10 Minute Curator's Success Guide

1. Intro to Curation with CurationSoft

2. General Settings

3. Google News Search

4. Google Blog Search

5. YouTube Video Search

6. Flickr Search

7. Twitter Search

Intro to Curation with CurationSoft

 CurationSoft gives you the ability to quickly find content from Google News, Google Blog Search, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr.

What this means is you can "curate" a blog post about a topic and drag and drop the best stuff you find from all of the sources, just one source, or any combination of sources.

Saves Time - A lot of it!

The reason this is a much faster way to curate is that you can immediately pull up the latest, greatest content from any source, check it out quickly to check for quality and relevance, and drag and drop it right into your post editor.

This saves at least 4 steps (on average) where you'd normally have to copy a title, go back to your post editor and paste it, then go back and forth each time to get a text snippet, and the link to the source.

That's 4 steps for every piece of content you curate into a blog post.

Trackbacks

The other great thing about curating with CurationSoft is that it gets you backlinks in the form of "trackbacks. When you link to another blog, they get a notification that you've done so. They come and check out your post and see that you've done a great job with it and they see your link to them. They can then go back and approve your trackback (as a remote comment) and you get a link back to your post.

The link back to your post is actually in the form of your post title. So you get a great anchor link that helps you in Google, while also getting direct traffic from readers of the blog which approved your trackback.

Better Curation Means Better Traffic, Links, and Social Buzz

Doing a great job at curation means you will attract people (followers, readers) who save a bunch of time just watching what you curate rather than having to find all this good stuff on their own. They don't know how easy it was for you to quickly "bubble up" this great content using CurationSoft. All they know is you save the time and find interesting things for them to check out.

This kind of content marketing is catching on big time around the web in most niches because the web is a sloppy mess that has very few single, reliable sources for the best content around certain trends, issues, and topics.

It is no small coincidence that well-curated blogs like Huffington Post, Mashable, Boing Boing and many others are some of the most popular and profitable blogs on the web today.

General Settings

When you open Settings>Options you will land on the General Settings page.

One this settings window you will be able to manage your username and password, the program's docking options, and you can clear your search history as well.

CurationSoft has an autocomplete feature when you do searches more than once to save you time in future searches. It also automatically searches the new source, such as YouTube for example, without having to hit the search button each time to go between sources.
 

Google News Search

In Google News search you get the best of the web's latest news results for any keyword.
 

You get the latest results which are drag-and-drop or you can copy the html if you wish.
 

Google Blog Search

Google Blog search allows you to search all the blogs on the web that Google has indexed.
 

There are specific settings for this search which you access by going to Settings>Options>Google Blogs tab.
 

Here you can set the number of results you want to show per page and the language you want to search in. Choose from Spanish, English, French, German, or Italian.
 

YouTube Video Search

YouTube curation settings allow for several different setups. You can control the number of results per page, sort by relevance, upload date, rating, and view count, search just for high definition videos or all videos, and choose whether you just want to drag the video itself, or also the accompanying title and description given by the video's producer.
 

Flickr Search

Flickr settings allow you to change the number of results per page, choose restrictions, different sorting options, and search all photos or simply those with Creative Commons attribute.

(We recommend you leave it set to Creative Commons, as seen below, to protect yourself from using an image that is restricted by the owner.)
 

Twitter Search

Twitter settings are simply how many results you want per page. You can drag and drop not only the tweet and any links that come with it, but also the link to the poster's Twitter profile and their profile image.
 

RSS Feeds

Here's a video Jack did on how to use the RSS Feeds feature in CurationSoft...