Content curation is not for every blogger, but it is one killer method to leverage already popular content to get tons of traffic.
What exactly is content curation?
Take a look at the news section:
http://topimnews.wealthmagnate.com/
I don’t have much time to publish on it now, but when I started this blog, I had no money, no content, no traffic, nothing.
I knew the easiest way to get people to visit me and read my content would be to curate already popular content…
…like all news sites do, and marketers like this guy:
https://wealthmagnate.com/building-an-adsense-empire/
Content curation is publishing other people’s content on your site with a link back to the original.
It’s always best to publish your insights as well, rather than just copying and pasting, but as long as you link back to the original, you can just republish if you have no time or nothing to say.
Content curation benefits
1 Free, fresh, popular content
I don’t know if you’ve ever been blogging, or want to become a big time blogger, but it takes a lot of time… and if not time – money.
Most people think:
“I’ll publish 50 articles with no dates and they will bring me traffic forever”
It doesn’t work like that.
With a blog, the moment you stop publishing is the moment it starts dying… content has a way of compounding, as you produce more content, it becomes more powerful.
Fresh content is gold… and when it’s also popular, it’s solid gold.
2 Traffic
You know getting traffic when starting out is the most difficult thing, maybe you don’t know, but it is… even if you think you publish awesome stuff.
When you are new, no one cares about you… maybe some will care about you, and if you have someone to position you as an expert – great, more than some will care about you…
…but you can’t go wrong with curating content.
Check out this article:
http://topimnews.wealthmagnate.com/awesome-ideas-how-to-use-visuals-in-your-social-media-marketing/
It is one of the first articles I published on the news section, I took it from social media examiner… this article still brings me traffic even though it’s been a few years and I’ve never updated it.
I don’t even know how people find it now, maybe on Stumble Upon… in the beginning though, it got boat loads of social media traffic for months, which brings me to:
3 Curated content gets shared a lot easier
I don’t know whether people like to share it because they see the link to the popular site it was published on originally, or because the content had already been liked a lot, but they sure tend to like and share curated content a lot easier.
In the beginning, all of my social traffic came from the news section, no one shared my original content but me LOL.
4 Backliks
When you link to the originals, people get backlinks… and they will love you for that. Backlinks are vital for SEO and now when it takes a lot of skill to build them, bloggers die to get natural links from other blogs.
Content curation drawbacks
1 Curated content does not rank
There’s not much to explain here, it just does not rank… you can build a news site to link to other blogs and help them rank, but that’s it for SEO.
News sites rank for trending topics, but that’s different.
2 Dies fast
Sometimes it doesn’t like I showed you with my article up there, but social media traffic is not that long lasting, and curated content does not get that much search traffic (because it does not rank).
3 You have to curate tons of content… and then some more to make it work
As I already said, it just doesn’t rank, meaning you can’t use one article to get traffic for a long time.
I don’t know if you like it or not, but content curation is a pretty decent way to get traffic for cheap… and some times easy too.
I did it when I started online and it helped me get traction and then build one of the most badass blogs online.
Let me know if you liked this article and stay awesome.
Vladi
