What Is Content Curation?

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What Is Content Curation?

I know I have written about Blog Curation or Content Curation before but it seems that it is so popular I wanted to write an update.

What is Content Curation?
Is Content Curation Auto Blogging? Hmmm well sort of but not really. Let me give you a definition:

Content Curation - Content Curation is the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting the best possible content that surrounds a specific subject matter and posting it on your site along with your opinions.

… or a better description:

Curation is basically a content marketing tactic. Rather than adding to the mountains of “original” content being uploaded every minute to the web, the curator researches, gathers, and picks the best information around a specific topic and shares only the best with their readers or followers. A curator becomes a thought leader through commentary to provide context and meaning to the information they curate into a blog post or a share with their “real-time” audience on the social web.   Source

As I have said in the other blog posts I love this form of content getting. It is fast and it is kinda like profiting from other peoples work but also being able to credit them for it as I talk about in the video below.

You get the content and they get the link pointing back to their site… so it really is a win/win situation.
That’s why I love it. I have had many people take my content put it up on their sites and then I get their traffic back to my site, it’s an amazing business model. Sort of doing a JV without it costing you anything :-)

Doing it this way saves you time and money. The two things I know you will all be happy to save.

Most of you will have done auto blogging in the past but some of the content that came in was not that good. The quality low and many articles really badly spun so it lowered the quality of your site, and generally people did not stay round long on your site as the content was just trashy. The whole thing with the auto blogging was that people needed to go back and check out the content coming in but most didn’t so really the big Google put a stop to auto blogging by dropping many sites ranking etc.

So even though Content Curation could be said to be similar to auto blogging it isn’t… It is quite different because you really do need to add your thoughts or your opinion to make this work well. It’s like have a never ending supply of information or content.. your own personal information river always flowing. Find out where to get your content and you will have a never ending supply.

In the video I cover a number of topics and one is all about Duplicate Content.

For years people have gone on about duplicate content and for years I have been saying the same thing. Duplicate content is using the same article/content on your site more than once. It would be like a newspaper printing the same story 3 times in the same paper, that is duplicate content.

What we have is called aggrigated content.

The most common question I get about content curation is, “Isn’t that duplicate content?” (in the eyes of the search engines)

There are two answers to this question:

First, if you’re just aggregating content into your website, yes, it is most likely duplicate content. But if you are curating the content, pulling great (not all) information from elsewhere — manually, not automatically — adding your own perspective to it and grouping things into collections of useful information, that is valuable stuff.

This is unique presentation of information that exists nowhere else and is not duplicate content. And we’re not just skirting by duplicate content filters. The goal is to create truly useful and unique content.

Second, if you are providing a valuable service by finding the best information on a subject, responding to a need of a community of people interested in your topic, you will become an authority and build an audience. By engaging this audience, it will grow into a community who is waiting for each of your updates and will respond to you. At that point, you’re “Google proof”, and the question is moot…

And the irony is with your valuable curated resource and social proof you achieve by adding value, that’s when Google will see you as an authority and rely on you and your website to provide good results for people searching in your niche, and all that free traffic is gravy.

Source article

Is content curation Illegal? Good question and the answer is no. However you must, must place the link back to where the content came from.

Who users Content Curation?

Sites have been doing this since before content curation was even cool. If you look around you may not have noticed that this has been going on. Here’s some examples:

  • Social Bookmarking sites have been doing this all along. They set it up so users can share content and vote on it. This has allowed them to build huge authority with the search engines. This is the reason why internet marketers like us have been able to take advantage of their work for links, etc…
  • Some internet news sites like the Huffington post. These sites gather internet content and sort through only the best.
  • Copyblogger.com and sites similar. These sites link to the most relevant content for the specific topic.
  • SEOMoz collects content about SEO from around the web.
I could go on but I think you’ve got the point. I also show you some of the sites that use it on the video so check it out there.  Content curation is awesome and it can turn a no-name site into a trustworthy source for information on a topic and turn it into the most visited site for the topic rather quickly. You really need to be using Content curation as one of your strategies in some of your sites.
 

Why use Content Curation?

