Picture of Mark Zahra

Mark Zahra

Mark has been involved with WP RSS Aggregator for almost a decade, from running customer support to now leading RebelCode, the company behind the plugin. He has a passion for content and news, especially the concept of ethically sharing content to help each other grow.

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A Content Curation Case Study – Building Trust and Credibility in Your Niche

Erik Tozier and two of his friends wanted to curate content from the personal-finance space with a visually-appealing feed of fresh news. Using the WP RSS Aggregator Pro Plan, Erik was able to build the Personal Finance Blogs website and take it to over ten thousand monthly page views within just a few months! 🤯

Have you ever wondered how you can build an audience without having to create a ton of original content yourself? Content curation is an amazing tool to attract any audience, within any niche, with minimal effort. Let’s take a look at a content curation case study from WP RSS Aggregator.

In this case study, we’re featuring Erik Tozier. As someone who’s very involved in the personal finance space, he wanted to curate content and grow his following with a visually-appealing content hub.

Using the WP RSS Aggregator Pro Plan on his WordPress site, Erik was able to build Personal Finance Blogs and take it to 15,000+ monthly page views in just four months.

“We’ve seen some strong traffic growth month over month. And so yeah, we’re up to over 10,000 page views a month – which is great for a new blog.”

Erik Tozier, PersonalFinanceBlogs.com
The Personal Finance Blogs Feeds page is updated automatically throughout the day.

📈 Erik’s Results on PersonalFinanceBlogs.com

As part of our first content curation case study, we spoke with Erik in late 2019 when he had already grown Personal Finance Blogs into a somewhat popular and reputable site. Since then, the website has continued to grow month over month. So much so that in January 2020 Erik shared the below screenshot of yet another increase in traffic.

A screenshot of the Personal Finance Blogs Google Analytics data for January 2020.

As you can see, in January 2020 the Personal Finance Blogs website had over 16,000 page views with an average session duration of over 10 minutes and a bounce rate of just 24.23%. That means that only 24.23% of site visitors left the website without visiting another page or post. (If you’d like to learn more about bounce rates, check out Neil Patel’s post.)

Here are some more details on what he has achieved so far.

  • Averaging well over 10,000+ monthly page views.
  • Strong traffic growth month over month.
  • 150 clicks through to posts on a daily basis.
  • 200 new email subscribers and growing.
  • Around 1000 Twitter followers and rising.

🎥 How WP RSS Aggregator Helped Erik

Apart from being an incredible time-saver and a great tool for Erik to keep track of the personal-finance space himself, WP RSS Aggregator has also provided him with a wealth of other benefits.

  • The flexibility of the WP RSS Aggregator Pro Plan allows greater visual customization to keep his readers intrigued.
  • The keyword filtering feature gives Erik more control over the curated content the site offers to its followers, opting for quality over quantity.
  • The WP RSS Aggregator team got Erik in touch with expert developers to add even more specialist custom elements across his site.
  • Eric received outstanding support and prompt communication from the WP RSS Aggregator team whenever he needed some assistance.

Marketing and Promotional Methods

Although marketing and promotion may not be the first thing that comes to mind for a content curation case study, it’s an integral part of the website’s journey.

Erik and his friends use a few different methods to boost the audience and their reputation through the Personal Finance Blogs website.

Initially, since all persons involved had their own blogs in the personal finance space, they announced the launch of this new website to their email list and social media followings to gain some initial traction.

From then on, they moved on to 3 main marketing methods:

  1. Personal Finance Blogs includes a directory of blogs. Bloggers in general love to get their link and their name in directories such as these, so by emailing them when they are added to the directory, they will sometimes promote the website in return.
  2. Each day, Personal Finance Blogs tweets out links and tags the people featured. This helps with brand awareness. In addition to that, every day they email the people featured on their website to let them know about it and to invite them to add an “As featured on Personal Finance Blogs” badge to their website.
  3. For the articles present in the website’s feeds, when visitors click on them, the original source website will see that traffic is coming from the Personal Finance Blogs website, which can also help with awareness.

The main aim, as Erik explained to us, is to “network in your niche to grow and gain awareness, links, and support. By creating an aggregation website, you are helping others grow, so they should want to help you as well.”

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📖 Content Curation Case Study – The Transcript

Erik, tell us a little bit about your website.

My name’s Erik Tozier. I live in the United States in Minnesota, and the website that I built, using the WP RSS Aggregator plugin, is called Personal Finance Blogs.

My two friends and I decided that we would try to do content curation in the personal-finance space.

What specific problem were you looking to solve that led you to discover WP RSS Aggregator?

What we wanted to do is provide a visually appealing feeds feature because that was something that wasn’t done very well in the personal-finance space.

A lot of people had feeds, but these different sites that had the feeds features, it would just be a list of links, and for the user that’s not a great user experience.

