Read on to find out exactly what content curation is and what it means for online marketers.

Content Curation Defined

First of all, let’s look at what this thing actually is. I like to think of curation as being an online content DJ. The DJ doesn’t technically create new music. At the most basic level, out of all the available music, the DJ selects songs to play for the people in the club. On a second level, the DJ might take elements from different songs and remix them, mash them together to create something new and original out of already existing songs.

Content curation is a lot like that. Out of the vast stream of content available online, you pick and select particular pieces of content and bring them together on your site. And just like every DJ specializes in a particular music genre, so would any content curator specialize in a particular niche. For example, you might create a curation-based website, where you gather all of the best articles and videos on the topic of, say, vegan cooking.

So, how is this different from content syndication?
With content syndication, you’d simply grab content (that you have the right to re-publish) and put all of that content on you site. You copy an article and paste it onto a page on your site (giving the author credit, of course). This is not the same thing as content curation. With curation, you don’t necessarily republish content. You might just quote a few noteworthy paragraphs, add your own comment and then link to the source. With videos, it would certainly make sense to embed them on the site, but even there: syndication is just embedding the video, curation is embedding the video and adding your own comments and reasons for selecting this particular video.

Quality Selection

Content curation is important and it’s as old as the Internet itself. A great example of why it’s important is illustrated in this article about the YouTube “black hole” on reelSEO. To paraphrase: More videos are being uploaded to YouTube every minute than you could ever possibly keep up with. Even if you narrow it down to just videos on a topic that you’re interested in, there’s still far more material there and far more new material pouring in every minute, then you could ever watch. How can you see the best videos on your favourite topics, without spending hours and hours browsing? A site that is dedicated to finding and publishing the best videos on your favourite topic is the solution.

The same is true for any kind of content. Articles, blog-posts, news… you can never keep up, so you go to a trusted source that aggregates all the best stuff in your niche of interest.

The key to curation is in making that selection. If you are the curator, then it’s all about finding the best stuff and only showing the best stuff.

This means that content curation cannot be automated (not entirely, anyway). Content syndication is easy to automate. You create a script that pulls in content on a particular topic and publishes it. Done. With curation, it’s all about quality and it’s also about your personal touch and your personal take on things.

Duplicate Content? Traffic? SEO?

The duplicate content issue is bound to pop up. Since you’d generally not re-publish entire articles on a curation-based site and always add your own comments, it’s clearly not duplicate content and this is not something to worry about.

In terms of SEO and online marketing, content curation is sometimes presented as a solution to the problem of having to create lots of niche content yourself. Curation is only a partial solution to the problem, since it definitely still requires manual labour. In terms of SEO, it does have one big advantage: A curation-based site is bound to grow at a steady pace and could become a central hub for people in a particular niche. This translates to site authority and natural backlinks, if it’s done right. Note, however, that the word “easy” is not featured in the preceding sentences.

As for traffic: yes, content curation is definitely a “traffic-sucking” method for building sites. Same reason as above: if done right, the site becomes a central hub, a “go-to” place for many people in the niche. And since you’re always linking out to other people’s content, you’ll have many friends in the niche as well. They will be linking to you, talking about you, recommending the site and so on.

From a marketing perspective, the problem with curation lies in the fact that it’s so much about sending people away from your site and to another site where the great content originated from. Also, curation is about aggregating good information, so people browsing the site are probably not going to be in a buying mood.

This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to make money using content curation. But you have to assume that the value per visitor is going to be significantly lower on a curation-based site than on a niche-targeted review site, for example.

Conclusion

I hope this sheds some light on the topic of content curation. In closing, my personal impression is that content curation could be used to quickly position yourself as an authority within a niche. As someone selecting and pointing to the good stuff, you are automatically in an elevated position. Also, if you can build  community, that would be one more reason for your visitors to stick around a bit longer. I believe there is potential for online marketers and affiliate marketers to make use of content curation and it could be something worth getting into.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

Case in point: The new Product Launch Formula videos by Jeff Walker.

Okay, I guess I know where this is coming from. It’s the same with the launches in general. Why does every marketer use the same kind of pre-launch process, the same kind of build-up, the same kind of hype generation? Because it works…

And I guess that type of video also works. But does that really mean that every marketer has to go and make a carbon copy of the Video Boss videos? Same style, same background music, same fonts, same colors and even the same text-animations? Seriously, you can’t select a different animation effect?

Apart from anything else, I bet that almost no one has actually tested the Video Boss type video against a different type of video. Video is a b***h to split-test, after all. Let me just say that I’ve been running a few tests with different video types and I’ve found some pretty surprising results.

I think that Internet marketers who market to the Internet marketing crowd have to start thinking on their feet a bit more and start innovating more quickly. You see, outside of the IM market, you can go ahead and use all of those tactics and techniques you know inside out. Use free ebooks as sign-up incentives, do the product launch formula, use Video Boss videos, use fake time-constraints, have one-time-offers that aren’t really one-time-offers and claim that the price is about to go up “any minute now”. Outside of the IM market, people haven’t all seen this stuff a million times before.

But if you’re marketing to online marketers, start thinking outside the box and be the guy who comes up with the next formula rather than always relying on methods that everyone got fed up with last week.

And seriously, consider using a different text-animation, if nothing else.

By the way: While Product Launch Formula is certainly going to be big and spectacular and cool and everything, one of my readers recently pointed me towards a product about launching products that looks way more interesting. Check out the Interactive Offer and see for yourself. It’s a really cool way to market (one that I like to use myself) and I learnt some very cool stuff just from the pre-launch videos. Coincidentally, I had already been doing almost exactly what the videos talk about, before I saw them.

