Have you ever heard about curating content? You can build a website solely for curating content, and if you’d like, even make money from it. In this article you’ll even learn about how to automatically curate content in WordPress.
What is content curation?
Content curation is basically picking articles from other websites and publishing them on your own. The articles you pick could be based on topic, or if you’re looking to highlight the best content online. You can even write your own content, and simply bring in featured content from other places.
It’s important to note that content curation is not exactly the same as content aggregation or autoblogging, where you pull in a lot of content from a wide variety of sources. Content curation is more personal and targeted to a specific focused topic or small set of topics. For content curation, you can still use a content aggregator tool to pull in content, but you’ll be taking time to manually filter through everything, in order to publish quality articles.
Can curating content be duplicate content?
The question on whether curating content could lead to duplicate content or not, is debatable. Some may think it’s illegal. However, the actual answer is that curated content is not duplicate content.
Now, if the curated content is the whole article verbatim, it could be a case of plagiarism. If the content is a mere summarization, and includes a link to the original published article, then it’s completely okay. Google is pretty smart today to see where an article originated from.
Curated content also doesn’t send your visitors away. You can set your site where the links to outside sites open in a new window, so the visitor doesn’t lose their place on your website.
The most important point to note, is that if you start curating content, to make sure you’re leaving attribution and linking to the original article.
Why would you curate content instead of writing your own articles?
Not everyone has an English Literature degree, or has a knack for writing. Most bloggers start off as amateurs, and over time, develop a blog voice, and better writing skills. With curating content, you’re using the content of others to attract interested people onto your website.
Sure, you can certainly write your own articles from time to time, but you can utilize the knowledge of other sites and build your own authority through a little content curation. On a small level, some people have weekly article roundups, where the blog author picks a few featured articles each week, and showcases them in a single post. Content curation just gives a post for each article you want to feature.
The other reason you might curate content, is to get content up quickly and also make money. Most content aggregator tools in WordPress pull in each article and place it each on their own individual post. This means you can use Google Adsense and other ad networks. You can even place affiliate ads to monetize your WordPress website.
In the end, the authors of the articles you’ve curated, will benefit from the traffic you send them.
