There are plenty of WP-Robot reviews out there, but after using it myself, and not quite experiencing all the “positive hype” you’ll read elsewhere, I’ve decided to write my own WordPress Robot Review.
Plugin We are Reviewing: WP-Robot Autoblogging Plugin
Plugin Homepage: WPRobot.net
Price: $169 regular price | $129 with coupon at end of article
About: WP-Robot of course is the most popular of the autoblogging plugins. I decided to try using it for a site I wanted to create about fashion – I thought this would be a great way to grab products from Amazon, Shareasale affiliates, YouTube videos, without necessarily having to create each post myself. It has a number of modules to grab content from a number of popular sites.
My Experience
So I spent $129 to buy the plugin (I found a coupon code, which I share at the end of this article), installed the plugin as directed, and spent about an hour playing around with the settings and everything else only to realize:
1. I Have a Guilt Complex: I didn’t have API keys for a lot of the popular services (such as Yahoo Answers or Flickr) and when applying for them, I really did not know what to write, especially after reading their terms of use and trying to figure out if my intended use was even allowed. Some sites like Shopzilla now actually very clearly state that you cannot use WP-Robot with their program, which makes me think a lot of people have probably abused their service in some way or another at some point. I am really not “normal” – I am sure I could have applied for all the programs, gotten approved, and made it work without any TOS violations…I am overly neurotic however and decided to skip this part.
2. I lack complete focus to use this plugin: One of the reasons I wanted to experiment with autoblogging is because I’m often easily distracted and sidetracked. It should not have been a surprise then that I am also too unfocused and distracted to use the plugin!
This is not a plugin that you can just choose a couple of settings from and go. There is plenty of documentation, and support was very timely and helpful, but there are just so many options and possibilities that it kinda makes your head spin. If you have excellent focus, maybe you can make it work easily. I however, am far too easily distracted and scatterbrained to really use this plugin to its full potential. Granted, I get distracted by a 2 and 4 year old every 30 seconds and usually have Dora the Explorer or Spongebob SquarePants yakking away in the background, but it was still hard for me to figure out all the settings and figure out just exactly what to do with it.
3. Auto Blogging is Not for Me! The plugin does work (once I got my settings figured out thanks to support answering some of my questions) so I can’t really complain about the plugin at all. The problem? I am not an auto-blogger. I am a “control freak blogger”. I care about how content looks and how it is displayed and what words are chosen. I didn’t really like how the products were displayed once they were posted. The didn’t look bad, they just weren’t up to my quality standards. This meant, if I was going to use this plugin, the way I wanted to use it, I’d be spending a good solid 10 hours editing & messing around with coding.
Now, if you are not a scatterbrained, control freak blogger with a guilt complex like myself, then you might be able to find some unique uses for this plugin. Here are some ideas for things you could do with this plugin:
Members Only Content: Maybe you don’t care about search engines, but you have visitors who need content. I think this could be very powerful if you combine it with a membership plugin. For example, you could create a “members only section” of auto pulled posts from the article directories which you could make sure are blocked by search engine robots. You could post original articles from a number of the directories or publish all the PLR in the world to your heart’s content without sacrificing quality or worrying about duplicate content penalties.
Excellent search/planning tool: I was really impressed by how this plugin found really relevant items based on my keywords – things I couldn’t find if I searched the actual sites themselves! So, it could be useful in that regard, if you used it to find items for you and save them as drafts for you to go in and edit/adjust as necessary later. It could potentially save you on the research time involved in setting up sites if you still want to have all unique content.
Use to Drip Feed Your Own Content: I wouldn’t buy this plugin only for this purpose, as there might be easier or cheaper ways of doing it, but it is a neat feature that it can drip feed your own original content as well as import CSV datafeeds. In essence, you could upload hundreds of articles at once, and WP-Robot would auto publish each and everyone for you based on whatever schedule/publishing rate you want it to publish at.
Good Learning Experience: You can learn a lot of things about APIs and WordPress plugins from this plugin. If you are someone who likes to dig into code to see how things work, you’ll likely find some useful things within the plugin files itself. If reading, writing, editing, and breaking php code is out of your comfort zone however you may not get this benefit.
Create a Link Farm/The Best Splog Ever: Of course, I would not recommend anyone to do this, but this plugin would make it super easy to do and if you’ve got sites you’re not afraid to experiment with. Say you have 50 domains just kinda sitting there doing nothing. It would be easy to set up this plugin and start adding spun articles like crazy. The problem? I don’t know if you would get traffic, how well you would do in search engines, if it is worth the risks, or if any human visitor would find any value in your site. But, damn, you sure could build a nice splog!
While WP-Robot (and auto-blogging/borderline splogging in general) isn’t for me, I will say it does do as advertised. Support is good. I just can’t bring myself to create an auto blog. So while I am too much of a control freak blogger with a guilt complex to use it as intended, I feel no guilt about using affiliate links while writing about it, as I do think that for some people it can be an invaluable and fascinating plugin depending on the needs – as long as you understand it’s NOT going to magically help you make money or create high quality sites with no effort on your part and you ARE playing with fire when it comes to SEO.
If you are a slightly neurotic, control freak type of blogger, who practices safety first, I suggest you do not buy it and continue making sites the hard way to ensure that you have quality, original, well presented content. Hopefully my honest review here will save you a lot of money that you could spend more wisely for another aspect for your online business.
If you DO want to buy WP-Robot, if for nothing else than maybe to try and experiment with it as I did, I would recommend using a discount coupon to do so – I happened to find a few floating around the internet that might work for you:
Click Here for WP-Robot Autoblogging Plugin and use Coupon Codes WarriorRobot OR SPRobot
(If these coupons stop working let me know and I’ll try to find some new ones)
Have you used WP-Robot? What were your thoughts on it?