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Since we’ve established that we want to make some money online, the next question is “How?”

That’s a really good question, and I can help with part of it. First, let’s review the foundation requirements for successful online businesses:

1. Market for products in chosen niche. Can you demonstrate the ROI with a solid business case? In other words, somebody has to feel it’s going to wax their car, whiten their teeth, or do whatever it is that makes them feel smart and attractive.
2. Authority knowledge in chosen niche. In the long term, you really do need to know what you’re talking about. This involves stuff like “learning.” Doesn’t have to be difficult, but it will take time.
3. Presence in market. Being an authority and being first to market means nothing if you have no presence in your market.

Item #2 is my particular strength. If there’s learnin’ to be doin’ you can be sure I’m on it. What’s more, once I learn something I can teach it.

Let’s be about it, then, and apply #2 for content curation.

Content curation

First, let’s take a look at the problem:

Go ahead, click the picture, take a look at it full size.

My goodness. What a mess. What is all that stuff, anyway?

Well, let’s see. I have:

• Josh Kohlbach’s Reducing Bounce Rate report.
• Danielle LaPorte’s Fire Starters (And a present. Go get on Danielle’s list and you can get presents from Danielle too)
• Jade Craven’s networking material. I got in early on Jade’s stuff. Saved $$$ bank. You should get in early on Blog Post Engineering. You’ll save $$$ bank too.
• Various bits and pieces of Dave Navarro’s work, including the mighty fine How to Launch the **** Out of Your Ebook.
• Some Ittybiz free bonus stuff (oops. Haven’t looked at that yet.)
• A folder with other ebooks (maybe yours?)
• Annabel Candy’s ebook on successful blogging. Oops again, I forgot, she hasn’t launched it yet. Get your copy next week.
• Roberto Koci’s Hungarian translation for hRecipe plugin.
• TOP SECRET stuff, which I can’t show you. Have you ever wondered why they always stamp TOP SECRET in screaming red letters? It practically begs you to rip it open and see what the big deal is (My suspicion is it’s mostly stuff like “What to serve at White House dinners to give unwanted diplomats gas pain.” Top secret indeed). Wouldn’t it be better if they just sort of nonchalantly printed top secret?
• Great gobs of programming stuff, like interpreters, text editors, code, etc. Super cool. Boring… Next!
• That’s enough for now don’t you think?

It’s an embarrassment of riches! And yes, I have read most of this stuff at least once. Some of it is getting implemented right now, some is scheduled for the future.

How to make sense of content?

Obviously, there’s a problem. I have a lot of very cool stuff, and I don’t know how to organize it.

I cannot be the only one suffering from this problem. What I want is a way to quickly store my stuff, and quickly find it again. More than that, I want to understand what I have. And I don’t want to have to think about it overmuch.

Curation is far more than organizing. If possible, I’d like to know:

• What it is.
• Who wrote it.
• Who owns it? How is it licensed? What can I do with it?
• Where I got it. How I got it.
• When I got it.
• Why I got it.
• What I intend to do with it.
• What other people have done with it.
• Why it’s important.

In this example, we’re looking at information stored in documents of various flavors. The bigger problem for bloggers is information spanning documents such as these, RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, bookmarking lists (e.g., delicious.com), etc. The list is long and growing longer daily. (Yes, daily, for real.)

Note the reverse problem: how do you, as a blogger, ensure your content is curated effectively?

How to figure it out

To get started in content curation (or any other subject), the very first thing I recommend is to find out what other people have done, and are doing right now. Specifically, poke around in Robert Scoble’s feed, and find Jeremiah Owyang and Alex Schleber. You can find all three easily using Google, and all three have written about curation.

What we as bloggers need is to know which technologies being developed in Silicon Valley and other hot spots are useful for bloggers, and exactly how bloggers can use them. (This is partly a curation problem itself.) If you see yourself more as a marketer or business person, there’s little difference in strategy. Substitute “business person” for “blogger” and carry on.

Here are 7 specific actions you can take to get a handle on this rapidly-evolving topic:

1. List the top 12 players in content curation. These may include startup founders, university professors, and bloggers.
2. Define content curation. What, exactly, is it? Does anyone really know? Or is it just a buzzword du jour? Does the definition depend on the content? (That is, does curating blogging and social media content differ in some way from curating audio or video content?)
3. What tools currently exist to help bloggers curate their own content? What about curating other content?
4. Could Google (or other) custom search be considered a piece of the curation puzzle?
5. How does content curation compare with “real” curation? What are the analogous activities to collecting, archiving, analyzing, interpreting and displaying?
6. How does curation benefit bloggers? Be precise.
7. How does content curation benefit other businesses? This is where the real money is, provided you can create a relevant product, and market that product effectively. The need is there.

This may be the first in a series of articles (no promises) examining the nuts and bolts of skill-building in a micro-niche. The above suggestions can be adapted for any field of study, not just online enterprises. I’m using blogging as a concrete example for Website In A Weekend readers.

And let me preempt any criticism concerning the quantity and type of information littering my computer screen. Anyone saying I should just delete all this stuff and get on with it, I’m cool with that. You’re probably right, I probably should delete all this stuff.

But the problem remains.

Businesses CANNOT just delete content. Instead of your ebook (or maybe not your ebook), this desktop screenshot could just as well have been filled with invoices, marketing collateral from collaborators and competitors, and regulatory documents where non-compliance incurs civil (or criminal) penalties.

What then, delete it all? I don’t think so.

Big businesses can snap up graduates from UC Berkeley’s School of Information. Can you be part of the solution for small businesses?

Micro-niches are exploding

Content curation for blogging is just one example of a micro-niche. There’s many others. For example, Corbett Barr is taking on the traffic generation for blogging. Alex Whalley is focusing on keyword optimization. I’m going after the write/publish/promote a single blog post niche.

I’ve created a list of people moving rapidly into other niches, and another list of rapidly evolving micro-niches, all material for a future blog post.

What about you? Have you given any thought about finding something where you can excel? A topic where you will be regarded as The Authority?