For Christmas I bought my daughter Kate a great piece of low-cost software called CurationSoft, to help her fill her niche sites with fresh content, and to get more traffic to them so that she makes more money.
(In case you think that software is a terribly mean present to give to a girl for Christmas I also bought her a nice white iPad to play with 
)
She loves both presents, though the email telling her about Curation Soft didn’t excite her anywhere near as much as opening the iPad box. And so far she’s spent about 3 hours using CurationSoft and she’s used the iPad until she’s boggle eyed and the tips of her fingers are sore from tapping and swiping the screen.
But it’s CurationSoft that’s making her money. Now that she’s seen how using it has almost immediately increased visitors to the site she’s using it on, she’s totally won over and singing its praises.
BTW, before you ask, there’s no way I’m giving you the name of her site, or even the niche. So please don’t email me about it. She wants me to keep quiet about it because she knows that a mention here will have dozens of you niche marketers rapidly jumping in to compete with her. And you would, don’t deny it
Having said that, Kate is a director of a new US based charity set up to help children born with metabolic disorders. Here’s a link to it The Metabolic Disease Foundation if you feel like being generous by making a donation they desperately need your help. Even just linking to the site, or giving their Metabolic Disease Facebook page a like will help in a small way.
Anyway, the reason I’m telling you Kate’s traffic success is because I’m personally amazed at the huge traffic increase it’s given her. I thought it might help a bit, but in a month her visitors have more than quadrupled. And get this – she hasn’t added any new articles, and she’s not done any backlinking.
All she’s done is just semi-automatically (drag and drop) added fresh content to 15 of her existing articles. (BTW, the software works on both Macs and Windows)
And it took her less than 10 minutes an article to curate the content she wanted to use on her pages and add it to the existing mix of articles and reviews.
So she’s spent just two and a half hours quadrupling her visitor numbers (real people, not bots)
To me this is amazing. Especially as Google like’s what she’s doing, and so do the individuals whose content she has used a line or two from and linked to. They like it because a) they’re getting a link to their content, and b) quite a few of them are chuffed because she’s ‘quoted’ them. She knows this because they’ve tweeted about it, or commented on her site.
And she’s not gone out and added any new links, though some people whose tweets and other content snippets she’s used have linked to her.
We all know that part of Google’s new ranking algorithm is favoring fresh content. It seems that adding to, or reworking existing content works just as well.
The full version of the software is just $59 (a year) but there’s a fully working free trial you can test. The only difference is that you’re limited to just one content source (Google Blogs) rather than the 8 in the paid version.
Seeing all you do is enter a keyword or short phrase, select the content source you want to use, and press go, it’s very simple to use.
It’s been out for six months, or maybe longer now, and the people behind it are all well respected online: Jack Humphrey and Peter Lenkefi to name but two.
At first I had my doubts about the whole curation craze. My thinking went along the lines of “It’s theft. Sites are stealing using other people’s content to profit from” But I’ve changed my mind. Sites use just a short snippet of your work. Maybe 2 or 3 lines, and in return you get a link back to your site. You get traffic from it, from both searchbots, and real people who are interested in your content and want to see more. It’s been written in more than one place that ‘curation’ is what the web of 2012 will be all about. And on the evidence of Kate using this blog curation software for just a few weeks, I can see why some people are saying that.
There’s quite a lot of content – examples and stuff like reviews and news items about the world of curating – on the curation software site on the sites blog. The site is not a sales pitch one. So if you want to know more about curation blogging you can read a lot more before even testing the free trial offer.
phil