“Content is KING!” An over-quoted statement that you might have heard umpteen times. But that’s also an evergreen truth!

Having a website – from niche analysis to web development, design to social integration … content generation is one of the most tedious tasks to ensure online success.

It’s content that engage your audience. It’s content that build your trust and authority. It’s content that shows the entire world wide web who you really are. Without fresh good quality/targeted contents, audience will not be built and, hence, monetisation will not happen.

If you were to ask me which is THE best content generation method, I’d give you a quick answer – WIY …. Write It Yourself! Nevermind about the grammar mistakes, nevermind about the English syntax, as long as you try to write any content yourself, those are very personalised and unique contents.

However, if you were to write content by yourself, not only it’s very very time consuming, a lot of us are not naturally borne writers and copywriters that can throw out pages of uniquely self-written contents in minutes.

If you’re like me, some times, I’d stare into a blank “page” of Word document and the “brain ink” just don’t flow!

As such, no doubt writing contents yourself is the best content generation technique, we’d also need some other content generation strategies.

And one that I’ve used and endorsed content generation techniques is – CONTENT CURATION.

What is content curation? Just head over to news.google.com and you’ll see content curation working at its best. Yes, even Google is using it.

Basically, it’s a curated list of news/contents that you compiled for a certain niche. The cool part about content curation is that the page of all your excerpt articles/news will be totally unique (in term of page content).

Any copyright issue when we use content curation method? This article here provides very good answer :

The most common and fundamental questions that come up whenever I talk about content curation (especially in the context of content marketing) is, “How can you use other people’s content?  How does that work with copyright, fair use, and more generally ethics?” –  http://www.contentcurationmarketing.com

So, which curation plugins can/should we use for our content marketing?

Curation Suite

I was an early user of Curation Suite. At the time when I got Curation Suite, it was an independent plugin with a low one-time price … can’t really remember the amount I paid for it, maybe around $69 of some sort. I also bought the Listening Engine for 1-year.

Before the 1-year Listening Engine subscription, I submitted a ticket at their site to cancel it – as I thought that features offered by Listening Engine isn’t quite worth its price tag. To play safe, I logged into the member area to delete my credit card details with them.

Unfortunately, despite their acknowledgement to cancel the subscription in the ticket, they still proceed to bill me for another year of Listening Engine. Thinking that I could have used it for another year, I let the matter rest.

To my horror, they rebilled me AGAIN for another year of Listening Engine! Ticket submitted this time round when unanswered and have to resort to chargeback with my credit card bank with proof of my tickets with them – thank goodness they somehow did not reset or wipe off the ticketing system.

Dismayed support and trustworthiness! Nevertheless, the standalone Curation Suite plugin is still quite a good tool to curate nice keyword targeted contents.

I’ve used it consistently at one of my projects, SgMyLIVE.com, to curate the blog posts … until lately, there is a rather persistent error that disallow the plugin from working ever since WordPress 5.2.

Now, Curation Suite is on a subscription model at $19 per month.

So, is it worth it to get Curation Suite? Think you’d know the answer – a Big NO for now.

Oh, another very important note about Curation Suite. Somehow, it requires you to put a file at the root of your wp-admin. When I submitted a ticket to ask them why, they said this is how the plugin can work. Now, having a file like that is a security concern! Not a good practice though as you never know what backdoor function such file can do.

MyCurator Content Curation plugin

With all the issues I’m facing with the Curation Suite plugin, I’m always on the look out for the “next best” curation plugins. Tried WP RSS Aggregator, CM (Creative Minds) Curated RSS Aggregator and ExpressCurate (totally free), I’ve settled down with MyCurator.

In fact, been using MyCurator for months. Just that out of convenience, I had continue to use Curation Suite … until the technical error that crashes Curation Suite that literally forced me to relook and reuse MyCurator.

Guess what? It turned out that MyCurator is GOOD, and most importantly, it is EASY to use.

Just watch the couple of video tutorials at their main site – https://www.target-info.com/ – and you’ll be well on your way to curate targeted contents.

The good thing about MyCurator is that you can try it out with their free plan which allow you to curate contents from 5 sources – more than adequate for beginning curation purposes.

An outstanding feature is GetIt – which allow you to “bookmarklet” any content that you’re browsing into Training Posts for your curation.

The verdict? Since MyCurator is free, I’d recommend that you give this powerful content curation plugin a spin. I’m sure you will like it as much as I do now.