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.
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.
Why use Content Curation?
Sometimes you may wonder how on earth you can say the same thing in a different way.
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
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.
A number of years ago, about 25 or so, my parents left New Zealand to go to Australia, my dad a photographer, felt that there was more opportunity there. Infact his words were “Gail the grass is greener there” so they sold everything and off they went. Dad did photography at horse shows all round Victoria, he loved it infact they both did. They loved the travel etc. Things went very well, New Zealand was going through hard time as a country and Australia had not gone through it… as yet.
