In this podcast, Paul Clifford, creator of Page One Curator, and I talk extensively about something called content curation.
Ever since the Panda and Penguin updates, the need for high quality content has never been greater. The days of throwing up a micro-niche site full of fluff are gone and smart online business owners are actively looking for ways to generate content that people actually want to read!
If you need to create content for your site/blog on an ongoing basis, this is definitely a topic that you are going to want to understand because by taking advantage of curation, you can save yourself a LOT of time and money.
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What is Content Curation?
Problem: Getting rankings and traffic is the challenge of any one trying to sell online. Almost all SEO relies on spammy techniques and strategies to get links and rankings. Given the recent spate of Google de-indexing / Panda 3.2 / Penguin – there is huge pent up demand for for a new solution that is white hat and designed to last for the long term.
Solution: Instead of gaming Google – this plays by its own rules to get huge rankings for competitive words. This method enables you to curate multiple blogs and create whole empire of cash and traffic generating websites for passive income or to sell to investors.
Market: Curation is exploding as a technique to create authority sites for bloggers, SEO experts, niche and authority site builders and in fact anyone making money online.
Look at these examples:
Drudge Report: $30 million per year.
Perez hilton… – worth 32 million
Huffington post – bought by AOL for $315
What do they have in common? .. none of their own content.. it was all curated.
In This Episode, Paul and I Discuss
What curation is and how it works
The 3 most important things to remember when curating
How to use curation to build your authority site/blog
The software that he’s created to speed up the process
The WSO he created to sell the software
Links Mentioned
Paul has put together a fabulous eBook that you can download for free (thanks Paul!): Get Paul’s eBook Now
Buy Paul’s software
Transcript
Click Here to Read the Transcript
OIL 024: An Interview with Paul Clifford on Content Curation
Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! This is Trent here from the Online Income Lab with session no. 24 of the Online Income Lab podcast. And in this session I am welcoming a fellow from across the pond by the name of Paul Clifford who I met when I was in Raleigh, North Carolina a couple of months ago at a warrior’s event. And Paul and I over a couple of beers had a very good conversation about all of the very interesting things that he’s been doing since leaving his corporate gig behind.
So without further adieu, Paul welcome to the show.
Paul Clifford: Hi! How are you doing Trent?
T: Very well thank you.
P: Thanks for having me on board.
T: Hey no problem. It’s always a pleasure. My regular listeners know that I love doing these podcasts.
P: Cool.
T: So in this show I wanna give you a moment to just give your background but I wanna let the listeners know what they’re in for. In this show we’re gonna talking about the concept of content curation. And since the Panda and Penguin, since the attack of the animals for lack of a better expression, creating content has become more important than ever before so we’re gonna dive into that. But before we get into that I do wanna give you, if you can just give a quick little bio-background. Where did you come from? How did you get into online marketing? And what did you do before, etc?
P: Oh so general, yeah. So I’ve come from the corporate world as you just said. And I was like a CTO for about 20-25 years and I did a little start ups and essentially built up the technology for other companies before we sold them on. And I was doing that for a number of years and everytime I get on thinking I need to get on something myself. And I started in online marketing back in 2008 and like all of us, you know, I start trying everything. I was doing selling ebooks as an affiliate. I was trying adwords at them. I was trying I’ve created niche sites. I thought I cornered the markets on hemorrhoids at one point. Seriously, I just think I’ll try this, no one must have thought of this, but of course they had. And it’s hard work.
And I think getting successful in online marketing there’s this kind of ride of passages you have to go through. You have to try a few things until it clicks and then something really works and you master it. But 99.9% of people give up too early. And I meet people everyday and I talk to them about what they’re doing online and they say “well I’ve tried this and I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work you know”. And I go “how long have you tried it for?” and they say “4 weeks or something like that”. The thing is in this game the market is so broad, you know, internet marketing is such a broad field, and there’s so many different ways all making money online that you need to either stick to one thing and keep going at it or try a few things but give them a good solid effort so that you can really say “yes I really tried that but that’s not for me or I couldn’t make that work” but if it’s just a few weeks that is not enough. It takes time to master this stuff.
