Many experts are predicting website curation is going to be big this year so here’s a quick briefing on what curation is, and how you could make money from it…
What is Curation And Could Web Curation Make Money For You?
To put it simply, curation is the latest way of sourcing quality content for a website. As you may know, every website needs lots of regularly updated quality content if it is to succeed.
Now, before curation there were really only two ways of getting content for your website – creating it yourself or aggregating (collecting) it from other peoples’ websites. But curation is a clever combination of creation AND aggregation. You don’t just feed other peoples’ content into your site. You carefully select, edit and present it to create your own unique story.
Website curation is a bit like what the curator of an art gallery might do… which is where the term comes from. They are not artists themselves. They are displaying other peoples’ artworks but putting their own unique interpretation on them.
So, by using curation you can get a ready made, quality stream of content with which to populate your website, build traffic and build an audience – but more quickly and easily than ever before.
To get started you’re going to need a good idea for your website. Really, it can be anything you like. But ideally it needs to be something popular that a lot of people will be interested in, and something where there is a lot of material out there on the web to be curated.
Once you’ve decided on your subject set up a website in the normal way.
Now you need to decide what curation tools or tools you’re going to use. Curation tools help you to collect, edit and present content on a semi-automated basis. Allowing you to develop your site with much less time and effort than used to be the case.
Here are the main curation tools that are available at the moment:
- Scoop.it – this is perhaps one of the most user-friendly curation tools so far.
- Storify.com – this one is heavily social media-focused.
- Bundlr – this one allows you to manually aggregate content, news, images, tweets and blogs.
- Stumble Upon
Take some time to decide which works best for you.
The next step is to monetise your website
You can sell products and services there in the normal way. But one of the easiest ways to make money from your site is to use affiliate schemes, and earn a commission for selling other peoples’ products. That way you don’t only not need your own content as such, you don’t even need your own products either!
Once everything’s set up all you need to do is maintain your site on a regular basis: Your curation tools will deliver stories to you automatically. All you need to do is select those that fit in with your product or service, edit them and patch them together to push out your own message, in your own voice.
Curation gives you the ability to make money from a website, or even a whole stable of websites, almost on autopilot – with much less work than you ever thought possible!
For more articles on making money from curation keep checking back with What Biz Opp.