WP Robot Plugin for WordPress
April 1st, 2010 | 
Author: Well a good marketing buddy of mine who’s in this whole 52 on Squidoo challenge mentioned a cool WordPress plugin he was using to auto update his blog. Bob Tyndall said he’s seeing increased sales and I took a looksee at his stained glass blog so I could see it in action and how it all worked.
I was hesitant to use anything that provides content for me, but this looks legit! I paid for the basic WP Robot and only added the Amazon component. (You can add stuff like ClickBank, eBay, YouTube, RSS, Flickr, and much more but I only wanted this for my gift blog where I’m promoting Amazon products only.
WP Robot is easy to install. You download the file, unzip it, and FTP it over to your plugin folder on your hosting account. Then you go in and just do some basic settings. It’ll give you a link to apply to this special Amazon program that works with this kind of stuff. It’s fast – a few seconds and you’re approved and you have your key, etc.
Then you basically give it a keyword and you schedule posts (or you can post on demand). So for instance, I chose the keyword jewelry. I did a post on demand and what it does it post a blog post on my blog with the title as the name of the product. It includes the image, it links back using MY Amazon Associates ID and it gives a short article using content from the Amazon page (allowed by Amazon). This is another cool thing – it pulls the reviews and turns THOSE into comments. Awesome! So people see the reviews right on your blog.
I like this for this particular blog because it’s primarily a Christmas blog – so it was going left untended for several months of the year. This way, it’ll continue growing as an authority for gifts. I’d like to thank Bob and fellow Warrior Lunatic for getting me onboard!
Tiff 
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Hi Tiffany,
I use this plug in also. It is awesome!
Mike
Charcoal Grill Guy
Do you know what the difference is between WP Robot and the free WP-o-Matic – other than being able to use reviews as comments?
Eric
I looked at WP-o-Matic.
This is a plugin that uses an RSS feed. So I see 2 issues. First, Amazon would have to be updating the feed on a regular basis which I don’t think they do. Also, unless you covert a feed to html, there is no benefit for keywords. Search engines can’t read RSS.
Also, reading thru the information I can’t make sense of it.
Maybe it’s to technically advanced for me.
I would love to see a blog that is using it.
I was thinking of using this on my skin care blog since I point toward Amazon products. Looks like a winner.
I had looked at WP a couple of times but wasn’t too sure about it, but you have pushed me off the fence now. Thanks
Exactly what I was thinking it would be good for, Tiff! My Christmas blog – only it’s still on blogger – must move to domain!!!! On the to do list now, for sure!
This is really cool Tiff. My daughters are building their first kid gift blog and this plug-in will really help them with the content side of things. Thank you so much for pointing us towards it!
Hey Eric,
WP-o-Matic will create posts from RSS feeds you plug into it, so it would be up to you to build all the controls into the feed itself [yahoopipes is the best for this].
WP-Robot has it all built in, handling all the complex stuff. I’ve spent many hours trying to make WP-o-Matic do what WP-Robot does, because I didn’t know about WP-Robot at the time.
Many many hours wasted…
WP-Robot definitely looks worth the money. I’m going to get a developer license to use in all blogs from yournicheblog.com
– Lewis
Sounds good for some niches I’m thinking of but where is the value of auto generating a site which will be the same as all the others produced by using the keyword you chose?
Isn’t this what google calls a thin affiliate site? Will you be writing any content for the blog in between auto posts?
Tiffany, I’d be delighted if this works and is an earner but I can’t see how auto generated sites are going to be ranked without a content strategy to produce unique content or a traffic strategy to make them independent of the search engines.
Good luck!
Hey Al! Well I don’t plan on only using this. I will continue posting 100% unique content too – it’s just going to add to my site and make it good for days when I can’t post. As usual, there’s a right and wrong way to use it
I am with Eric as I also would like the know the difference WP Robot and the free WP-o-Matic. My budget is thin and have to watch it closely. By the way, I thank you Tiffany for providing all the good stuff and new ideas.
