Our WordPress Content Curation Guide – What You Need to Know

So you want to take on the mammoth task of curating the web’s content into one convenient place? Nowadays, it seems like everyone and their mother has a blog, so content curation is a valuable service to the many content consumers of the world.

But what exactly is content curation? And how do you actually do it? Those are good questions. While you probably encounter content curation every day on the web, you might not know all that much about it.

That’s what I’ll get into in our big WordPress content curation guide! I’ll give you a crash course in content curation on WordPress. Let’s dig in.

Content Curation Guide: What is Content Curation?

I don’t want to belabor this section too much because there’s a good chance that you’re already at least somewhat familiar with content curation if you’re reading this guide.

But in case you’re not, let’s give it a quick run-through (feel free to skip ahead if you’re a curation expert).

Content curation is pretty much what the definitions of those two words are. That is, it’s the act of curating the vast sea of content into a digestible package. Basically, you go through all of the content out there and collect the best pieces of content in a neat organized manner.

For example, you could curate content on a specific topic (like WordPress), or a medical condition, or anything else that tickles your fancy!

What Types Of Sites Can You Build With Content Curation?

You have a few different options when it comes to content curation sites.

One way is to create something called a content aggregator. With this type of website, you’re basically just collecting news on a topic in one place without any commentary of your own. That is, it’s just excerpts and links to the original article with nothing else added.

A good example of this type of content curation site is WP News Desk. It’s still helpful to users because it collects content from different sites in one place, but there’s nothing new added.

Another type of content curation site that you can create is a commentary site, where you actually add your own thoughts to each piece of content that you share. This helps frame the content for your readers and is a bit more involved than pure news aggregation.

Readers will come not only to find interesting articles but also to hear your thoughts.

There are also other smaller forms of content curation like:

• Roundup posts
• Social sharing curation

How to Make Money With Curated Content Websites

Like other websites, you have a ton of options to make money with curated content.

In addition to common methods like:

• Google AdSense
• Affiliate marketing
• Display advertising

You can also try more content-curation specific methods.

One example is charging for access to your curated content. If you curate content especially well in an in-demand niche, business leaders or others may be willing to actually pay for access because it saves them so much time.

Another possibility is offering websites special “promoted content” spots on your site. For example, you could have featured listings that webmasters can pay to place their site in. This is one way that WP News Desk monetizes itself.

How to Add Content Curation to WordPress

Because WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system, it provides a solid foundation for creating a curated content website. But, it’s not the only tool that you’ll need.

Rather than trying to manually curate all of the content on your site, you can put the whole thing on autopilot (or semi auto pilot) using the power of RSS feeds. RSS feeds are basically a constantly updating feed of a website’s content. Nowadays, you can find an RSS feed for pretty much every site that regularly publishes content.

Once you have an RSS feed, you can use an RSS feed plugin like WP RSS Aggregator to automatically import that RSS feed’s content into your WordPress site.

While the core plugin is free, you’ll probably want to extend it with add-ons like:

• Feed to Post – lets you import RSS feeds as actual posts in your WordPress site.
• Keyword Filtering – lets you add filtering to RSS feeds to only import posts that meet certain criteria.

These two premium add-ons give you much more flexibility over how you curate content.

For example, you could have the Feed to Post add-on save each feed item as a draft in WordPress. That way, you can, say, go in and add your own commentary to an existing draft, rather than having to do everything from scratch.

Or, if you’re not planning to add commentary, you can also just automatically publish each new post as it rolls in.

Taking Things Further With Content Curation

I kept things brief with how to use WP RSS Aggregator because we’ve actually already written extensively on the topic.

If you’re interested in creating a content curation site with WordPress, these posts are a great jumping off point into the actual technical how-tos of creating an awesome content curation website.

We’ve written guides on how to create a general news aggregator, as well as more specific uses like curating sports news or the latest news on a specific medical condition.

Once you have your basic website built, you might also be interested in ways to enhance your site’s feed display.

And finally, if you need some inspiration, we’ve put together some good content curation website examples, as well as some content curation WordPress themes to help you with your own design.

Wrapping Things Up

Content curation is a great way to enhance an existing site or can serve as the basis of an entirely standalone site. No matter if you’re aggregating news or adding commentary to specific curation items, WordPress provides a great foundation for your curated content website.

All you’ll need is a plugin like WP RSS Aggregator, as well as some of its premium extensions like Feed to Post and Keyword Filtering.

Then, you can build out your site and start gaining traffic and making money from curated content!

I hope you enjoyed our content curation guide and please leave a comment if you have any questions!