Make money online from content curation - a strange suggestion

[Kay]

Content curation has been around for a long time. After all, Reader's Digest has been doing it since 1922, and there are plenty others following that path. It's not even new in Internet terms.

So why am I posting this? Well, I'm signed up to receive a few MMO emails, just to keep in touch with what's going on, and I was surprised by one I received today. To paraphrase: I need never worry again about attacks from Pandas and Penguins because curating content is a way of future-proofing your website.

Yeah? Lead me to it! So I clicked on the link, which redirected me to a content curation product via a Clickbank affiliate link. And you know what is even better? Once I buy the product for $47 or $97, depending on which version I choose, it's going to do everything automatically for me! It will find the news and automatically create my posts. I will never have to do anything! It will create posts that people love to read, bring me loads of traffic, and I'll earn heaps of cash from this. It sounds great, doesn't it?

Hmm, what's all this talk about making yourself immune from Panda et al? So, it'll be fine to create a lot of crap dupe content postings based on scraped content?

I've nothing whatsoever against content curation. It can be very helpful if done well with editorial insight and analysis, but it looks as though G's algo changes may be bringing a whole new wave of absolute rubbish to try to game them in a different way.

[KenW3]

After Clinton made a post last month about the website CurationSoft.com for sale at Flippa in the thread A recent DD experience, I did some research into curation software and support tools.

Along the way, I found junk tools offered as WSOs, tools with intermediate features that would probably serve well enough for a non-professional blog, and tools used by the best news organisations. Now that this process seems to have been picked up as the newest MMO method for a short-cut around running a real business and a way to avoid doing real work, it may become more difficult to find useful, accurate information. All the appeals to the lazy and the greedy will start to appear at the top of the SERPs, as scammers begin to promote this as an easy way to make money. I hope not, but I've received those same emails Kay mentioned above.

First, let's answer the question, What is content curation. Basically, it is the process of going through the web and finding useful information on a specialty for which you have superior knowledge. Through possession of this personal expertise, the curator goes through all of the information available on the web that is new each day, and compiles only that which is useful, accurate, and places it on one site for the benefit of readers. The curator then writes a review or overview of the content, and places it into the context of the site with the curated content. SEOmoz has a content curation guide.

Content curation is not a way to legally use articles from other sites. Fair use still applies, as does copyright law. A magazine or news site which does curation around a topic would add context to the article, with original writing to describe the content and explain why is it valuable, then the first few sentences can be quoted with a link to view the rest of the (complete) original article (on the original site). To be perfectly clear, this content is not on your site, you would be linking to the original site with the complete content. Those sites most likely to rank in SERPs using curated content will be those sites that are recognised news organisations, or those sites that have substantial, additional, original articles related to the curated content.

If you would like to try content curation software for free, to learn how it works, go to Scoop.it and create an account. I also found their FAQs, Guided Tour, and Tutorial, all linked on the bottom of the home page, worth the time to review.

A good list of available curation tools is at Quora.com, What are the best content curation tools for daily use? and What are recommended content curation solutions for business or website startups? Please be aware that the graphic for The Tool Universe in the above link is, itself, curated content, so you should view this list from Robin Good's article titled Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 6: The Tools Universe