Making money online with RSS to blog programmes (and why they don't work)

The Internet is one of the only places that exist where you can make money quickly; seemingly anyone can make money online. However to make any meaningful income you need some serious effort, dedication and skill - sometimes people try to outsmart the system and the RSS-to-blog idea is yet another one of those.

Making mone online is difficult and lucrative at the best of times, but rewarding for those who manage it. One of the most talked about ways of making money online is to run your own website. Put content on that website and users will stumble across it when searching for things.

So what is the RSS to blog scam?
The logic behind the RSS-to-blog scam is that if you aggregate feeds onto a site it saves you having to write meaningful content yourself - which is handy. Then it's just a case of sitting back and letting the search engines do the work. Right?

The search engines aren't that stupid anymore
Once upon a time this was a great way to make money online without using any of your own thinking power - short of trying to promote the site. You see, search engines are now very wary of sites that try to abuse their mechanisms and collating everyone else's content counts. Engines like Google keep an eye on new domains, placing you into the sandbox where your every move is watched. From the sandbox your search engine listings are greatly reduced.

The point of this is so that search engines can ensure that your content is meaningful, original and un-spammy before they release you upon the world. They have been known to place existing sites into the sandbox if their behaviour changes significantly.

Yet you still see loads of people pushing that as their "make money online" solution
It amuses me when you see so many people pushing this as their genius idea to "make money online". Search engines are wise to it so you should stick away from it or face several months with rubbish search engine listings.

How do I know? Because I've done it
A while ago I set up TorqueToday as a motoring website with the sole intention of trawling RSS feeds - as an experiment into the sandbox effect. It started life back in October and has since sat in the Google sandbox waiting to be released. All it does is trawl motoring RSS feeds and update itself every now and then. The content isn't original, the site isn't popular and therefore it sits in the sandbox - simple!

It has trawled through 3,200+ pieces of content in it's lifetime - that's probably too fast for search engines but either way it's impossible to find unless you search for the domain itself.

So RSS-to-blog schemes are worthless. You won't make any money from them because the content will have absolutely no value - it'll be repurposed from other sites that the search engines already index. I'm afraid if you're trying to cut corners in your quest to make money online, this isn't the way.