As a digital content writer, content curation is part of the work I do for my clients. Content curation involves searching, selecting, customizing, and sharing existing web content that is relevant to a particular theme. It includes sharing videos, pictures, infographics, social media updates, and links to other articles / blogs.
Difference between content creation, content curation and content aggregation
Content curation involves presenting existing web content in a manner that will appeal to your website audience. On the other hand, content creation involves writing new content.
Content curation is also different from content aggregation. Mark Sherbin in his post ‘Should You Curate Content? The Essentials Every Content Marketer Needs to Consider, explains the difference-
– Content aggregation relies on automation, using algorithms to find content.
– Content curation features handpicked content, often introduced with a snippet of copy from the curator. Performed correctly, content curation can create a big value addition.
The work of a content curator is similar to that of a museum curator. A curator picks the best paintings (or articles) suited to the theme of an exhibition (or website niche) and presents the paintings in the most flattering manner to the target audience.
Two Important Benefits of Content Curation
In a world submerged in digital content, content curation adds value to your readers by bringing all the relevant information in one place. Following are the main benefits of content curation for your blog and website:
1. Improve content variety for your readers
Despite best attempts at creating fresh content for your blog, the content can begin to seem monotonous. We all have a particular style of presenting information and that can be hard to shake off.
Content curation improves diversity of type and style of content on your blog, making it more engaging for the readers.
Take my blog for instance, it has lots of relevant content on freelance writing, but some of my readers have messaged me to spice things up by adding more videos and images. Which is, in fact, what got me inquisitive about ‘content curation’.
2. Improve SEO rankings
There is a far more lucrative benefit to including content curation as part of your content strategy, which is SEO. Content curation helps your business become the go-to source of information for a particular topic, drive traffic, and improve search engine rankings of your content.
Content Curation is layering your blog with different types of content to make it more appealing to your audience.
5 Tips on successful content curation
1. Identify your reader. As with content creation, successful content curation starts with answering the questions ‘ who is the target audience and what are their topics of greatest interest’. Seek and share content that is of interest to your audience.
2. Always give credit where credit is due. Clearly identify the original writer and the source of the content.
3. Only share quality content.Using automated curation may lead to poor quality curating. Seek content that will truly add value to your readers. Sean Carton in his article ‘Become a Content Curation King‘, points out that what you leave out is as important as what you leave in.
4. Curate content regularly, but don’t overload your readers with information sharing.
Content curation and content creation are an important part of achieving SEO success. Mix the two and serve a delightful concoction of valuable content for your readers.
I know, I intend to 🙂
Pie Photo credit: Savit Keawtavee ; freedigitalphotos.net
