Make Money Writing Bad Online Content

Whether the method used to make money online is to earn a portion of a penny for every unique page view, or a percentage of revenue from advertisers, the consistent advice to any writer who wishes to make money publishing articles online is: write quality content. Quality content will be read, linked to, and forwarded to friends. Some will "Digg" it, others will "Stumble" it or "Reddit." Quality content generates the most page views and revenue. Or does it?

What if a highly skilled, professional writer deliberately wrote poor quality content? What if he (for sake of argument, it's a he) went out of his way to include at least one grammatical error in every sentence? What if his voice was passive, and his subjects and verbs never agreed?

What if this writer peppered his article with factual errors; not esoteric mistakes that most people would miss, but basic common knowledge mistakes. For example, in his Introduction to Genetics he states that sex chromosomes for boys are xx, and for girls are xy.

He does one thing right -- he researches which keywords are likely to get his article page views. He may even be so bold as to pop into an open forum discussing genetics issues, post a few comments and link to his article. His work is over.

The first person to come across this article can't believe her eyes. She pinches herself to make sure she is awake. Her jaw drops and a fly narrowly misses her mouth. She blinks her eyes, shakes her head and... forwards it to three friends who will think this most terrible article is darkly amusing. And so it goes. Her best friend "Diggs" it. The Introduction to Genetics ends up at the top of Reddit's "WTF" category.

A mediocre article is deleted and forgotten. A truly horrid article is something to talk about, and the page views and revenues keep rolling in. The best way to make money writing online may be to write the worst quality content imaginable.