One of the beautiful things about automated blog tools is not just the the ability to automatically insert content. That’s obviously very important because that is probably the primary reason you are interested in these tools. You either do not have the time, or you do not have the depth of knowledge to post new blog content on a consistent basis in the niche you want to target.

Most experts say that you need to post new content at least 3-4 times per week to have the search engines crawling your site. To put it another way, if the search engines crawl your site and do not see any new content they may start waiting longer in between crawls. What this means is that it will take longer for your pages to be indexed, but there’s also another underlying problem. If the search engines do not view your site important enough to not crawl more than every week or so, how are they ever going to view your site important enough to give you good page ranking?

But the other wonderful thing about automated blogs is the ability to post “monetization” content that is also keyword relevant. In other words, if your niche is in “dog training”, you want to sell items that are targeted at people looking for dog training products. If one of your targeted keywords that you want to create posts on is “dog training collars”, you want to have dog training collars to sell on your page.

Now let’s be reasonable and set expectations right from the start. There may be some niches or some products when you get down to a granular level that these automated tools just will not find the exact product. For example if your keyword was “red dog training collars”, there may or may not be products that have that keyword in their description. But in many cases, these tools will return products that very closely match the targeted keyword.

So what types of monetization content should you be looking for in an automated blog tool? The following is a summary of what most of the current products offer, but none of the tools I researched provided all of these. But this list sort of represents the average of what monetization methods should be present:

• eBay
• Amazon
• Clickbank
• Google Adsense

In reality, the list of how you could possibly monetize an automated blog is endless. In the future it is easy to imagine that any affiliate program would offer a web service where all you need is an API ID similar to Flickr or Yahoo Answers. In this example, it might be possible one day to pull monetization content in from a large number of affiliate sources.

The following are examples of some of the other affiliate programs I would like to see supported by WordPress autoblog plugin tools which would take the concept of monetizing automated blogs even further:

• Commission Junction, Linkshare and other large affiliate sites
• Paydotcom, RegNow and other similar affiliate programs for electronic distribution of software, ebooks, etc.
• Google Affiliate and other similarly large affiliate programs
• CPA companies and other cost per click affiliate sites
• … the list is endless, and with today’s technology it should be as easy plugging in an affiliate ID

The impact of providing products for sale that are keyword relevant for a search that leads to your website will bring great value to your visitor. Not only will the visitor be pleased that they found a website that provides the content they want, but they will also be presented with products that are similarly related to their search term. This is very powerful and in many cases the impulse of doing a search and finding a page that was targeted precisely for that search will lead to a sale right on the spot.

One thing some people tend to overlook when considering how to monetize an automated blog, is that you can still monetize your blog the same way as you always did before. Because most of the automated blog tools allow you to choose the WordPress theme you want to use, you will still have complete control on the type of content that you can place in the sidebar widgets or other places in your blog that you can monetize.

For example, on my automated blogs I continue to use ads from other affiliate programs to complement the automatic content that is being generated. So in my previous golf example, if my keyword is Callaway X14 irons, I could still place other ads in my sidebar widgets for golfsmith.com, or golfballs.com or any other relevant affiliate products that complement the targeted keyword.

A big part of why you want a monetization module in your blog is to obviously find a way to earn money from your blog. But you also need to consider that mixing in the monetization content from eBay, Amazon, Clickbank and other affiliate sites, along with the content from articles, Yahoo Answers, etc., provides a unique page that the search engines will index as unique content.

So besides making money, the monetization content helps generate the fresh, new and unique content that keeps my blog ranked high for the keywords I want to target. And all I have to do is find those keywords and insert them into my automated blog tool.