How to Create a Money Making Blog Without Writing Content for it?

If you have clicked through the headline over to this article, I am sure that you first thought might have been

Looks like an insane blogger playing gimmicks with his headline

So, my first objective here will be to prove you wrong, if you had a similar thought. On the other hand if you are somebody who is genuinely interested in learning what this technique is, then I have a decent tutorial for you here.

First of all, let me set a few things straight. I am going to show you and teach you how to create and run a successful blog without writing content. That doesn’t mean that you don’t need content for the blog. This also doesn’t mean that you don’t need to do anything.

You definitely need to put in a lot of efforts and time to setup your blog, and promote it. The only difference here is that you do not need to write content for your blog.

On that note let me start off with the method…

The Technique – Blogging without writing content

I hope it will be safe for me to assume that you are a social media user (you have got to be living in the Harappan Civilization if you are not..lol). Have you ever noticed the fact that there is so much of content that gets shared on such sites without any of these content being original. I mean it is the same content that somebody picked from somewhere which is being shared by each user. I haven’t seen Mark Zuckerberg writing an original post or, piece of content on Facebook.

Yet Facebook and Twitter, among others almost always feature on the first page of Google or, any other search engine. Ironical is the fact that even the Google God loves them.

Duplicate content you say… Yeah.. Strange, isn’t it? Even stranger, is the fact that Facebook, Twitter and the others are now multi-million dollar companies.

Let me control my emotions and take a diversion.

If you have been on the internet for about 4-5 years, I am sure you would have come across a website called Huffington Post. This site was created and managed by Arianna Huffington. This is what Wikipedia has to say about Huffington Post –

The Huffington Post (sometimes abbreviated Huff Post or HuffPo) is a liberal American online news aggregator and blog.

You might want to notice a term being used here to describe the website – “Aggregator”. Before we start discussing on what that term is all about, you might be surprised to know that Huffington Post was acquired by AOL for a whooping $315 Million, and Arianna was made the editor-in-chief of the website.

Huffington Post just like most of the news and media websites, is a news aggregator. Just as the literal meaning of the term is, these websites publish content, primarily news that they aggregate from other media sources. It is hence that they are called “News Aggregators”.

So, in blatant terms, it means that these websites don’t write any original content. They rely on other sources for their content. Yet they are not marked down for publishing “duplicate content”, nor are they penalized on their ranking on Google. Almost all of these websites rank on the first page of Google for a lot of competitive terms.

This method of publishing content that you aggregate from other sources is called as “CURATION”.

Why Would People Like Stale and Duplicate Content?

This is one of the questions that I get asked a lot, whenever I speak of Content Curation. If Curation is about publishing content from other sources, why would readers be interested in your blog, when they can read the original from the original source. This is precisely where the term “aggregator” comes in.

You would agree to the fact that there is a lot of information on the internet. And a lot of these information relates to the same topic but is presented in a different way or, from a different angle. If I am to gather detailed information about a specific topic, I will have to spend a lot of time browsing through a lot of websites and blogs, filtering through information so that I get exactly what I was looking for. This is very time-consuming and time is the thing that I am am always short off.

It is for this very reason that we prefer watching NEWS. We can catch a glimpse of everything that is happening around the world in those 30 minutes.

Aggregators also do the same thing. They dig through the heap of information available on the internet and find the ones that are really worth reading. Then they would put that into specific topic buckets and present that in a readable format, so that you have everything that you are looking for at one place.

Which one would you prefer? Spending all the time that you have in a day trying to find information or, just clicking over to the place where that information is already available.

It is hence that people prefer Curated Content.

The technique that I am going to discuss about whereby I build money making blogs without actually writing any content is “Content Curation”.

Steps to Build a Money Making Curated Blog

Setting up and running a curated blog is just like running any other blog. Some basic requirements are commitment, consistency and persistence. If you miss out on any of these attributes, you might end up with a blog that withers away with time.

You can pick a platform of your choice to run your blog. But I prefer WordPress primarily because of the fact that there are a lot of Curation Plugins available for WordPress, which can simplify your work to a great extent.

Now let me take you through a step-by-step process on how to start your curated blog.

Deciding on the Topic – This is one of the most critical step involved in setting up the blog. It is very important that you spend a decent amount of time researching on your topic. The topic that you pick has to be something which –

1. has a large audience
2. can be branched out to multiple sub-topics so that you have a lot of content to aggregate.
3. has decent affiliate programs (While this is not exactly a must, it can help you make that extra income from you blog when you monetize it)

Some broad topics that work really well with Curation, though not limited to only these, are –

1. Hobbies
2. Health Issues and their cures
3. Finance related topics
4. Internet Marketing
5. Career and Self-development topics

I have had success in a few of these topics and hence I can assure you that these topics work really well with Curation.

