Hi everyone! I am definitely back in the saddle, as it were, and I’m all fired up to help you take your blog to the next level. I definitely want to make sure that you will have every tool at your disposal to get things done, but I also want to make sure that I’m answering your questions.

One of the first things I’m often asked revolves around automating your blog. People aren’t always sure whether or not they should even bother trying to automate their blogs, while other people are convinced that if they don’t automate their blogs they will be missing out.

So which group is right? Well, the truth is that they both have their good points and bad points. You see, you don’t have to automate your blog. You can make all of your posts on your own and not even have to bother with scraper bots or other automated things to grow your blog out. There’s nothing wrong with this.

However, what most people forget is that there’s nothing wrong with automation in of itself. Unfortunately, a lot of people do automation wrong, which ends up doing more harm than good. They do nothing but take other people’s content, instead of coming up with their own ideas. This will ultimately turn off your readers and cause your blog to fall hard from the search engines. You’re not being informative. You’re not giving good information. If you fail on the two above points, then why are you even blogging?

There are pro’s and con’s to everything, and automating your blog is no exception. One of the strongest pro’s to the situation is that you will be freeing up your time, which is never a bad thing. However, one of the strongest con’s is that you will be withholding your own unique voice as a blogger, which can make it hard for your audience to decide whether or not they want to follow in your footsteps.

OK, enough of that. The action steps tonight are simple: you need to look into ways to balance originality and automation. Could you set up your WordPress to automatically post your blog posts after a while? Could you set up WordPress to incorporate a short RSS feed of a site that matches your content, while still giving your audience what they’re looking for? Think on that, and keep the balance.

Pretty easy, right?