WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

A while ago, we came across a way to get free content for your blog. Guest blogger Gary Jones posted on JohnChow.com (Arbitrage from a Non-Arbitrageur) how you could use Charles Johnson’s wordpress plugin, FeedWordPress, to get content from any RSS feed of any blog and use it as your own.  Charles designed and uses the plugin as a way to combine the feeds from a variety of blogs into one source of information (feminist blogs). The plug in takes a published post from a different blog and saves it into your own WordPress database as a post of your own. The default option for the plug in is to have the permalink for the post to point to the original blog, but that can be changed.

So, one way to get free content quickly is to find a bunch of blogs that are related to your subjects, copy the RSS feed addresses into the FeedWordPress plugin, and voila, you have instant daily content that you didn’t have to write. Set up a nice template, pop in your ads, and instant blog. Of course, you still have the challenge of directing traffic to your site, but at least you don’t have to worry about spending hours coming up with content every day.

Unscrupulous? Perhaps. (I mean, technorati pulls exerpt from millions of blogs as well)

Does it happen? Yes. (In fact, I have one site pulling the feed from another site which is pulling the feed from Webdiggin. I know this because when I check out the first site, it has one of my posts attributed to a different blog: “Here’s a great post from Cashflow for Life”.)

Can you stop it? Probably not. They’re pulling your content from your RSS feed which you’re not about to turn off, are you?

Will it hurt you? Maybe. Google penalizes websites that have duplicate content, so if another site is showing the same content… I don’t know how much of an exerpt you could show before it impacts you.

Can you use it to your advantage? Yes. The feedwordpress plug-in copies the entire post as it is. Which means, any links you have in your post pointing to your other posts will get copied as well. You have another blog linking to your site, which can help improve your pagerank as well as your blog rating on technorati, for example.

People typically show an exerpt (say the first 35 words) on their main page with your stolen content, so make sure you have a link to another one of your posts in the first paragraph. Lets say a blog called easymoney takes your content. Typically the post will say something like “Here’s a great post from Webdiggin” because the RSS feed came from my site. But if another blog takes the content from easymoney, then the post might say “Here’s a great post from easymoney.” So I don’t get the name plug, but because I have a link to another post on my site in the first paragraph, I’ll still get the traffic.

Bottom Line: Link to your own posts in the first paragraph of every post. That way, when your content gets stolen, you’ll at least benefit from having another blog link to your site.

(1 votes, Rating: 4 out of 5)

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