What made you decide to use WP RSS Aggregator over other solutions?

WP RSS Aggregator was the most documented plugin and the one with the most features as well.

It also had the stuff that I wanted to do, which was the keyword filtering. That was one premium feature that we bought.

We can easily filter with the plugin. With the WP RSS Aggregator plugin you can define filters based on different keywords, for example, if you only wanted to have posts that included the word ‘budget’. You can do that with the plugin and we wanted to do that.

What has made WP RSS Aggregator so valuable for your website?

Originally, all I needed and all I wanted was to get access to the data, such as titles and I wanted the links and who it’s coming from.

I ended up hiring a developer through WP RSS Aggregator. They work with a contracting company and I used this service to add on a couple of custom fields, so that I could include elements like my Twitter handle, Facebook URL and blog name within the metadata of each post coming through.

When I figured that out, I was really happy because I had all the data there. Once you have all the data, then delivering the data to the viewer becomes much easier. With all that data, you don’t need to do a lot of processing or anything.

Once I was able to get that done, then I felt, “Okay this is great. This is fantastic!”

The content brings in your audience. The subscriber list keeps them close by.

How has WP RSS Aggregator benefitted your website and the project in general?

We launched at the end of July and it has been approximately four and a half months since the launch.

In terms of traffic, in November we had 15,000 page views!

Throughout the day they update, so then you can get any new content that’s coming in throughout the day, which I think is awesome.

We’ve seen some strong traffic growth month over month. We’re up to over 10,000 page views a month, which is great for a new blog but also just any blog in general.

Once you hit that level then – we haven’t thrown ads on it yet, but once you do throw ads on it, you can make a couple of hundred dollars a month. I think we’re excited for that coming up.

In terms of other numbers, our email list just hit 200 email subscribers. In terms of the traffic, we’re sending about 150 clicks to various posts and blogs on a daily basis.

How did you find the support services?

The support has been great. I think through their website they have a knowledge base, which is pretty comprehensive.

Sending messages to their developers or even to set up this interview, messaging with the CEO. It seems to be that communication was great and really helpful.

👇 Final Thoughts

There are thousands of others just like Erik that have put WP RSS Aggregator to good use on their websites. This isn’t just for the personal-finance space. You can curate and aggregate articles and videos from any niche and any source of your choice.

Content curation isn’t always easy to get right, but when used for the best intentions it can be a very valuable tool for growing your website and your brand identity.

With the WP RSS Aggregator Pro Plan, you can set up a website (or part of one) on auto-pilot, constantly bringing in fresh content as often as you’d like. If you want to review that content first, simply use the filtering options or opt to import everything as a draft, then manually review everything before publishing.

The flexibility offered by WP RSS Aggregator is an invaluable asset to add to any WordPress site, while our professional support team will help you get the most out of your investment whenever you need help.

Get WP RSS Aggregator’s Pro Plan to boost visitor engagement and grow your audience. With no limits on the number of sources to fetch the latest news from, you have the tools you need to share all the best content.

Build Your Own News Aggregator

Follow Erik's example to build a following and a reputation in your niche through curated content.

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What did you think about this content curation case study? Has it inspired you to work on something similar? Let us know in the comments below and we might feature your site in the future.

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7 Responses

  1. I have a pro plan but have struggled to sit down and figure out the curation process myself. This article gives great insight into how to leverage a certified developer to implement and really gets me thinking about getting my project back up and running. Thanks for sharing Erik!

    1. Hi Nick, I’m glad Erik’s story has helped to reignite that fire. If we can help in any way to figure out your content curation process, please let me know here or by using our contact form.

      Feel free to suggest any ideas in particular that you’d like us to write more about, such as different methods for content curation or some other area you may be struggling with.

  2. Hello,

    Interesting. Are there any more case studies like this?

    Can you explain this part please, “… include elements like my Twitter handle, Facebook URL and blog name within the metadata of each post coming through.”

    What does it mean by ‘each post coming through’?

    Is this for posts that are shared in social media?

    1. Hi Ben, we’re working on more case studies in the coming months.

      That’s referring to the imported posts. They can then be used to be displayed on the posts if you’re showing a preview on your site, or you can use them when sharing to social media with third party tools.

  3. Hi Mark,

    I am planning to buy the premium plugin but I am at loss as to if the incoming feeds will conform to my theme’s post layout. I want the posts and layouts to look very neat and professional. We can discuss privately through gmail to know the theme I use and how you guys can help.

    Cheers.

    Josh

    1. They will Josh, since the content is imported into your WordPress database, and the theme then controls how the content is displayed.

    2. As Jean mentioned, you’re all set, Josh.

      When importing as Posts, WP RSS Aggregator has no say on the layout and styling used to display the posts. We leave that completely up to your theme to make sure it matches perfectly with everything else.

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