles written for me, one way or another.

Several websites are excellent meeting grounds, bringing together freelance talent and people who need jobs done. Two of them I have become quite familiar with are rentacoder.com and elance.com. Now, forgive me if this is too broad a generalization, but in my personal experience, I found the writers on elance were too expensive, and the more affordable, offshore writers from rentacoder were not sufficiently proficient in English. I got 5 articles written for, as I recall, about $12 or $15 from one fellow in India, but I ended up having to waste my time editing them before they were usable.

Until recently, one of the best sources I found for professionally written blog content is Articlez.com, where you can get various length blurbs, miniposts and articles written to your specifications for $2 to $6 each. It’s not quite as good as I would write, and it takes about a week from order to delivery, but they give excellent value.

But now I have scooped what I think has to be the best deal possible on outsourcing the writing of your blog content. They give you 250 blog posts for a price that averages out to less than 7-cents each. What’s more they’re organized into ten different topics, and these are topics that have been researched to meet the criteria you’re probablyl looking for. They can be monetized, there is a large enough group of people interested in this information, and they’re niches that are not so popular they’re already swarming with competitors. It’s a subscription service, giving you 10 niches with 25 posts each for $17. What’s more, you also get 100 pre-written comments you can use to post on other people’s blogs. The reason for this is to get links back to your blogs, so search engines will give you higher rankings, and you’ll get more traffic. The Pro Blog Source members area has content going back through to August, 2008. That means you get at least eight months of content, or 80 niches worth of outsourced editorial if you sign up now. I think that’s one heck of a good deal. Here’s the link:  http://www.problogsource.com.

Next time I’ll let you in on a profoundly easy way to maintain a huge network of blogs by putting them on autopilot. This has got to be the greatest saver of time and effort I’ve ever found. I just started testing it a few days ago, and so far it’s working like a charm…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s easy to set up a blog, but the tricky part is getting people to see it. And especially if you are setting out to earn a steady income from blogging, you are going to need to know how to get traffic. One of the easiest and best ways is to get backlinks.

I sometimes spend an hour to produce a simple video and put it up on YouTube simply because of the high value of a link from YouTube to one of my websites. That’s how backlinks work. The more authoritative the site on which they are located, the higher weight the search engines give them in terms of the “halo effect” they reflect back to your website.

Besides YouTube, there are at least a couple of dozen other authority sites on which it is pretty easy to get valuable backlinks. These are the social bookmarking sites, such as digg, furl, ask, Stumbleupon and others. What I recommend you do is, each time you publish a new blog post, you give it a bookmark from these sites.

If that sounds like a lot of work, believe me, it couldn’t be simpler or faster. Not if you work smart and use a service that automatically bookmarks your page onto as many as 27 authority bookmarking sites all with one mouse click. The service I use is Onlywire.com. It’s free, and it works well. Yes, you do have to go to some trouble to set it up. It will probably take you an hour or two to set up accounts with 27 different sites and then enter those usernames and passwords onto your Onlywire page. But once that’s done, you install an onlywire button on the bookmarks tab of your web browser, and from then on it’s automatic.

I suppose, once you’re making money with the kind of an automated blog network I recommend, you could even outsource the task. Hire somebody for chump change to set up your accounts and bookmark them for you.

Oh, and don’t forget also to bookmark your YouTube videos, Squidoo lenses, and your posts on free blogs from Blogger.com and WordPress.com. The whole idea is to add more authority to your entire network. Do this and your traffic numbers will swell, and your blogging income will rise.

Cheers,
Robert

P.S. If you have not already done so, please pick up a copy of my new, free “Blogging Profit” report, available now at http://getbloggingprofitsecrets.com.