And what started working for me is I found sort of e-commerce sites or building e-commerce stores and using the model called drop shopping where I would build a store that I would sell Atlantis or fridges or mini fridges or camping fridges or coal books and I’d find a supplier who would directly ship directly to the customers. So basically I could act like a real store online and I’d actually handle the transactions myself but the actual shipping part was handled by the supplier.
Anyway, I was on a rolling so basically with e-commerce. And the reason e-commerce works is because you’re attracting buyers and buyers are already in shopping mode. So all you gotta do is present them the right product at the right price and they’ll buy it, okay. So I built like a whole empire of these stores, you know, I had everything, ladder, set racks, the lot. And then I started making some cash. So that was all good.
And then when I decided, an opportunity rose in my main job where it’s an opportunity to leave basically.
T: You were doing all this on the side?
P: I took that opportunity and thought right. It took me a few months leeway to really make a go at this so I did that. And I did it in software coz software is what I know. And what I did was I just focused on little small apps around the SEO market coz that’s what I know. I’ve had all this experience now trying to rank affiliate sites. And so I built different apps, desktop apps, some plug ins and some things like that and then sold them on the warrior forum. And you know what? People liked it. People liked what I was selling and I started selling a lot of it. And of course then it just builds up and builds up and you end up with a good customer base, loyal customer base who follow you and the thing just starts better, better and better.
T: You know what? It’s so interesting that your story parallels a blog post that I published I think 2 or 3 days ago. And I titled the post something along the lines of I wanna sell you as much of my stuff as possible or as fast as possible or something like that.
P: Right.
T: And really the topic of the post was the whipping that I had taken from essentially not building a real business. So real businesses has 3 parts: products, customers and a way to get paid. And so a lot of us with niche sites and maybe hemorrhoids sites, we didn’t really have customers and we didn’t have products. We just got a way to get paid. So we had a one legged stool so it’s not any great surprise that when eventually Google, when the attack of the birds came or attack of the animals came that the stool toppled over.
And so you stuck with this long enough to figure this out. And that when you started if I’m understanding what you’re telling me you started to become successful because you had a three legged stool. You started to build products that weren’t terribly expensive, I’m guessing, to build and weren’t terribly complicated. You started to have customers and of course you had a way to get paid. Is that a reasonable assessment of how success came your way?
P: Yeah. I think having your own product puts you in a much better advantage than being an affiliate. You have more control and there are lots of different ways of converting, you know, that product into customers. And then secondly you grow up and have a market. So many people especially in software, they have great ideas and they come to me with some of their stuff, fantastic. I say “that’s fantastic!” How many people are looking for that? And I go “I’ll work that one out yet”. You gotta have a market and then of course the SEO market is huge and people are always looking for better and more efficient ways of getting links or increasing their rankings, etc.
So that’s the market I start with coz I got the knowledge and I know the traffic that people are looking there. If you’re working with an affiliate star product where you want affiliates to promote then the key is then what’s called the jv recruitment and it’s, I know you have these 3 pillars but in a way in my business I have to have a good product, my own local customers to build momentum but I also have to have a fantastic jv community around me who will send me traffic.
T: It’s very good point.
P: Yeah. And once I learned that, I learned that quite early on, I really put a lot of effort into that. Everything surrounds the jv recruitment so that involves networking, and just speaking to people, helping people out, you know. So I’ve helped people with their launches who, not in return for anything, I didn’t ask for anything or whatever. But there’s a couple of people that I saw things going wrong in their sales page or something like that, I just help them out. I didn’t ask for anything. And when I did need something, you know they were coming to me and saying “how can I help? How can I help?” It’s those types of relationships that really start to build a long term with the jv’s.
