Widgets make it incredibly easy to put up a website that points users to useful links but never requires manual updating and generates revenue from AdSense.
This is particularly easy with blogging platforms like TypePad, which make it easy to reuse the same sidebar elements on multiple blogs.
Here's an example of a website that took me a few hours to put up: Apple Dashboard.
Here's what I did:
- Purchased the URL appledashboard.com (yes, I know, remarkable that it was available)
- Set up a set of Feedsweep widgets that display headlines from various carefully chosen RSS feeds, including Seeking Alpha's Apple feed (http://seekingalpha.com/by/symbol/aapl/feed)
- Set up a TypePad blog with the Feedsweep widgets as the only post.
- Added a sidebar that contains Google AdSense Ads.
End result? A genuinely useful site (this page offers more coverage of Apple than Seeking Alpha's own AAPL page!) that never needs updating (the widgets show the latest headlines) and generates AdSense revenue.
Because TypePad and Blogger are amazingly cheap and stock-market related ads have high cost per click, this sort of website should start making money almost from day one.
Combining widgets and blogs is just a fast and easy way of doing mash-ups with RSS feeds. The value to the reader depends on your ability to find and aggregate useful feeds and to focus on usability of the website. And for that reason, I think that sites based purely on RSS feeds may ultimately be of limited value. At Seeking Alpha, for example, we have a team of (live) editors that filters, tags and edits contributors' posts, and it's that process that leads to the vastly superior reader experience versus automated aggregators. We even address the risks inherent in finance blog content with our compliance program.
But in some cases -- particularly if you can find really high quality RSS feeds -- an automated aggregator can provide a good user experience, and then widget-based sites are license to sit back and watch the AdSense revenue gush in. And even if a widget-blog RSS mash up is of limited value, it could still generate a constant trickle of AdSense revenue. And a lot of them could generate a lot of trickles... More on making money with blogs from Steve Pavlina.
There's a lot of opportunity. How about individual sites for Google news, Yahoo news, Microsoft news etc. that use Feedsweep widgets that sucks in headlines from feeds including those from Seeking Alpha and other sites? The RSS feed format for Seeking Alpha ticker-based news is:
http://seekingalpha.com/by/symbol/FEED/feed
where you replace the word "FEED" by the stock ticker.
Update: Now look at this one: In an hour, I put together and published Housing Dashboard with multiple feeds, and added a links to as many housing related blogs as I could find. As a result, this is probably one of the best resources for housing bubble news on the 'Net now, after only an hour's work.
If you succeed in publishing a site using widgets and ads, leave a link below so readers can take a look.