Con
Tiff,
I checked out your gift website and looked at the comments that WP posted. It looks like a convenient solution.
The only thing I didn’t like was the error I got when I clicked on the name (that left the comment); it gave me this message:
“Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.”
I think it’s great that there is a product out there that lets you post to your Christmas blog for you but in the same token it would be nice if the product did it without causing more problems for the end user.
Now you’ll need to return to the product maker and find out why it gives an error when clicking on the comment poster name. It should send you back to the Amazon profile of the poster but instead gives that bad request error.
Good luck!
Bonnie Gean
Hey Bonnie!
Yeah I’m figuring most people won’t click on the comment person’s name. Not sure why it does that? I’ll try to find out – thank for the heads up!
Tiff
Thanks Bob and Lewis for the info.
Al
You said “Sounds good for some niches I’m thinking of but where is the value of auto generating a site which will be the same as all the others produced by using the keyword you chose?”
What is the likelihood that someone else has your exact niche and will use the exact keywords. Pretty slim I would think. Plus the products are picked randomly so there is very little likely hood that you will see duplicate posts.
I have had one site posting daily for a couple of months. My stats show that more and more searchers are finding my site with exact title searches which tells me Google doesn’t have an issue with it.
My sales are increasing also.
Everyone has to use it as they see fit.
There is nothing stopping someone from making additional posts of their own with new content and building links.
And that is just my 2.5 cents worth
In regards to the bad request when you click the persons name.
When you are on an individual post you see the list of reviews below the post. Like this
http://blackjava.ca/keurig-k-cups/1524/timothys-world-coffee-kona-blend-for-keurig-brewers-24-count-k-cups/
Clicking the reviewers name brings you to the amazon product. test it.
Ok, as I was writing this I tested my other blogs. Only one blog returns this error so I’m thinking this is an issue with the theme not the plugin. The stained glass blog that is linked above doesn’t have this issue and neither does another of my coffee blogs.
So I sent a note to support to see if anyone else has had this issue. If I get an answer I’ll let you know what they say.
And what Tiff said. I don’t see to many people clicking the reviewers name.
Hey Tiffany,
I purchased WP-Robot elite and over-all it is a good auto-blogging solution.
My single biggest complaint is that it does not pull in the user entered tags from YouTube, Yahoo Answers, or any of the other modules. It simply uses random words from the title which most of the time are not relevant tags…and tagging is part of my whole overall strategy.
On another note, I really like the “mix” feature where you can combine the individual modules (yahoo answers, ebay, youtube, amazon, etc.) to create one post based on a specific keyword.
Just my two cents worth!
Teresa
Sounds good, will look into it.
I use WP-O-Matic on my affiliate sites where I am provided with a RSS to use that has my aff ID built in.
Though, some copyright issues may come up if you randomly pull RSS feeds from anywhere you want.
@Teresa, try a Firefox add on called “Zemanta” (free) and it will crawl you text and let you choose your tags you want to use, although it is not automatic, but good to use.
Just bought WP Robot. Works great. I also noticed the problem your other reader mentioned about getting “Bad Request” when clicking on the name of the commentator.
I guess you were right that most people won’t click on it but it bugs me when there is a broken link on my site.
So I dig a little and found that comment URL actually goes to the Amazon affiliate link but it’s cut off at 200 characters that’s why it’s invalid. I changed the size to a bigger number and it works fine.
The fix involves modifying a variable in the database so I won’t post the details here. If anyone knows what I am talking about, just go to the database and look for table wp_comments and change the size of comment_author_url from 200 to something like 250.
I am going to see if I can find an easier way to do it. If so I will come back and post it here.
Thanks.
Awesome Leo thanks!
Your stained glass blog is beautiful. Very engaging and draws the viewer in. Wish I could do work like this.
What stained glass blog?