Making money with current events

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By Alex on July 10th 2008 - 5 comments

via flickr

In a world of almost seven billion people, "current events" happen all the time. Sometimes they happen so quickly it's impossible to try to take advantage of it and monetize it. But if you can stay in the money-making mind-set when you're reading or watching the news, you could easily grab a new stream of passive income.

For example, Iran is in the news this week because they are testing their missiles. North Korea was in the news last year for doing the same thing. If you happened to run a blog about missiles or North Korea last year, you probably substantial boost of traffic for a couple weeks. The same should be true today if you have a website about missiles and / or Iran. But that traffic will probably be short-lived (ask the guy who runs the missile / North Korea blog), so it might be better to "capture" a current event.

What do I mean by "capture" an event? For example, the legendary George Carlin died last month. If I was a huge fan of George Carlin's (which I am), I could register GeorgeCarlinMemorial.com (which is available at the time of this writing) and put together a bunch of videos and pictures to remember him. A cynic might say you're trying to make money from his death, but that's just cynical because you wouldn't be exploiting his death. Even though more people will be using the keyword "memorial" when they search for George Carlin.

That is just one example. Another would be, say, the Iraq war. If you were to land the domain name IraqWar.com right when the news broke, you could probably retire today.

Even though big things happen every day, you can't usually build an entire blog around that event. When you capture an event, it has to be big and you have to do it quick. Otherwise you wont get the key domain name, or that event will soon me forgotten by the world.

Time to give me your thoughts. Have you thought about doing this before? Do you think it could give you another reliable source of income? Let me hear it!

Comments

July 11th 2008 @ 12:35 pm

Erik Karey

Hey Alex, Just wondering if you've ever personally tried this and had any success?

I tried a similar technique, but it was PPC based and had to do with CPA offers and current events.

July 11th 2008 @ 1:46 pm

Alex

Erik, I have tried this with a degree of success. I did one recently related to somebody passing away but it's too early to report any success yet.

But the main point of this is to capture organic search engine traffic, and to become an authority on that subject very early. Passive income without spending a dime.

July 11th 2008 @ 10:41 pm

John Lampard

Would a domain name related to the news event you are trying to generate traffic help much, or would cleverly titled posts on an exisiting website be just as good?

For instance there was recently a furour over a New York hamburger that planned to sell a $175 hamburger.

I wrote a short post about it and a week or two later had about 30k hits to my website (over a weekend btw - usually a quieter time). People were doing a serach on "$175 Hamburger" being the exact title of my post.

If you can cinjure up a good post title when writing about a newsworthy event you also stand to collect a lot of traffic simply with an existing website.

July 11th 2008 @ 11:20 pm

Alex

@John - It depends on the website. If you run a news website, little news events like this would be perfect with a clever title, just like you said. You wouldn't want to register a domain name in this case probably, because there's a good chance this won't stay news for too long.

But since I don't live in New York, it's very possible this could be news for a long time. In that case you could register the domain 175Hamburger.com (if both keywords are your domain name, Google loves it) and forward it to the blog post you already wrote.

Just judge the event by how popular it will be in a week, a month, a year, and then decide if it's worth buying a domain and building a site around it, rather than just doing one blog post about it.

By the way, welcome to the Freelance Twins blog, thanks for your comment.

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