The No-Nonsense Guide To Make Money From Content Curation

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Content curation is organizing and bringing useful content at one place. Some people do it naturally, and many learn this technique over the time. You can make decent amount of money with Content curation, and this article is all about it.

Content curation is one of the most common attributes of our daily digital life. Content curation in most simple language is bringing the best content that you like to read at one place. In old days, we used to do this with the help of social-bookmarking sites like Stumble-Upon, Delicious, Digg and so on. In those time, we let other users also vote for our curated content, and make it reachable to more people. In today’s trend,

In today’s trend, voting of content is replaced by social-sharing. If you are a quality content-curator, your curated content will get more social-sharing and acknowledgement. These days a majority of online users take help of content curation tools like Scoop.It! Which is created for curation purpose?

Content Curation Monetization
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If you look at the current trend of most of the popular websites on the web, they all are using content curation as a part of their content strategy or solely uses content curation as content strategy. One best example is Upworthy, which curate best of the videos, uses strong headlines and drive millions of traffic from social-sharing sites.  If you want to know more about it, you should check out Digital Upworthy’s viral formula. Here is the main excerpt:

Upworthys marketing
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As an end user, I always love to read curated content, because it helps me to save time on discovering great content, and it also keep me away from bad content. Now, this made me think about making money from content curation. I like the idea, as the time spent on content curation is less, and one can easily use this model as a passive online income source If you are serious about it, you can easily plan a business model for your content curation site.

Here I will be sharing some ideas that you can adopt and use to create an awesome content curation blog. You can use it for various purposes, and I will explain that too at the end of this article.

Ideas to make money from Content Curation:

When it comes to online, there is endless ways of using an idea to create more ideas. Here I will share the plan which is easy to execute, and you can use it for either marketing or for making money. The best thing about content curation is anyone can do it, and you don’t have to be perfect from day one, as with practice you would know which kind of content is more appropriate for sharing and will work better.  I have divided the article in sub-topic, that will make your reading easy and comforting.

You can do it
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What all you need to execute this idea:

Content curation could be done on any platform (There are various tools), but if you want it to work for you as a money-making system, you should do it on your self-hosted WordPress blog. If you are an existing WordPress user, you know how easy it is to create a blog and set everything up. If you are a newbie, you can refer to Shouters WordPress guide, where you can learn everything you need to know about creating the blog with WordPress.

Topic:

This is the most crucial brain-storming you need to do to make content curation work for you. You can go completely viral by targeting topics to everyone, or you can target a specific niche. For example, If you are into finance niche, and you want to target people related to finance niche, it would make better sense to cover topic around finance niche only to get more targeted traffic.

An easy way to decide the topic is something that you love reading all the time. If you use Zite, go to Zite topics and see which topics you have set to discover. Or analyse your Twitter account to find which kind of keywords you tweet about the most. Picking the right topic will ensure that you will not get bored with the content curation process.

Design:

Simple design
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I would suggest you to pick a theme that helps in improving social media sharing. For a content curation site, all you need is a simple design, big social-sharing buttons, clean navigation and social-subscription. The Major source of traffic for content curation website is Social-media traffic, so you should ensure that your blog design helps your readers to share content easily, and subscribe to your social channel. Before I give more design tips, I suggest you to read about what make a content sharable on social-media, and seven types of content people love on social-media.

To ensure your curation blog look professional, ensure to take advantage of all modern design elements. Ex: Flat UI design, Bigger Fonts, Responsive design to name a few. Also, take advantage of Social meta tags to make your content and the social profile more reachable.

Content type:

As a curator, you are free to curate any content, and the best one is a mix of all ( Text + Video + Infographic), or Infographic only or Videos only. This is something you need to decide of your own, based on your liking. Usually, I prefer a quality video sites that curate content based on my interest topic. Moreover, video curation is easy and because of public video sharing sites like Youtube, Vimeo you can find endless videos, and this will keep your site always updated.

