I’m a huge YouTube fan. When I’m not focused on writing, meditating, praying, or exercising, you can usually find me binging videos. The content from popular YouTubers really draws me in, especially those in the “make money online” niche.
There are quite a few well-known YouTubers who teach people how to earn money online. One of the big names in this space is Ryan Hildreth. His channel is slick and much of his content is pretty engaging. If you’re new to the online money-making world, you could easily spend hours getting lost in his videos.
Questionable Advice
A lot of what Ryan produces gets rehashed by smaller YouTubers. In one of his videos, “Earn $150 per hour with Google Articles,” Ryan suggests a method where viewers take articles from Google News and run them through an article spinning website like Spin Bot. The next step, according to him, is to sign up for platforms like SEO Clerks, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com and use these spun articles to apply for content writing gigs.
Honestly, telling people to use spinning software to pass off content as their own for job applications is just bad advice. If you genuinely want to leverage Google News to make money online, you should steer clear of this method entirely.
A Better Approach
Here’s a much better way to go about it:
Find trending news: Use Google News to discover popular topics.
Write commentary: Create your own opinion pieces on specific news stories.
Make short-form videos: Produce TikTok videos about trending news.
Create YouTube content: Develop longer-form YouTube videos discussing trending news.
Curate news: Write articles that list the latest news with a brief personal commentary for each item.
Sunday Omony, for example, creates celebrity news commentary videos and has over 80,000 subscribers. There are plenty of others doing similar things. You absolutely don’t need to copy and paste articles into a spinning bot to earn money with Google News.
I have a news blog myself, though I’m definitely not pulling in $150 an hour right now. I’m confident I can grow it into a $1,000-a-day earner, but it’s not quite there yet.
The Risks of Shady Tactics
The truth is, many YouTube videos mislead viewers into believing they can make thousands of dollars using questionable methods that could easily get their accounts banned on these freelancing websites. Some YouTubers even encourage viewers to spin content and submit it to online magazines that pay per post.
Don’t do it! You could permanently damage your reputation as a legitimate writer.
Would you try this Google News method?
Here’s how to build a profitable content curation business that’s sustainable and realistic.