T: Yes I agree completely. That’s actually one the reasons why I do this podcasts. I find it’s a great way for me to form new relationships with people by giving them an opportunity to come and share their knowledge to my audience. Invariably if they have a product they get an opportunity to promote any of their product and then the audience loves it and it builds goodwill between me and my guests and potentially that makes a jv for me later on.
So with that said this topic, this podcast is supposed to be about curation. We actually have another podcast, folks, that I’m gonna have Paul back to the show in 2 weeks, I don’t think it’s 2 weeks, maybe 3. We’re gonna be talking about, coz recently you’ve got substantial success with your curation software product which was released as a WSO and got WSO of the day which is a really big deal, did a very strong amount of revenue and is now headed towards a clickbank launch. Being as there was such demand for that particular software product and being with the attack of the birds from Google and how content has become just so much more important now than just building spammy links. I really wanted to get you on the show to talk about curation.
So now we know why curation is becoming popular but I bet you that most people who are listening don’t know what curation is. So let’s start off with that.
P: Yeah. You know funny enough curation means not brand new, it’s been around for a while. And it’s kind of like, it’s what non-marketers have been doing for years to actually build contents on their sites, okay. If you look at the problems we have today, we all want traffic right? We all want free traffic. We want that from Google coz that’s obviously the biggest source and the way we do that is obviously to get rankings and historically the way to get rankings is to get quality backlinks. So we know all about that. And I think in the internet marketing community what we’ve always been taught is first of all go for low competitive keywords because we know with a certain amount of backlinking we can reach the top. And then we also how to create backlinks or we’ve been taught how to create backlinks with all types, the automated or blog networks or whatever. That’s the way we’ve been taught, let’s face it, it’s awful, right?
And what curation is that it deals with fundamental thing that Google is looking for. And all this one wants is to present quality content, right? Because all it wants is for you to have a good search result. So when you type in anything you’ve got quality search page coming back. Coz if it’s a quality search page coming back then you go back for more. And by going back for more Google gets more ad revenue, alright? So that’s all their relationship is. And so to produce good quality content, let’s face it, it’s hard work. If you wanna write a 600-800 word article it’s gonna take you a while if it’s gonna be interesting. And you know our whole world has evolved where we outsource it and you know I’ve outsourced loads of content writing myself and to be honest it’s not that bad but it’s not the kind of thing that you wanna read. Other things you can do, you can spin it. You must spin it with plenty of spinners around, rewrite your articles but then again it’s not interesting. It’s not designed for a reader, okay?
And so this whole curation thing came about where you can genuinely and legally and ethically copy someone else’s content as long as you attribute or recognize the source of where you got it from. And the way that works basically is if you imagine a blog post what you should do is you should introduce the content. Okay so you write a paragraph of what the theme is or what the story is you’re trying to create in your blog post. And that paragraph is your spin. It’s your take on it. It’s got your character and your voice. And then basically you insert a copy content it’s just you don’t copy the whole article but just copy 30 or 40% of it and then attribute the source. And then you summarize the article. Again with your opinion and your input to it. And in terms of nuts and bolts that is what curation is, okay?
From an internet marketing point of view you should try and ensure that your title is also optimized towards your keywords so that you know that’s gonna be picked up but go for the long tails, okay? And that is like the mechanics of it. The reason why this works is if you look historically at some of the biggest authority sites that were sold at the last few years and the ones that gets bonded about and the reason they get bonded about is because they sold a big bucks. What I’m talking about is things like the drudge report, and Paris Hilton and we all know masherbolt and people like that. In fact the biggest one was the Huffington Post. That’s what everyone knows and they only know it because they’ve sold that site at $350 million. And you know Adriana Huffington still runs it but on a mega million salary. So you know everyone’s winning there. But the reason it sold so much is it gets so much traffic. It became a really, really big authority site. It was quirky and everyone kept coming back for more and that’s what gave this whole build up of huge amount of traffic. And of course once you got the traffic the monetization techniques are endless. You could do lots of different things.