Too bad that the Interactive Offer also suffers from Video Boss-itis…

Let me know what you think. Is this rant justified? Are you also fed up with the same old formulas? Do you use them yourself?

Cheers,

Omission From Search Listings

There is something that frequently happens in Google search results, that perhaps could be misinterpreted as some sort of penalty. As an example, I just did a quick search on Google for the name of this blog and “Best Spinner”. The reason I did this is because I know that I have referenced to the program called The Best Spinner in several posts already, so there’s bound to be a whole bunch of listings – some of them from posts, at least one of them on the homepage (at the time of this writing) and so on.

Here is what Google returned:

As you can see, there’s a double listing of results on this domain. After that, however, results from other places around the web are displayed. As I’ve marked with the arrow, there’s a “Show more results from richquickreview.com” option. Let’s see what happens when I click it:

Now, I get seven listings and there’s a new option at the bottom for showing all of the listings on richquickreview, for this search term.

Oh no! All of my Best Spinner posts, save for two, have been penalized by Google and they aren’t showing up in the search results! Time to PANIC!

Of course, what’s going on here is not a penalty of any kind. Google generally don’t show more than two results for one and the same domain. And they generally don’t show more than two results from different domains, if the content is identical.

If you write an article and submit it to a dozen different article directories, unchanged, you’ll get a similar result when you do a search for it: The results will typically list your article on one or two directories, followed by the option to show more of the results that are hidden, because they are identical.

The important point here is that this is not a penalty. The omitted pages are all indexed by Google, they are all flowing pagerank and no one is getting their sites “sandboxed” because of duplicate content.

Obviously, the pages won’t all get listed in the results, because who would want to find several pages of the same article as a result for a search query?

Chasing (Long) Tail

This is where article spinning comes in. The point of spinning articles is not to “avoid the duplicate content penalty” as way too many sales-pitches for spinning tools would have you believe, the point is to grab more long-tail traffic. If you write an article, spin it’s content and then distribute it to a few dozen or even a few hundred online properties, it’s a bit like casting a wide net out into unknown waters: You don’t know where the fish are, but by pure chance you’re bound to catch a few.

All of your spun articles will consist of different sequences of words and every time someone “out there” on the Internet happens to search for a string of words that are present in one of your article variations, it’s likely that that variation will show up in the search results. And thus, you catch another fish.

I hope this clarifies the whole dupe-content subject a bit. If you have any further questions, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Cheers,

As mentioned in the video, I’d love to hear what your take on this whole content spinning thing is and if your experience has been different from mine, I’d be very interested to know in learning more about it.

Cheers,

See this weeks selection after the break.

• More on the Duplicate Content Myth – Jonathan Leger
  I recently posted my own thoughts about duplicate content. The linked article by Jonathan Leger actually has two parts (part 1, part 2), of which I especially enjoyed the second one. The posts are already a bit over one year old, but they are still relevant as ever and definitely worth a read.
  –
• Description of a CPA Scam – Harlan Kilstein
  A while back, I posted an article about the difference between a scam and a crappy product and stated how I often see the term “scam” being misused. The video linked above is an example of a real scam. It’s really disgusting that people do such a thing and the video is well worth watching.
  –
• Dennis Yu – Shoemoney
  Speaking of scammers, this is an in-depth post by Jeremy Shoemaker about the, by now notorious, Dennis Yu, a guy who managed to piss off a lot of high-profile Internet marketers in a very short time. It’s interesting and sometimes baffling to read his story. There’s more in this follow-up post.
  –
• 3 Symptoms of a Marketer Who’s Destined to Fail – Chris Rempel
  Finally, here is an incredibly good post about where most IM’ers that fail to make money go wrong. I’ve seen many a post with this type of “Top Mistakes to Avoid” theme, but this one just left me speechless. It’s really well written and contains priceless information. Go read it now!

And that concludes today’s roundup.

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

In the video linked below, Greg Grothaus from Google clears up some misconceptions about duplicate content. You might have seen some general “panic” about duplicate content and the alleged penalty that you receive in search engine listings if you use duplicate content. There are a lot of rumours and wrong ideas floating around on the web, concerning duplicate content. In the video below, you can get some clarification, straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak:

Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

Some of the most important points are mentioned in the first few minutes. After that, there is some talk about redirects and canonical URLs. Interesting, but not essential to what I’m trying to get across.

What It All Comes Down To

It really all comes down to a point I have already made before and will surely make again in the future: Every search engine’s goal is to deliver the most relevant and interesting topics possible to the searcher.

If you are using duplicate content in a spammy way, autoscraping content from other blogs, spinning articles into “unique” and unreadable gibberish and submitting them hundreds of times or actually copy-pasting page content onto other pages to make your website seem bigger than it is, then yes, you will probably be penalized in one way or another.

But spammy sites containing of auto-submitted, scraped content are dead anyway. I don’t mean “dead” in the sense of “this doesn’t work anymore” (like keyword stuffing is dead), I use “dead” as a description of the impression such a site makes on visitors. It feels like a lifeless site. One that is not interesting or engaging and one that you simply want to click away from.

As long as what you are doing really is relevant and interesting, you will get visitors. No matter if you’re also selling stuff and no matter if you have multiple links from the same source, identical anchor texts and duplicate content.

Of course, search engine optimization has it’s place. And good keyword research most definitely has it’s place. But those places are, in my humblest of opinions, located at the foot of the throne that is interesting, relevant content.

Ok, I have to stop now, otherwise it will look like I’m keyword stuffing for “interesting, relevant content”…

Cheers,