What Is Content Curation?

After posting Build Traffic, Be More Visible & Build Relationships With This One Strategy I received some questions from people. They were still confused as to what content curation really means/what it means to be a content curator. So this post is the first in a series all about... you guessed it content curation ;-)

Content curation means pulling together content from various sources and presenting it to the reader in your own way. It may be easier to understand content curation by defining what it is not. Content curation doesn't mean presenting a list of stories or a weekly roundup of links. It's definitely not going and copying, word for word, someone else's content!

The idea is to take the information available and make sense of it for your readers. This means you'll have to take time to sift through all the content that's out there and choose what you think is the best and most valuable for your readers. Once you've done that, you create bite size nuggets of info about that piece of content and point your readers to the full piece of content.

Why Curate Content?

One of the questions people asked was what's the point in curating content? The content is already out there, my people will eventually find it on their own.

True. The content is already out there. But the key point to curating content is that it's not just a pile of information. Every minute of the day all of us are inundated by large amounts of information thanks to the internet. And while the internet is a great thing, it also leads to overwhelm. Everyone has to sift through all that's out there to find what they're truly interested in reading. A good content curator does this for you!

How Content Curation Helps You

One misconception, and a big one, when it comes to curating content is that people choose to do it because it's a way for them to not have to come up with their own content - since you're pulling together content from different sources, this offers a shortcut to writing it all yourself. However, this isn't true. The content you curate can help you establish authority and create a connection with your readers.

Think of it from the reader's point of view. Your blog or website is a source of the exact information they want on a regular basis. It saves them from having to do their own sifting online. Over time, they come to see you as a go-to source for their information. They see you as a knowledgeable expert in your field. An automated program that uses keyword algorithms to suck up content from other sites won't do that.

If your content is relevant and helpful to your readers, they'll keep coming back for more. It doesn't matter to them whether you're the actual content creator or have taken the time to weed through all the info out there to find and share the best and most useful to them.

Curating content should be taken just as seriously as creating your own content from scratch, but one of the advantages of this approach is that it is easier and more cost effective than writing your own content or hiring a writer. It's just a matter of understanding your readers well and choosing the right content.