Last month, I took a break from actively writing to start a few new projects. This means that this month, I need to make some money, so I've returned to my old faithful side hustle of writing news articles to refill my bank account. I've made videos like this in the past, but today I'm going to update you on exactly how you can use Google News to earn anywhere from $60 to $200 plus per article with zero investment and on your own schedule. Let's get into it.
If you're new here, my name is Hudson, and on this channel, I explore all sorts of ways to make money as a writer. Writing news articles has become my most consistently profitable way to refill my bank account when it gets dry. At a high level, this method involves taking already trending topics, using AI to write profitable articles on them, and then using your brain to turn those articles into money. In this article, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that step-by-step.
Many videos that cover this method suggest submitting articles to websites or publications to get paid. Personally, I don't like doing that because it's time-consuming, and you might spend time writing articles only to get denied or ghosted by the publication or website altogether. Instead, I use a platform called NewsBreak. I like NewsBreak because it's free, easy, and has a built-in audience. On NewsBreak, they pay you for page views, making it a really easy way to monetize this method. You can also use a Medium account, your own blog, or sell these articles as a freelancer. I'll add videos on how to set up all these different methods in the description below.
Once you figure out where you're going to post your articles, the first thing you're going to do is go to trends.google.com. Click "Explore" and change the country to where you're targeting. NewsBreak is only available in the U.S., so I'll pick the U.S. Change the date to the last 90 days and change the content to "News." Then, take a look at the trending topics that interest you. This is important because you'll have to spend a little time editing and fact-checking your AI-generated content, so you don't want to get bored with the topic. When you find one, click on it and copy the keywords into Google and search under "News." Then, copy the top headline and URL into your Google Sheets page or note-taking app. Repeat this process for as many articles as you plan to write in this batch. If you run out of popular topics from the Explore page, you can always click "Trending Now" on Google Trends or go to news.google.com to find more trending topics to write about.
You want to pick trending topics because you know there's already going to be an audience for them, and you don't want to spend time writing an article only to find out that not very many people were interested in it in the first place. For reference, what I define as trending is any topic with over 100,000 daily searches on Google Trends or on the front page of Google News.
Now, to actually write the articles, I use a tool called SEO Writing AI, but I'll also show you a free method using ChatGPT and a tool to humanize your text. In my past videos, I haven't spent too much time on how to actually write the articles, so I'm going to dive a little deeper into how I take these AI drafts and turn them into clean, profitable articles. You're going to come over to the One-Click Blog Post tool, copy your main keywords from Google Trends or Google News, and add them into the main keyword section. Copy your headline from your base article and add it to the headline section. Then, come down to the core settings and fill these out. I'll fill these out for you, and you can just screenshot this page, but the most important things are to keep the articles short, use GPT-3 128k, and humanize text at an eighth-grade level, as it's the optimal level for readability across the world. We'll skip over these two sections and go straight to SEO. Simply click NLP keyword generation, you can add additional phrases from Google Trends or anything else you want to include, but honestly, the keywords it provides will work great. For the last section, you're going to add in external linking and connect to the web. This will give you real-time, up-to-date information and provide links to build authority. SEO Writing AI is very useful, but these last two features are only available on the pro version. If you want to use these features, which I do recommend, as well as extend your word count, you can use code HUDSON25 at checkout to save 25% on your monthly membership. Or, you can use this next method, which is a little more time-consuming but 100% free.
Open up ChatGPT in a Google Chrome browser, then go to the Chrome Web Store and search for an extension called Web ChatGPT. This will connect your ChatGPT account to real-time web results, and when you ask it to write a news article for you, it will produce an entire article complete with headings and source links. The final step is to humanize your articles and start earning money from them. In my opinion, this step is the most important because it makes a difference between simply writing an article with AI and posting an article that people actually want to read. AI is very good at conveying information effectively, but since your audience is made up of humans, you need to turn the AI's text into something your audience actually wants to read. At the end of the day, longer read times will always equal more money, regardless of the platform you post it on. So, I recommend investing just a little bit of your brainpower into this step. For me, it takes about half an hour to write these articles from start to finish. If you're new to this, it might take you a little longer.
Here’s a really effective five-step process I use to do this:
Open up your base article to get a feel for the topic. Skim the article for images, quotes, and social media content to embed in your article. All of this keeps your reader on the page longer and extends your read time. If you’re feeling stuck, search for the topic on Google and open up the top three results for more inspiration.
Remove any redundant information or anything the AI has repeated because it does that. If you’ve used SEO Writing to automatically add your links, they will already be in your article. If not, add at least one hyperlink to an external source within each subheading. Always add hyperlinks as opposed to a list of sources at the bottom—it just looks a lot cleaner.
Adjust the subheadings to tell the whole story of the article. This is a little writing trick I use because most people skim articles before deciding if they want to read them. I like to give them the bullet points of the article in the main headings to help entice them to actually read the article, extending the read time and increasing your earnings.
Listen to the article to hear how it sounds and make any final adjustments to its flow. Use your phone or computer's native text-to-speech function, or download a plugin like Speechify. I also recommend downloading the Grammarly web extension as it catches editing errors and saves you a lot of time.
Craft a compelling headline. Take one of the top results from Google and mold your headline around that. This may feel like a little more work than simply copying and pasting or using plagiarism spinners, but that little bit of extra work makes all the difference between people actually reading your articles or not, and ultimately earning you money.
I have added links to everything I outlined in this video in the description below, as well as a video outlining more specifics on getting started and how to be successful on NewsBreak. I really hope you found this article valuable. If you did, like, comment, subscribe, and share it with someone who may find it valuable as well. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you in the next one.