That’s the famous story. And that’s the biggest one but of course there are thousands and thousands of smaller curator sites that sell for a lot less. Well, what we’re finding nowadays is we hear stories of investment bankers and people like that who are looking to buy assets, you know, almost real estate online. So these authority sites that get sustainable traffic over long periods of time actually become quite valuable. And so the beauty of it is technically you’re acting like almost a reporter. So you’re grabbing content and you’re reporting on it adding your spin and then publishing it.
T: And that’s the big reason why I wanted to get you in this podcast because I want for the members of Niche Site Mastery, for example, who I told after the last update, micro niche sites done with that, updated all the training. I really want people to understand that building an authority site is not as daunting as a task as you might think it is. It’s really not that difficult. If you can put together one post that has an intro, that has snippets of other people’s content and the curation strategy that we’ve talked about and you could do that once, twice, three, four times a week, over a period of time you’re gonna get traffic. Your people are gonna find it because it’s gonna be in. It’s like my blog, Online Income Lab, I only get 17% of my traffic from search engines, big deal. The reason that people come to my blog is because the content is good and they’re interested in it. And it has a good user experience and so they tweet it and share it and they do whatever and it gives me the opportunity to be in lots of places to drive traffic to it. I’ve actually started to use curation on my blogs. There were kind of 2 posts ago, I had a post titled something along the lines be all, end all post penguin SEO, something around that. I don’t remember the name of the post but if you go to the blog you’ll find it fairly recently and there was a lot of curation in that post. And here’s the other thing that I found quite beneficial. The people who I attributed to, so I borrowed pieces of their content attribution linking then I tweeted about it, I put them in the tweet so they became of the fact that I had shared some of their content, they reached out to me and said “hey man, that was awesome. Thanks so much.” And then they tweeted too to their audience to say “hey, go check out Trent’s blog.’ And one of the guys is now, a fellow by the name of Nate from Mind Infuse, we skyped and we started to mastermind. And so I did it because I didn’t want to write at all but look at all these other benefits that are coming from adopting this curation strategy.
So very clearly we know that works when like drudge and all of those sites like Huffington Post and so forth they’re still getting a lot from their search engines. And media sites for years have been curating from what I understand from you. So this is very different from duplicate content, correct?
P: Yeah exactly. I mean the guy who introduced me to this, I can’t remember when, ages ago, but he was telling me about curation and all that so I was, the one thing that struck me was like how do Google really know. And he actually fired off an email to Matt Cutts. And he actually got a reply and he can’t believe it. But Matt Cutts said as long as you attribute and that means a proper follow link so don’t try and do a no follow link and all that trickery. Just ensure that you’re recognizing where you copied that element of the post.
And the idea why this works for the writer, the original author, is because they’re getting natural backlinks. Because they’ve written the original content and they’re very happy for other people to curate that content because by curating and creating a link back to the source you’re creating a backlink to him. And it’s natural, it’s organic and it’s exactly what Google designed the search engine to do back in the early days when it’s called back rub. And it’s doing that, what’s called content marketing. It’s what non-marketers were doing to try and get more traffic to their sites.
So what has happened and coming back to how I started talking to you, in the IM world what we’ve been taught is how to create backlinks and the non-IM world they’ve grown up with is really how to attract backlinks. We’ve sort of come in full circle with the latest algorithm updates, you know, and people are already realizing that “hey this is not a planned strategy.” In the surface it looks like more work but you know if you can, curation itself is less work than writing unique content everyday yourself.
And by curating other people’s excerpts and contents you’re taking contents from authority sites and in your example Trent, you know, first of all you’re using social networks to get traffic to it so you twitted it. You might share on Facebook. You might then syndicate it perhaps to a few web 2.0 sites. But also if you’ve taken that from a WordPress site then that author will get a ping back by wordpress so he’ll know that you’ve taken that article and he might approve that pingback. And that pingback itself will give you more authority assuming that his blog is more authority than yours. So you can see like it’s a real win-win. You’re creating content, you’re funneling and briding your view on the internet to your audience and let’s face it everyone’s overwhelmed with the volume of information on the web today. And so you’re briding your job as a curator and people will follow you because they’re liking your view on things. And then in return the originators are getting backlinks and more traffic to their sites as well.
