Content curation can be a great strategy for building your own content website empire, be it news, information or any other related infotainment content segment. What is content curation? How to use these strategies to create your own website that draws tonnes of traffic with minimal work?
Content Aggregation for Websites
Let’s face it. The world’s biggest Internet company that feeds the world with all sorts of news and information does not spend a dime on creating its own content. Google feeds on news and articles generated by others, who invest lots of time and money creating the content for its users.
In this era of disruptive technologies, one of the world’s largest car rental company — Uber — doesn’t really own cars. It serves as an aggregator for vehicles owned by others. Similarily, the world’s largest real estate rental company — Airbnb — does not own any of the properties available for rent on its website. Despite holding no actual inventory, all these aggregators have become gaints in their field. That’s the power of aggregation.
If you are an infopreneur, what lesson do you learn from these giant companies? Don’t just spend time and money creating original content when you can build a viable business simply aggregating news and articles published on the web.
What is Content Curation?
In the Internet space, there are thousands of websites that curate content and news generated by others to build their own websites. Sometimes, such websites grab more traffic by publishing a curated content in comparison with the original publisher. For instance, websites publishing daily news round-ups can garner more eyeballs than the individual websites from where the content is sourced.
Content curation is simply the process of gathering information on a particular topic or area of interest and presenting them at one place in an interesting manner.
Content curation should not be confused with content scraping. In the past, many websites used to scrape RSS feeds from multiple websites and aggregated them at one place using automation. Scraping does not add any value to the already published information. It is basically a duplicate content.
In contrast to content scraping or auto-blogging, content curation is a manual process where a person spends time gathering information & media related to certain topic, filters the information to find the useful ones and then weaves them into one article. In this process, the curated content becomes an original work that helps users discover all the relevant information at one place. Such curated articles also add value with additional inputs from the curator.
You can curate news, information, articles, resources and much more. An example of content curation is listicles, or an article with a list of certain topic. Eg: “Most Talked About Start-up Investments in 2016”, “Banking News Roundup: September 20016”, “Best Free WordPress Themes for September 2016”, “Most Expensive Domains in 2016” or “Highest Earning Bloggers of 2016”.
In the above examples, the curator does not create anything from scratch. Instead, she is merely pulling information from different sources and putting them together at one place. Such articles have long been a successful strategy for blogging.
Leaders: Content Curation Examples
Who are using the content curation strategy to build successful companies? Here are some examples of content curation websites that have become successful businesses aggregating & curating content.
Huffington Post: A website that curates news published around the globe. It has grown to have several country-specific websites.
Slashdot: A technology-related news website curator that provides news snippets with a brief commentary.
Green Data Center News: Curates news about data centers, green information technology, energy efficiency, and climate change.
Digg: A news aggregator with a curated homepage. It relies on data and user interaction to power the main pages of the website.
Buzzfeed: Curates wacky, interesting facts and content.
How to Start a Content Curation Website?
We know content curation is an effective strategy to develop successful websites rapidly with low investment. So, how do you create websites using the curate contention strategy?
Pick a niche for content curation
Don’t just become a website with list of links. Get your own niche based on your area of interest and expertise. If you are good with finance, why not curate content for any finance topic? If you like sports and have good understanding of the topic, you can start curating content around sports news. A foodie can start curating content around cuisines and recipes. Whatever topic you choose, stay focused and pick a niche that has a good number of audience.
Add your own voice to content curation
Google is the biggest content aggregator. As a content curator, you need to make your website stand out. If people like machine-curated bland content, they won’t come to you. Fortunately, people like communicating with humans. You need to present your curated content in a humanized manner to make yourself different from Google News or Search.
For successful content curation, you need to add value through your inputs, commentary and opinions. Add a personal twist and flavour to your curated articles. For instance, you can add a sarcastic or humourous comment on your curated news articles. With your personal touch and voice, the website will stand out as a unique source of information that keeps your audience engaged and persuade them to come back to your website.
Add value through content curation
Rather than simply stating the news and information, add value to it though comments and personal stories. You can also remodel the information into image galleries, infographics, videos, podcasts and slideshows. Help your audience discover the latest in your website niche easily and fast. For instance, if your website is about banking news, you can become a source of latest, reliable information available at one place.
Stay updated with the latest in your niche
You need to stay on the top of all the information being generated online so that yo can skim through it and offer the best of it to your audience as fast as possible. You want your audience to know about the latest development and news on your website. If you are lazy, your website might be stale news for your audience. Keep a tab on social media, set up news alerts and keep track of the major sources of information. If you can also track lesser know sources of information, you are more likely to succeed.