Have you ever suffered from writers block. Even on a topic you know really well.
Sometimes you may wonder how on earth you can say the same thing in a different way.
I have found that in some niches so I am very glad to have discovered Content curation a long while ago now. Some are writing like it’s something new but not really, if you have followed me for a while you will know I have been talking about this for years, it just has a fancy name now. But some of my niches were hard to write about as I knew nothing so this was a great way round the problem.
From another point of view sometimes I just don’t have time to write another post, and then there is the constant changes, especially in this IM niche so using other peoples content is very helpful.
 

Here’s a few more reasons why you should use content curation:

  • Mixing your content with curated content will give your readers the best content and save them time in looking around
  • You can become the best source of information in your niche
  • We use Curation on all our new sites it gets them up and running faster, it gets great links back in the site, it just speeds everything up and saves thinking too hard about what to write straight away.
  • As I said earlier if you curate on your site then you will have links coming in and going out to others sites, plus if you also write your own content you can have others take your content for their sites as has happened to me.
  • As I show in the video you can curate videos, pictures, tweets etc, use your imagination
  • It is so much faster to get content and easier as said earlier


What is Content Curation.

So how do I do Content Curation?

Well as I talk about in the video there is the manual way and the almost but not quite auto way. I have done the manual for a while and now I just use software to do it. It is so much faster. So in the video I mention a few ways you can do it manually, but really why would you. You can use this great software for free Best Curation Software, so just go grab it, they also give you some training all about Content curation all in all is a great deal.

If you want to go do it manually then use the RSS feeds from sites within your niche, so use google to find these sites… Sorry but I am all about making things easy and using software is easy… yes sure I am giving you my affiliate link and sure I will make some money if you buy the product, but you don’t need to buy it, use the free version.

Thought you might find this Infographic really helpful:

 

Anyway enough reading and enough watching time to go out and do it, You now know What Is Content Curation now it’s time to go and do it…

now here is another way to curate some content, press the Facebook share button or “Like” button and that will curate some content onto your facebook profile with my compliments. Thanks for sharing and caring.

 

 

 

Best Blog Curation Software

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Best Blog Curation Software

What is the best blog curation software out there? That’s a great question that many of you have asked me. I have been doing blog curation for a very long time now using both the auto posting software (as below) and using specific Blog Curation Software.

I have used the auto posters and still do on some sites, the video, articles and Yahoo answers plugins are all excellent tools to use to  curate content onto your website. However, be warned it can get out of hand and so one does need to go into the sites now and again and check the posts coming in, to make sure that what is coming in is great content.We all know that Google loves new content so it’s well worth going into your auto posted curated content and writing something in there yourself. You can add things like your opinion, or a review, you may not even agree with what has been written so could write that as well. So now days I add at least 10% of my own thoughts at beginning and end of the content I bring in which really does not take too long at all.

There are a huge amount of curated sites out there that rank very highly and if content is great then why not use it for your self on your own site. ( always give credit though as to where article came from)

Here is what I have found. …

If I find a great article and want to share it on Facebook or Twitter then I am sending traffic to someone else’s site, they are probably happy, but I’m not as happy… why? well I want that traffic to go to my own site, so what should I do?
Easy… I take the content that I love and I put it on my blog, I write my 10% comments into it, then post the link into Facebook or Twitter or any other Social Site,  I send traffic to my site. That way my subscribers are happy, they have not had to wade through masses of info to find this great content, I’m happy because I know I am giving my subscribers great content, and I am also happy because I have driven traffic to my site and not the person who wrote the content, although I make sure I have a link back to them in the article or at beginning or end.

Don’t get me wrong though I also leave most of the links they put in there and I also write where I got the information from. Good news is the links out go to great authority sites ( in my case) so that make’s both myself and Google happy. So all round I am building a site that People love and Google loves. It’s a win win.

The other good news is I don’t have to think up what to write about everyday as there is so much great content out there I can curate and use.