T: You know you touched on a really important traffic. You didn’t name it. I’m gonna name it. It’s called USP unique selling proposition. Anytime that you wanna have people say you wanna have a presence online, you wanna build a business, you think well there’s other people who wanna do this. For example in my case, Online Income Lab, when I started it like the world needed another how to make money online blog. There was a gazillion or more already and the world would have been just fine if mine was never created. But yet it’s become successful. Why? It’s not that I have information that you can’t get anywhere else. If you read enough blogs I’m sure everybody’s covered everything that I’ve ever covered. It’s because of me, the guy behind it. The unique selling proposition is my take on the world, my style, my personality, my background.
And anyone who’s listening to my podcast who wants to create an authority site in any niche they want to could do the very same thing. They can become the unique selling proposition of their site. And if you’re so picking a passion is wonderful as long as that passion has commercial value. If there’s no commercial value I would not encourage that you build the site around your passion coz it will never make any money. There’s easy ways to check commercial value. The no. 1 is just looking at the adwords keyword tool and make sure there’s plenty of advertiser competition and a decent cpc. That’s a really terrific parameter to know if there’s commercial value in that particular niche.
So not only is curation, this is what I love about it, not only is it less work in creating the content but you don’t have to spend all that time manufacturing all those spammy backlinks that Google doesn’t really want you to have anyway. So it saves a truckload of time. So if you compare the old model that the niche site was pitching. It’s to build hundreds of sites, put up unique content on 5,6,7 pages and then spin, create web 2.0 and RSS feeds and press releases and all these tons of moving parts which still definitely I wouldn’t say don’t do that anymore but to rely on that exclusively I don’t think is a terrific strategy. But regardless it was a lot of work. And with the Online Income Lab I decided using SocialAdr to bookmark my occasional posts which now I always forget to do. I don’t really build any backlinks but I’ve got last time I checked somewhere around a 1,000 links or links to a 1,000 domains. Something like that, if I open the site in explorer and I punch it in. Anyone listening can go and do the same thing. And it’s a lot less work.
So I think that the curation concept is absolutely a fabulous one and I’m glad that people like yourself are finally bringing it, no I wouldn’t say bringing it, but it’s becoming known in the internet marketing community that this is a very viable strategy for helping you to build your real online business.
So are there any best practices or tips that you wanna give and equally important are there any like make sure you don’t do this or you don’t do that?
P: Yeah. First of all, you use social. Let’s start from scratch. When you do your niche sites you’re looking for low competition words, right? You build your site all around that wishing you could rank for it. With curation you do the opposite. You just go headlong into the big volume words, okay? So you build your site or your brand, you don’t worry about having a keyword optimized domain or anything like that. You need to create a brand. And it can be any name you like but obviously something pronounceable, quirky or something that people will remember. Another trick to do is look for age domains coz remember age domains already have a certain authority especially if they have PRs as well. And you can repurpose those to get you started, you know, further up the ladder.
And then you choose like your target keyword. Again as I said go for the high volume keywords and you optimize your home page so in other words your title around that. And then what you do you create your curation posts targeting all the long tails. Each of those, the longer tail the better because first of all that’s often where the buyers are. You know you don’t get buyers shopping for shoes you get buyers shopping for ladies, sports, white, trainers or something by Nike or something like that. You know, the long tail keyword is where the real buyers are and actually where the volume is anyway.
And because you’re posting regularly using curation then each different posts are gonna attract some of those long tail ones. So you can imagine now you can start to see, because you’re posting regularly because it doesn’t take much time then each posts get authority. It gets traffic and all that traffic is obviously funnel through to whatever your monetization is whether you’re doing adwords or what we’re trying to do is encouraging opt in more than anything.
T: Absolutely, no. 1.
