WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

The biggest problem with making money with blogs and content websites is that you have to create rich content to keep your readers interested. Sure you can buy traffic through sites like Google AdWords, but you need original material to keep them returning. FeedWordPress is the easiest way to aggregate the content of multiple blogs onto your WordPress powered webpage… or in other words, it’s the easiest way to pass off other people’s syndicated content as your own.

Charles Johnson developed the code originally to aggregate the posts of various authors from various blogs into one, feminist blogs:

Feminist Blogs is a community of weblogs by self-identified feminists, women’s liberationists, womanists, and pro-feminist men. We use free software to syndicate our weblogs, in order to raise awareness, bring together feminist voices, and promote cross-linking and discussion between feminist bloggers.

This is perfect. One day, I started blogging. I blogged about traveling through Hawaii, trying to make money online, as well as some geekier dabbles into website design. I posted all of my thoughts on our travel blog, WhatTheDuck.ca. Eventually, it occured to me, that my friends back home probably didn’t care for the geek speak… and the future-money-making-moguls probably didn’t care to know about me jumping out of a plane. So our lowly blog was appropriately split into several children blogs like amoeba: WhatTheDuck.ca for our travelogues, Gohanyo.ca for our Japanese-Canadian cooking secrets, and cashflow.gohanyo.ca for our financial fortunes. I’ve often thought that it’d be nice to have one consolidated blog where you could see the ramblings from my separate blogs. FreeWordPress would allow me to do that - have one website where all of my posts from my different blogs could get combined into one site (and pumped out into one corresponding RSS feed). That way you could sign up for the individual blogs, or get the whole package.

However, because FreeWordPress uses the syndicated RSS feed of another blog, it’s easy enought to post other people’s works on your blog. Not, just an exerpt, but their entire posts (tags, titles, categories, all included). FreeWordPress converts their syndicated RSS feed into posts that are saved in your database - it’s as if you wrote them yourself. The great thing about this is all of the posts are full searchable. The bad thing is that the blogger who wrote the post might not appreciate how easily you can lift their work and plop it into your own blog.

Like P2P sharing software (or a photocopier), FreeWordPress is a tool that could be used in many ways. Feminist Blogs appears quite consciencious about the copyright issue: “The copyrights to all posts are held by their authors; all posts are reprinted by permission. For details on copyright or reproduction of a post, consult the contributor’s web page.”

Understandably, it’s getting promoted as a great way to slide other people’s content into your own site: Create a free blog, slap on some affiliate banners, use FreeWordPress to grab other people’s content (through their syndicated blogs), and then buy cheap traffic to send to your site. If you watch your margins, you could make money by buying cheap clicks and converting those clicks into higher paying traffic. That’s essentially what Gary Jones recommends in his post on Arbitrage from a Non-Arbitrageur. I wonder what he would think (or JohnChow.com) if you took their syndicated RSS feed, combined it with a few other syndicated feeds, mixed in your own affiliate ads and set it off into the world.

Still, it’s another experiment to try. What do you think?

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