If you are still not sure what Blog Curation is then you can go and read the Blog post I have written on WordPress Blog Curation

So what is the Best Blog Curation Software? In my opinion it is by far Curation Soft  you can have the free version of it or pay a very small yearly amount and have it to use all year on as many sites as you want. Plus you get to also use it on 3 Computers. The reason I believe it to be the best is the following:

1. Easy to use

2. Easy to setup

3. On paid version you have twitter as well as number of other places to curate from

4. You can add in other RSS feeds

5. You can use Youtube

6. You can bring in pictures from Flickr

7. One off payment

8. Great training

9. Great support which I had to use once

10. Drag and drop it’s so easy.

So if you have read enough and you want to go and see for your self then click on my Best Blog Curation Software link

One other question I get about blog curation is… Does Linking To Other Sites Bring You More Traffic?

Well here is a curated article on that topic…..

Best Blog Curation Software

This is one of the most often asked questions I get from beginner content marketers who are investigating  curation.  I say “beginner” because once you’ve read a few sites  that aren’t just shopping or direct sales sites, you quickly realize that everyone is linking to other sites – a lot.  And not by gun point, but willingly.

What’s more, sites that send people away are some of the highest traffic sites on the web.  So how can a site that actively sends people away, like Mashable.com, be one of the highest traffic sites on the web?

The answer is not to over think the answer.  It is so obvious that people don’t believe it at first.

As a content marketer you MUST send people away from your site in order to get a lot of traffic.  You don’t have to understand why to know it’s true.  If sending traffic away from your site was bad, all the major blogs, news sites, and niche content sites that link to resources outside their own domains would be unpopular instead of rolling in readers.

Some of the lowest traffic sites on the web, conversely, don’t link to anything outside their own domain.  Though there are sites that dead-end on the web which also get traffic, it is either paid traffic or comes from affiliates who are paid to send traffic from their sites and lists.  I’m talking about organic search and direct traffic from straight links on, you guessed it, other sites.

So Why Do You Get More Traffic By Linking To Other Sites?

Again, this answer is simple, but true.  Sites that actively (gleefully even) send people to other sites are hubs.  They are the watering holes of the internet.  In Africa, once a Zebra is full up on water, the watering hole sends them away, happy to live another day.  But do you think for a second that Zebra hasn’t burned the coordinates of a watering hole into their mind?  Of course it has.

Hot Watering Hole Action

Not only that, but the Zebra is going to lead any and all other Zebras he finds back to that watering hole.  ”The water is good, cold, and plentiful here.  We should always come back to this place.”

A hub site that delivers great and plentiful information to people who are thirsty for it has the exact same effect.  People come in throngs to sites like Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable, Boing Boing and thousands of others every single day.  And what do each of those sites do?  They send those people right back out on the web to quench their thirst for information.

And those people bookmark, share, Like, Tweet, and email the crap out of those sites’ links to share the great watering holes they’ve found.  And the news spreads far and wide, virally, that there is this great place to learn about do-it-yourself projects, or about the trials of motherhood, or a site that has all the latest news on Android apps.

That is not just a primer on how to get a lot of traffic.  It’s exactly how the entire web actually works.  If hubs didn’t exist and no one ever showed their visitors the information that they’ve discovered elsewhere on the web, there would be no web at all.

Thankyou to the folks at Curation Soft for the article

Hopefully you have found this information helpful, if so can you share it round on the net, Facebook, Twitter, anywhere even Google + and you help me and I will continue to bring you great content.

Blog Curation is fun, quick and easy with the right tools. I know what it is like to get writers block so any help on that side is a great help. Sometimes all we need is a start to what we should write about and then our brain kicks in and we can go on writing.
If you have a site that needs new life breathed into it then make it a curated site and go download the software and use it to build huge sites that have a great following. You go out and find the good stuff using the software, it really is easy.

This is the Best Curation Software out there, I know some of you have bought Harlans and that is also great plus you get the training, this is abit different and for those of you who could not go the price we had Harlans course for this will be the answer for you.

I have been using this Blog Curation Software for a long while now and so can really recommend it to you all. You can trial it for free so come on give it a go. You don’t have use of all the features in the FREE version but it will give you a real good idea of how to use it, and you will quickly see why it’s the Best Blog Curation Software out there, for all the reasons listed above.