P: That’s really target sign up coz what you really wanna do is get your repeat visitors coz every time you do a new post you ping them, your visitors, to that post and of course they return and that’s how you build traffic.
So you kinda reverse your thinking, alright. So I tell you just to throw SEO away or everything that you know of SEO. Go for the high volume, don’t worry about that. Go for branded domain. Ideally go for age domain or a high PR domain and start there. And then in terms of the posts and the site make sure it’s interesting. So remember now we’re not doing it just to get traffic to make money. We’re doing it to get readers. So it has to be actually an interesting site. It has to be the kind of site you wanna go to and say “that’s pretty cool.” You do that by obviously making your site look professional, use a professional theme, good news or magazine theme. But you know spice it up with images and videos and things like that.
Videos are easy. You can get videos from youtube. You have full license to embed videos in your posts so that’s absolutely no problem doing that. Images you must be careful. Never copy an image of another site unless you know for sure that it’s royalty free image. Just either buy images from istockphoto or dreamstime or you know, you can take images from what’s called the commercial commons area in Flickr or in fact Wikipedia as well but Flickr is a great source. And in the Flickr community there are millions of photographers around the world taking photos and those photos get ranked as well. They get ranked socially according to what Flickr calls interestingness. And so ideally what you want is images from Flickr that are interesting but they have a license for you to use it. And that license is called an attribution license and all that means is you can use that image as long as you attribute the source. So you need to basically ensure that you have a link in your post back to the author or photographer, in fact, of that image so that you’re fully recognizing that it’s their image and it’s not, you haven’t stolen it coz again they’re getting more credibility and they’ve also licensed that image themselves for that photo for you to use.
T: Now you have to attribute underneath the image or could you do all your attributes, if you’re using 3 images can you attribute at the bottom or the footer of the post? What will be the best practice?
P: You can do either. Technically you can do any way just make sure you got the links in there. Some people do caption, in a WordPress you can do a caption and that’s quite common. You can, what I tend to do is put a link near the bottom of the post that references the name of the image and the author. And that would be a link back to the author’s page on Flickr. And then I’ll make the Flickr image itself clickable as well to the author.
T: Okay.
P: Okay. But you don’t always have to do that. It’s just important to ensure that if someone comes along and sees that site and they see that’s a really cool image then they’ll have no problem looking at that and seeing the link back. Or imagine if you want to show that to the photographer, what would he feel happy about? So as long as you do it ethically and there’s a great collection of Flickr images, if you sort by interestingness by their algorithm, you get some spectacular stuff.
And don’t go for the obvious images, alright? I was talking to someone in my forum today, you know, and he was saying he’s struggling to find images for his niche and I was trying to explain that don’t go for the obvious things. Like weight loss, everyone will be looking for an image of some long, toned woman in an athletics gear alright? Maybe not. Why don’t you go for a great big cream cake? Or something a bit more abstract, right? It’s gonna catch the eye. You have to think like that and do that way.
T: So going to Flickr, just so I’m clear on this coz this is new for me, this commercial commons area, is all of Flickr a commercial commons area? Do I just go in like I’m on Flickr right now, do I just type if I want a picture of a cake?
P: No. The majority of photographers obviously copyright their work. They don’t want you taking it. But in Flickr in the advanced search section there’s an option there called creative commons it’s called and that’s the license. It’s a little cc called creative commons. You make sure that flag is on and there are various options in creative commons. The most common one is what’s called attribution which means you can take the image but you must recognize the source. Then the next level up is if you’re gonna use that commercially then there’s a different license flag. And then if you wanna modify that image then there’s different license flag. There are different versions of the license but essentially you must search in what’s called the creative commons.
T: Okay so the way to get to that, folks, when you go to Flickr’s home page there’s a search box and there’s a word search beside it. Just click the word search that will take you to another page where there is an advance search hyperlink. Click the advance search hyperlink that will take you to the page that Paul is just talking about. And down towards the bottom right by the search button you’ll see the creative commons section with those 3 little check boxes that you could check. That is a terrific little piece of advice. Thank you for that.
