Using Content Curation to Reduce Your Workload While Building Beneficial Relationships

In my last podcast, I interviewed Paul Clifford, creator of a new software product called PageOne Curator which he created to help website owners speed up the process of content curation when creating new posts.

When I first met Paul at a Warrior event in Raleigh, NC, I had no idea what curation was, nor had Paul created the software. Thankfully, after meeting Paul, I decided he was a guy that I needed to stay in touch with because he was having a lot of success online.

Two Rules for Content Creation

Whenever you are creating content, its a very good idea to keep two things in mind: pleasing your reader and pleasing the search engines.

To please your reader, you need to create content that is informative, educational and highly relevant to the topic they were searching for. If you can accomplish that, your chances of turning a one-time visitor into a subscriber and/or regular reader go up significantly.

The other reason that you want to create epic content is to ensure that your readers are so impressed with the content that they share it with others via social networks. When this happens, you get completely natural inbound links to your site, and this is exactly what Google wants to see.

So, killer content = more engagement + natural inbound links = more traffic = more revenue.

This is why we create content for readers first and search engines second.

To please search engines, your content must be 100% original…or does it?

Say what? You mean it doesn’t have to be 100% original?

Search Engines Love Curated Content

Content curation is not a new idea. The media has been doing it for years. 

In fact, one of the most highly trafficked media sites on the web, which was recently sold to AOL for $315 million is pretty much all curated content. The site is called the Huffinton Post.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Now check out the screenshot below where I took a bunch of the text and ran it through copyscape to check for duplicates.

As you can see, there are plenty of duplicates for the section of content that I was checking. Despite this fact, when I performed a search in Google for the headline of the article, I was presented with the following results:

Did you notice who was at the top? The Huffington Post!

So much for the idea that Google won’t index content that is in more than one place online.

So, What Is Curated Content Anyway?

Essentially, curated content, as the name suggests, is content that consists of some portion of your original content, plus smaller portions of content that is borrowed from other sites, so long as you provide an attribution link to the site you borrowed the content from.

Is this allowed? Of course it is, just be sure to provide the attribution link!

Think about it for a moment, if some other website wrote a post that contained a snippet or image or video from one of your site’s posts and then they linked back to your site, would you really mind? Not likely. In fact, you’d probably appreciate it!

Here’s an example of a curated post that I recently created. Upon examining the post, you will notice that I’ve borrowed content from numerous other sources. You should also notice that I’ve linked back to everyone that I borrowed from. By creating the post in this way, I was able to more comprehensively cover the topic and my readers liked that.

Did any of the folks I borrowed from mind? Not one bit. In fact, I was contacted by one of them to thank me for helping to give them some extra exposure.

Content Curation Leads to Beneficial Relationships

Anytime you are helping someone else to increase their traffic, they are going to like you. In fact, they might even feel like they’d want to return the favor at some point.

This is called ‘building goodwill’ and its a concept as old as dirt.

To me, this seems like a much smarter way to start to build relationships with other bloggers in my niche. I start by giving them something instead of asking them to give me something. Kind of a no brainer, don’t you think?

Over time, if you continue to create content on your site(s) that makes use of this curation concept, not only will you have to do less work than if you created everything from scratch, but you will be simutaneously building relationships with other bloggers in your niche that will eventually want to return the favor, and when they do, you’re going to get extra traffic and links.

Talk about a win-win!

How to Automate Curation

You can definitely curate manually, however, search for the content, getting it, formatting it, and building attribution links can be tedious. Thankfully, that is where well engineered software can help.

Have a look a Paul’s demo video below to see what I mean.

As you can see, Paul has created a fantastic too that will save you a boatload of time when it comes to managing your niche sites. Thanks Paul, you rock, mate!

If you’d like to get yourself a copy of Paul’s software, you can grab a copy here (affiliate link). If you’d like more information on the concept of content curation and how you can apply it to building sites, you can also download Paul’s getting started guide.

What Do You Think?

Was this a helpful post? Could it have been better? Do you have some thoughts or ideas you’d like to add? Please share your comments below. Thanks so much!