Out of Blog Ideas? Try “News-Jacking”

In November, 2011, David Meerman Scott released a book entitled “Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage“.  According to Scott, “Newsjacking” is “the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.” This is a great angle to make money blogging.

Scott let us know: “If you are clever enough to react to breaking news very quickly, providing credible second-paragraph content in a blog post, tweet, or media alert that features the keyword of the moment, you may be rewarded with a bonanza of media attention.”

You can setup Google alerts to keep informed of news in your area of expertise.  When something new and interested is spotted, you might be the best person to add to that story, and thus get media attention for yourself and/or your website.

Sometimes, just curating a post can be good SEO for you site.  You can copy a small paragraph of text, link to the original news page or blog article, then add a small comment of your own to make it unique.

Internet marketers for  year have been doing a similar exploit known as “Launch-Jacking”.  As new products are launched, some marketers create mini-sites around that product, and they do a better job of SEO than the product creator.  Then when people search for that product, the affiliate’s site comes up higher in the search engine rankings.  That affiliate also offers a related bonus, and gets the sale and the commission, earning thousands of dollars.