P: Yeah you learned something Trent.
T: I learn something every time I have somebody on my podcasts. Really I just do this for me. This is how I get free lessons from other really smart people and I podcast it so I get to share the knowledge so it seems to work really well for everybody and I love doing it.
Okay, before we get into tools and resources I’m sure you have some ideas and I know that you did come up with that piece of software that was so very successful which automated this. Before we get to that is there else that I’m missing? Should I be asking you something else about curation or have we pretty much covered the basics that people need to know?
P: Yeah I think most of your readers know a lot about monetization and things like that, you know, so where curation can really help is really creating and building these authority sites. That’s where the value is. And not just stop at one, you know, work on an empire. You want several of these going on. You don’t know which one’s gonna explode, do you?
T: No.
P: So have a few going on at the same time and you just have to keep going. You just have to keep working on it. We know it works. There’s set cool, white hat, it’s good for your readers and they come back for more, you know it’s a good win win strategy.
T: And hey, Matt Cutts said it’s what Google wants. I don’t know what more you would want them to convince that curation is a very viable strategy for authority sites. I’m already convinced like I’m saying.
P: I didn’t say he said curation is what he wants but he certainly replied to that email.
T: That’s what I was referring to.
P: I’m sure he’ll do in his video soon.
T: Okay so you being the software guy you created some software which makes this easier.
P: Yeah.
T: How does that work? Just give us a little bit of overview.
P: Yeah so everything I’ve described is what you have to do to create your posts. You have to go out and find this content. And the manual way so obviously you can search Google, you can search Google blog search, Google new search. And another thing you can do is go to Google reader and start collecting feeds of other sites in your niche. We call it niche’(nichey) you call it niche. And build up these sources or content. Coz once you found good authority sites they’re always publishing stuff in your niche. You kinda hang on to them, right?
T: Absolutely.
P: And keep curating from those things. Yeah he knows what he’s talking about, we’re on the same wavelength and things like that. So to explain how to construct the post manually and all the backlinking you need to put in to the originators of the post and I have explained to you how to find these content sources.
So what the tool is, what page one curator is, it’s a desktop tool that runs on Mac or PC and what you do is you simply plug in your blogs into the tool. So you literally register your blogs, a top core blogs, you can run like a whole empire from one tool. Then what you do you’re faced with like an editor window where you could then put in your keywords and go into Google blog search, Google new search and in fact your own collection of feeds and search and pull back all the content that’s relevant that day. Within the tool then you can just browse that content and then perhaps highlight paragraph that’s interesting. Highlight that paragraph and click use that. And that pulls that content into your post but it also pulls the backlink, the attribution reference for you so you don’t have to copy paste or remember that link or go through all of it. You know, the stuff that’s really fiddly and takes time. That’s all done for you automatically. So you got the whole search integrated into the tool. You’re able to find content very, very quickly, inserted very, very quickly. And what the tool does is search all the image and databases as well so you can put in your keyword and it could go into Flickr for your keyword and pull back the interesting images.
T: And this will all be creative commons?
P: Bang! Insert them into your post and all the links for that automatically.
T: And will these be creative commons images?
P: Yap, yeah exactly. They’re all completely genuine and free for you to use. The same for Youtube. So you click on Youtube, search for keyword, you could pull in one there. And bang! All is ready to go. All you need to do really is write your intro, write your summary, make sure the whole article is interesting and click publish. And that goes straight to your blog and it’s done. And the post that you just published is stored in the tool so you can go to your post tab and you can double click on the link and it will open up your browser with the post on your blog so you can look and see if it looks okay. And if it doesn’t have some of the formattings out or something like that, in your tool you just click on edit and just open the editor again so you can fiddle with it, click publish and refresh. So you can do the whole thing from your desktop.
Now what’s really cool is I’ve built a keyword tool into the app as well. And what this does is called keyword explorer and you can put your seed keyword and click go and it will pull back all the keywords coming from Google specifically Google suggests. So it’s coming back from all the long tail keywords that are in the Google suggests database and literally you can have hundreds come back straight away.