Setting up your Blog – Blog Curation does not necessarily require a self-hosted blog. It can also be run by using 3rd party platforms like Scoop.it, Spundge, Paper.li etc. But the reason I prefer a self-hosted blog is because of the flexibility that I get in posting adverts on the blog.

I prefer a WordPress blog because of the many plugins that are available that can help you in curating content.

In case you are facing with difficulty in installing a WordPress blog, you can get in touch with us using the Contact page and we can get it setup for you.

Deciding on the Curation tools –

Finding and curating content can be an extremely painful thing to do if you do not have the right tools. It is truly said that, “[social_quote duplicate=”yes” align=”default”]a craftsman is only as GOOD as his tools[/social_quote]”.

A curator is also only as Good as his Curation tools. It is hence very important that you have the right tools. This is also one of the reason that I recommended WordPress blogs instead of any other platforms. Ensure you have the following in place before you start curating content –

1. Your WordPress Blog running on a Good Hosting Server
2. A Good, keyword rich and catchy Domain Name
3. A Good Curation Theme
4. All the necessary plugins installed – Yoast SEO plugin, Social Share Plugin, Jetpack plugin, Pretty Links etc.

Once you have these in place, you are ready to explore the many curation plugins and softwares that are available. When deciding on the curation tool, you need to keep in mind that it should be –

1. Simple to use – Drag and drop works the best
2. Has a good search-ability feature
3. Has posting and scheduling feature
4. Puts your curated content in a “Blockquote” for better presentation

While there are a lot of softwares available, I have been impressed with only one – Pageone Curator. It is because, it has a nice interface, almost all features of what I mentioned earlier and is easy on your pocket as well. An added advantage is the presence of a keyword research function, that is available in the software.

But my most preferred and recommended curation tool, is the CurateThis Bookmarklet. CurateThis comes from YouBrand Inc. and is part of a bundle. The best part about this bundle is the fact that you get –

1. A Curation Plugin for WordPress
2. The CurateThis Bookmarklet for easy and quick curation
3. Curation Traffic themes (3 different themes) that comes pre-installed with a handy little social share plugin as well.

Finding and Posting Content –

Now that you have identified the tools, you need to learn how to find the content that you wish to post. I recommend 2 simple methods to do this –

1. Setup a Google alert for your topic. You can setup different alerts for blogs posts, news articles, videos etc. Keep monitoring the alerts for topics that you would want to curate.
2. You can create a recipe at IFTTT.com. This is a very good way to curate content. IFTTT helps you automate a lot of things ans thus stay updated on the latest information.

The Curation traffic plugin also helps you search through a lot of content and then post the relevant ones with your commentary. At the same time, the bookmarklet will help you curate content as you browse the internet.

Promoting your content –

This is probably the most trickiest of all. How will you generate traffic to your Curated blogs?

While this is a complete course in itself, one need not panic about going about generating traffic. Because it is pretty much the same strategies that you would normally apply to your other blogs. The only difference is that you need not work too hard on getting traffic, because that will start to come a bit automatically because of the trackback that is generated when you add a link to the source for your article.

A few good ways to generate some free traffic is by –

• Reverse Blogging – Reverse blogging primarily refers to a method where you build an audience for your niche first and then divert that traffic to your blogs. You can generate a decent amount of traffic by building a Facebook page and then drive that traffic to your blog.
• Forum posting
• Blog commenting
• Submitting Press Releases
• Video Marketing – this is one method that has worked great for me. I usually create about 5-6 short videos targeting some good keywords and get them to rank on the first page of Google. I then drive that traffic to my blogs.

Monetizing Your Content –

Now that you have your curated blog ready, we can jump straight into monetizing your blog.

If you have done your research right, monetizing should be too much of a bother to you because you will have about 3-4 ClickBank or, other affiliate products ready. You should also have some Amazon products identified by now. Then you have Adsense, and the usual Amazon widgets.

Another place for searching some good affiliate products is offervault.com. It is a one stop shop for me when it comes to shortlisting good affiliate marketing products.

A few ways in which I like to monetize my curated blog is  –

• Writing short review posts – You can do it by yourself or, this can easily be outsourced.
• Adding links in posts – You can insert relevant links to products in your posts. I also use contextual links as an additional source of income
• Inserting small product widgets in posts – This is similar to inserting links into the posts with the only difference that you will insert small widgets like that of Amazon in between the posts
• Banner Ads – Banners have been a good source of income for me.

You can use all your creativity to identify many more such methods of monetizing your curated blog.

Conclusion

Okay! So with that we are at the end of the tutorial. I have tried to put things in the easiest possible perspective so that you understand how the entire process works.

If you like to get detailed training on Blog Curation Basics, you might want to join my Blog Curation Blueprint  Course, which I am offering for FREE for a limited time.

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