Today I am taking a look at a new WordPress theme called OmniEngine

OmniEngine is a mobile responsive, clean looking, WordPress theme that is designed to do one thing and to do it well: allow people to quickly build curated content websites.

In case anyone does not know what a content curation website is I will explain it here real quick. These are basically sites that pull content, normally content based around a common topic, from various different sources into one central place.  You have probably seen sites like this. Yahoo does some content curation. As does BuzzFeed, Mashable, and several others. Its a common practice. While content creators often do not mind their content being curated because it gets them more exposure the real benefit, in my opinion, is to the curation sites themselves. They get to have sites full of instant, updated, and well written content without doing any work at all. Since they are getting free content, they can get low cost traffic, which they can then monitize with either CPA ads, AdWords, affiliate  offers, or even build an email list for future monetization.

Ok so now that you know what content curation is the question is how can OmniEngine help you build a site that does it? Well besides being a flexible, mobile responsive theme it also has functionality built into it that lets you automatically get content from any of several reputable sources. Its also quite easy to do, in fact there are only 3 steps involved.

In order to get content for your site you first select the source you want to search:

You then search for the content you would like based on category or keyword: This is actually the longest part of the process, in my tests it can take anywhere from between 3 and 12 seconds to find content depending on how broadly you search (yes I actually timed it a few times using my phones stop watch app). However it does return dozens of articles that you can curate.

The final step is to click the checkbox next to the content you want to pull into your site (or click ‘select all’): and then click the large  red button near the bottom that says “Post Selected Items”.

Thats it, in just a few minutes you can have a full niche site with tons of curated content. Its really that easy. In fact I was happy to see how easy it is. There is no app to set up, no API keys to enter. On my testing blog  I installed the theme and was able to start using it right away, just as I described without any issues at all.

There are a few things I need to point out though:

First I did not see any way to schedule the publishing of the content you curate. While you can pull in tons of articles, videos etc all at once, you cant drip feed it that I could see. While having this option would have been nice this is not the end of the world. You can add a one, two, five, ten or even twenty new pieces of your content to your site in about 3 minutes. I don’t believe anyone does not have three minutes a week to devote to making money online if they are serous about it. In fact if you really don’t have  3  minutes a week not only should you not be starting a new venture, you should be going on a vacation (or at least taking a nap or something).

Second of all when this curates the content, if the content is an article and not a video (such as from YouTube or Vimeo) it does not pull in the entire text of the article. It does pull in the title and the graphics for the article but it only pulls in an excerpt of the text.

Finally I had a look at the demo site they provided to me and did some checking and I noticed that the articles do not seem to rank well on Google. I have no doubt in fact that anyone who builds a site with this kind of curated content will get very little SEO traffic.

Now this may sound terrible however its really not because OmbiEngine is not designed to get traffic to the content it curates via SEO. It is designed around social media. Specifically Facebook, using fan pages and low cost paid ads. In fact in the members are  is a 30 minute video that explains their entire strategy. The video is all inclusive and informative however from a tech perspective it is not the best. The speaker does have a bit of an accent and the audio quality is not exactly top shelf. Now don’t get me wrong, its not a bad training, its not terrible, its just not as good as it could have been. However given that the content is very good I think we can forgive the vendors for not having a $500 mic to record their video with.

So what do I think  of OmniEngine over all? Well I know that content curation sites are a proven business model, but I wanted to make sure that the specific monetization and traffic tactics that they teach work well. In fact I spent a lot of time questioning them about their income proof before I became satisfied that they are actually doing what they teach. Beyond that the software aspect of the theme works well. It is easy to use. Requires almost no set up (I actually did no set up) and functions as described. Finally, putting all of that aside, even if you don’t want to content curation it still is at its core a well made,  clean looking, mobile responsive WordPress theme.

Because of these things I think there is value here for several kinds of potential customers. If you want to do content curation and have a curated website then this is for you. If you want to a niche website with a social media presence this is for you. If you just want a well made, mobile responsive theme at a fair price, well then this is for you.

Bonus: The vendors of OmniEngine have provided me with the following bonuses for anyone who picks it up through my link:

Click here to get OmniEngine as well as ALL of these bonuses! They will be waiting for you right inside of the OmniEngine members area.

 A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.

About the Author

Brett Rutecky

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Brett Rutecky is a full time online marketer, web developer, and entrepreneur. He has developed scores of Facebook apps, dozens of custom web sites and hundreds of scripts.

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