And what I’ve also done is built the same thing for Amazon as well. So if your site is an Amazon niche site or you’re trying to attract buyer keywords then it’ll do the same thing from Amazon as well. So you can get a great collection of keywords that people are using everyday to look for your type of content. And then again with a couple of clicks you can grab one of those keywords and it automatically puts it into the title of your post. So already now you’ve got your post that’s not only relevant for your reader but keyword optimized as well. And you can just click publish and off you go.
And then you can even schedule these posts. Now I could do like 10 posts in one sitting so then I’m done for the whole week.
T: Very nice. I like that.
P: So they’ll go out every couple of days or something but all the work’s done in one sitting. So basically it’s such a huge time saver. We know curation saves time anyway over unique content but using page one curator you’re managing a whole empire and building your authority blogs in no time whatsoever. And that’s where the real power comes in.
T: That’s pretty darn awesome. Well I wanna thank you very much for coming on to the podcast and educating me and my audience about curation.
P: You’re welcome.
T: As we mentioned you can do this all for free. You don’t need to buy any tools or software or nothing to do it but this is a business of being efficient. If you’re gonna be a business owner you wanna be streamlined and efficient and have processes coz ultimately if you can make it really that efficient you can probably outsource the work to somebody else. And you can simply act as an editor and say approve, reject, approve, reject. And you can have your VA creating all these curated posts for you.
So there’s lots and lots of opportunities and all you need to do as with anything is to take it to start.
So Paul thank you so much for coming on the podcast. There’s gonna be, we haven’t figured it out yet, but there’s gonna be some kind of special on this product coz I know you have a clickbank launch coming up I think for the week. It’s June 12 for this podcast and I think this podcast is gonna go live on June 5th. And so there’s gonna be a link in the podcast so if you’re listening to this on iTunes or some place else, Onlineincomelab.com/session024 and that will take you directly to this podcast. In that post underneath there will be a link that you can click when it goes live and you’ll be able to get, you’ll be eligible for some kind of discount or something that we’re gonna figure out on the page one curator software.
So I guess that wraps up this episode. It’s been fun. I learned a lot as always. Paul, thank you. We’re gonna have you back on in 2 weeks to talk about how you absolutely crashed it with a software as a WSO. We’re gonna talk about best practices for software as a WSO. And if you’re like me and you’ve never made software or you think “I don’t know how to make any software” I’ve talked to enough people who have now built software that I have come to the conclusion that it maybe not as hard as you might think and I’ve got an expert right here in front of me and we’re gonna talk about that in more detail as well. So if you’re not already on my mailing list and you wanna make sure to not miss that podcast make sure that it’s in the right bar down at the bottom of the post there’s an opt in form and you can just put your email in there coz I email out almost every single time that I publish a new post or a new podcast. You could also subscribe to my RSS feed and you would get it that way.
If you wanna get, Paul do you have a blog? Do you have links or some way if people wanna follow you, follow your stuff or Twitter or anything you wanna give up?
P: Yeah I mean there’s paulclifford.me which is my blog. I try and update it as often as I can, probably not as much as I should because I’m more focused on building software but they can get hold of me there without a doubt.
T: Alright. Paulclifford.me. I’ll make sure to make a link to that in the show notes as well.
Okay folks as always I really appreciate the fact that you come and you read my blog and you listen to my podcasts. I do every one of this with a single intent of trying to share with you strategies that are actually working by real people who in most cases I met and believe in and think that their ideas are worth listening to. Trust me, if I didn’t think they were worth listening to I wouldn’t put an hour of my time to doing the interview. So that’s it. We will see you in one of the future episodes of the Online Income Lab podcasts. If you are listening to this on my blog if you’ll be so kind to tweet it or share it or facebook it or pin it or do something just spread the word I would be eternally grateful for that. That’s it for now. Talk to you again soon.
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