Curated content Title:

As a curator, your role is to discover best of the best stuff to read. Now, there are times some content are amazing but with a bad-title. It’s your role to polish the title to make it more sharable. WordPress users can use this free plugin to experiment with 3-4 titles to find the title with best CTR. (I use the same plugin on ShoutMeLoud). Do remember, your target is the social-media platform, so make your title clickable by giving the personal touch. For example, if I have to share this video about Bitcoin, I would use a title like “This fantastic video made me learn everything about BitCoin in 204 seconds“. Be as creative as you can, and do remember your goal is to amplify your content with strong headlines.

Monetization Techniques for Content Curation blog:

The interesting bit is, you can apply most of the common blog monetisation technique on curated-content blog. But to make it work the best for you, here are some ideas and tips.

  • If you are curating in a niche topic (Ex: Finance, Real-estate), you can sell your own eBook or use Amazon affiliate and recommend top selling eBook from amazon on that particular category.
  • You can also reach out to other experts selling services or product, and tell them about your niche curation site. The quality of traffic on such niche-sites are really high, and the conversion rate would be great. You can use this as a pitching point, and get direct advertisements.
  • You can also use this technique to build a targeted mailing list, and later on make money from eMail marketing. I will cover this technique in some other post, but for now; having a targeted Email list is like having your own cash-bond.
  • If you not really interested in monetisation, you can always use content curation blog to drive traffic to your own blog, or to build your online profile.
  • In contextual advertising, AdSense will work great for you.

Few Important things to keep a note of:

For me, content curation is all about stuff I like on the web. Think of your content curation site as, stuff that you not only loved to read, but you want others to read too. Also, this works as your personal bookmarking site. So, always ensure that you pick only those stuff that you like to add in your personal bookmark.

Content Curation value
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  • Small online businesses can set mini-content curation site and drive highly-targeted traffic to their main site. For example: if you sale fashion accessories, you can set Two mini curation site for “Men’s fashion”  “Women’s fashion”, and curate best fashion tips from around the web. You can add your store ads on the sidebar, and drive traffic.
  • Since our focus is to get traffic from Social-media sites, adding your own text with the curated content is an optional choice. If you curating videos, I would suggest you to add 2-3 lines about the video or why you liked the video.
  • Maintain a proper posting-schedule and you can take advantage of WordPress scheduling feature, to drip-feed content on your curation site. Or use this WordPress plugin to Curate without leaving webpage which you are curating.
  • Instead of retweeting any link on Twitter directly, which is relevant to your curation site, you can curate it, and share the curated post on all your social-networking site.
  • You might like to automate the social-media sharing to save your time. You can take advantage of social media automation tools like Hootsuite or use Jetpack auto-publicize feature which supports Google+ too.
  • Executing this idea will not take much time, and with 1 hour of work in a week, you can keep your site up and running.
  • Quality is the key to success with content-curation.

To sum it up:

Instead of sharing content you like to share on social-media sites, you curate them at one place to let others see and discover it anytime. This fun stuff will not only help you to create your own “Best stuff to read” place, but will also help you to make money out of it. Here are the list of links and tools mentioned in this article for quick reference:

If you have more ideas or suggestion to add into my idea, feel free to share it via comment. If you find this idea useful, do give us a Shout on Facebook and Google plus.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

24 thoughts on “The No-Nonsense Guide To Make Money From Content Curation”

  1. Sam

    i am going to work on video content curation from Youtube, then an seperate video website will be good or an channel on youtube for the collection of those videos?

    I am choosing Instagram as an inital social media for marketing because of its easy accessbility to video contents. I will upload video’s demo part there.
    So later on ,is it essential to work on other social media as well?

  2. William

    Thanks Harsh! Sometimes some of us curators can feel isolated and be thinking to themselves “What business do I have curating ?”. But thankfully there are people like you who’ve obviously made a good living out of it, so that’s very encouraging. I would definitely echo that you have GOT to love your subject and what you do, if it’s just about the money, forget it,

  3. Lee

    Hi, I have been following your blog for quite some time now which has boosted my interest in starting my own blog. The more I read about Blogging the more I tend to draw towards content curation for a magazine website for my niche. I even got me a domain and a premium theme- Newspaper 7 from ThemeForest. Now for starters, I would love to try out a free curation tool to find out how I will stand. I would be glad if you could advise on best free plugins for curation.
    Thanks

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