Harlan's Blog Curation

I purchased Harlan's Blog Curation program last spring (March I believe). I worked very hard to decide on a niche and create a curation site in a subject that I love and am competent in (but more importantly, that gets good traffic and has rabid fans). The niche I chose suits me well.

Here is my honest appraisal and my experience with the program:

1- Everything is well laid out and the instructions are comprehensive. I have no doubt that if you are able to do everything as suggested, you should have a wonderful curation site. Whether you can make six figures in six months with it as claimed is certainly up for discussion.

2- The niche you choose is very important and you need to find the "sweet spot" between being too general and too specific so there is a good amount of news in the chosen niche on a daily basis.

3- The course teaches that you should curate four articles a day if possible - although you could do less or more depending upon the news in your niche and the time you have to put into your site.

This is where I ran into problems. Harlan talks in the course about doing a day's four posts in a few minutes (I believe he said 15 minutes/4 posts but don't quote me on that as I don't remember exactly.) It was taking me an hour, on average, to do one post. Why? Because I wouldn't post anything unless it was quality content which means you have to read through all the day's news so you find the best articles to curate.

In addition, I was adding an image to every post which means you have to either buy a cheap stock image or find a free image online (I was using public domain images mostly). It takes time to find good public domain images then download them, get them up on your site, give them attribution, etc, etc. Plus, I was cataloging my images on my computer so that if someone ever questioned my photo use, I could quickly go back to the source and prove I had the right to use it.

In addition, you have to add your own commentary to the curation post. It's pretty easy if you just say generic things like "Check out this article I found about . . . blah, blah, blah." I didn't want to do that as it really adds no value. But if you add valuable content (which I tried to do for every post) it takes time and effort to sort your thoughts, say what you want to say and make it all fit into an "intro" and "outro".

4- Harlan's sales pitch claimed something like six figures in six months. I would like to know how many of his students that signed up during his launch in March are now making six figures. Of course, I have no way of knowing that and I don't think he does either. But my guess is, very few, if any. I would love to have Harlan chime in here and tell us about all his six figure students so we could actually see what a six figure business looks like.

It's not that the system doesn't have the potential to give you big returns . . . I think it does and Harlan teaches you everything you need to know about blog curation to do it. I just don't think, from my own personal experience, that getting to six figures is easy because of the time involved. I recognize that I could be spending less time by cheapening my site with less valuable content, curating articles I didn't read, no images, etc, but I didn't want to do that. I personally work at least 10 hours a day on other businesses and I don't have 4 more hours every day to do curation as I want to do it (meaning a very high quality site with my own added valuable content.)

5- The Beach Millions software is supposed to make curation very fast and easy. My own personal experience is that it does save a little time in helping you to find content, but it doesn't read that content for you (which takes a lot of time) to determine newsworthiness and quality. And it doesn't reduce the overall time it takes to curate much when you want to have a site like mine that has relevant free PD images, added valuable content, proofreading your curations, etc.

Here's my synopsis. I really tried hard to make this work, but I was never able to post 4 articles a day like Harlan suggests. Even half that, 2 articles a day was taking me a couple of hours and that was time away from my family - not what I or my wife wanted.
If you have the time, Harlan's course and methodology is excellent. But I doubt that many people have six figure sites because it's hard to put in the time required for six months without any return.
I think Harlan started the Dogington Post in January and I'd be interested as to whether he is making $10K per month with it yet (btw, he says he outsources much of the work - I'd like to do that, but don't have the money to do it and I know that it would reduce the quality of my curation because of the lack of knowledge and experience in the niche on the part of the outsourced writer). Harlan has two sons that have curated blogs more than six months old, so they should also be making six figures.

Sorry this post is so long, but it's my honest feedback.

Steve

I submitted my blog as you requested above, gave you my blog url in a pm for privacy reasons, and you answered:

"This is not a support address"

Make your mind up

Here it is sign up link It's free www.hyprcastr.com It's by invite only So make sure you use the invite code webcast

Andre