Feeling lazy?
Can’t be bothered creating your own content today?
Well, you don’t have to; introducing the lazy marketer’s guide to content curation.
You see, 2 days ago I received an email recently from a Profit Copilot member who wanted to take a content marketing short cut. He was tempted to copy and paste articles from Ezine.com and use them on his website’s blog.
It’s an easy mistake to make.
Obviously, I encouraged him not to do this though, as copying and sharing unchanged content can be detrimental to his site… it’s kinda spammy.
The last thing you’ll want your visitors to think is that you are plagiarising, or otherwise using unoriginal articles, media, or other content.
So today, I’d like to offer you a much more efficient, quicker, and simpler method of content creation.
This is a technique called content curation which is often confused with another technique called content aggregation.
What’s the difference?
Content Curation vs Content Aggregation
Content curation happens when you take a small portion of someone else’s content and use it to create more content.
A good example of content curation is the Slashdot.com website.
However content aggregation on the other hand, is when you just take someone else’s content and use it “as is” on your own site/blog. There is a danger with this method because if it’s not done right then you risk plagiarising other people’s content which can negatively affect your site’s integrity and traffic, if you don’t link to the original and use a canonical tag.
A good example of content aggregation done right is the Alltop.com website:
Content aggregation doesn’t create extra value to your content and doesn’t offer anything new for the reader, or anything that they can’t find elsewhere. So, why would they want to keep coming back to your blog? This is where curation comes into play.
Not all of us are meant to be writers or bloggers, but luckily, there’s enough content already written on the web to be able to really collect and form into new pieces.
How To Curate Content
So how do you find content to curate?
- Know what your audience wants
- Find articles that will interest them
- Copy and past a small portion of that article
- Wrap it a block quote tag
- Link to the original
- Add your own unique thoughts and opinions
It’s that simple.
So let’s break it down in more details.
Start with finding relevant articles that your audience will appreciate. This is why knowing your audience is essential, otherwise nobody will care about the content you’re curating.
Then take a small portion of that article, a piece that you find particularly engaging or helpful, and paste it into a new blog post.
Then you’ll want to wrap this section in block quotes and link it back to its original source.
Add your own valuable insight on the topic and voila!
You’ve just created curated content that is unique to your blog. It’s a very easy process, but important to know and understand.
And as always, this article accompanies a video on my Profit Copilot YouTube channel, called Super-Fast Content Creation (above).
In the video, I found an article that I thought my audience might appreciate about the benefits of ‘affiliate marketing for advertisers’.
While it was a fairly lengthy piece, it was also numbered, which made this example much more organised and useful for the tutorial.
Since there were five different points with their own sections to cover, I copied all of the content and pasted it into a new WordPress blog post on my site.
Then I got rid of most of the extra text, outside of a sentence or so, for each point. I highlighted each of those sections and put them in block quotes as explained above, then added my own opinions and advice on the topics, as well as the hyperlink for the original source.
Something important to remember; be sure to change the original headline so that you’re still explaining the content, but you aren’t plagiarising the source article.
Save and publish, and you’re done!
This is as simple as it gets when it comes to content curation and creation. It’ll be a massive help in bringing traffic to your website or blog as well, but there are other methods you can learn as well. If you want to learn how to gain organic traffic and build a bigger following, be sure to go to profitcopilot.com/traffic and check out my absolutely free, no-strings-attached training course.