Make Money off Political Egos With Your Blog

A few months ago I launched a blog about Nebraska politics hoping that the upcoming elections (national, state and local) would make for good traffic and a few bucks in advertising dollars. But everyone knows you need unique content to bring in the bucks.

I really like politics, but I don’t have the time to sit down and write unique posts about candidates, policies and elections. I needed someone to write it for me, but no one will write the content at a price low enough for me to generate a profit with it online.

Hmmmm….. Where can I find a ton of great hand-written content that no one else is already publishing online…..

FREE Unique Content For My Blog

Instead of posting until my fingers bleed, I joined just about every business association in Nebraska and let them write the content for me. I needed to join these organizations anyway for my computer repair business, so this gave me a good reason to stop procrastinating and get the job done.

Most business organizations use email to send out alerts about upcoming votes, new candidates, or general policy statements. I started collecting these emails and republishing them on my Nebraska Pulse blog.

The traffic is pretty decent for a blog I literally invest 5 minutes a week on. But the real story is where that traffic is coming from and why people are clicking ads on the blog at $1.50-$1.90 a pop!

Their Egos Driving my Income

A lot of the posts that get traffic are about politicians themselves, or a politician’s support of a policy or vote. The reported search terms indicate that I am literally making money off people searching for other people’s names!

I imagine some of it is vanity searching by the subjects of my posts themselves. But if you were going to make money off of vanity, what could be better than a pool of politicians in a super-duper Republican state with tons of great contested primaries?

Champaign Anyone?

Now don’t get me wrong – I made about $3.00 yesterday off that blog, so I am not exactly sipping Dom Pérignon as I click post. But $21 a week for about 5 minutes of work (just over $1,000 a year for 4.3 hours of work) is not bad.

The moral of the story is that content is KING and there are lots of brick and mortar offline sources with shake n’ bake content that is not being published online somewhere else.

You can bet if an organization has membership and spends the time creating content their content must be interesting to someone out there. What resources do you have sitting right in front of you that you could be using to make money online?