Home

Blog

Axel Segebrecht

Scraping the bottom of the barrel

As seen in my earlier rant post “10 Most Annoying Things on the Web“, I just love people ripping off others by scraping their content. As outlined before, it’s real easy these days with a little creative use of RSS feeds. Everyone can do it, even you! And it might just make you the extra income you always wanted. Find out how.

First, find a niche that you want to exploit like online TV, css web design or equipment news. Then get a free website from sites like WordPress.com or Blogger.com and start filling it with content.

Hunt around the bloggosphere to find sites offering the content you need and hopefully won’t notice you are stealing theirs and passing it off as your own. Just grab either the posts feed or why not just grap the entire category? Then tell your RSS parser (WordPress already has the ability to import syndicate build-in) to take the feed and display its content on your website.

Add a little style and play around with the feed data. For example, you may want to remove the original author and originating website. Also be sure to remove any backlinks to their site otherwise they will get a trackback and be alerted to your actions. Or leave them, so you can tell them you just liked their site and wanted to provide free advertising to them.

Now to the really interesting part of getting something for nothing. Sign up with textbased ad sites like Google Adsense and surround your content with ads. Add a few digg.com or other social networking buttons, submit and wait for people to visit your site and click those banners!

And you are done :-)

A not so nice example can be found at joostvideos.blogspot.com where you can find a multitude of other peoples content (especially videos) like my post on the free joost invites I gave away last week. Enjoy and remember to send me a cheque for my share of your advertising profits.

Leave a Comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

blog comments powered by Disqus