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What is Content Curation?

These days it’s become pretty clear that “content marketing” is where long-term, reliable, traffic generation is going to be focused for the foreseeable future. Gone are the days of heavy “on page SEO” and throwing blog posts up on the first page of Google over night.

Content “Curation” is now an accepted component of content marketing, and it’s growing day by day. However, the technique is still new enough so that there is disagreement about what “curation” actually is. Some people say one thing and others say something else. For instance, some folks consider themselves “curators” while others would disagree and refer to them as “aggregators”.

So who’s right? Frankly, that’s for the future to decide. In the “here and now” we can tell you what we believe at “Contact List Builder” … and we can also try to keep you informed of what others think as well. Our curation blog posts speaks for our point of view, and if you’re a member of the Contact List Builder you’ll be getting a heavy dose of our opinion and our teachings. Here on our blog, we’ll be gathering definitions from different experts and presenting them to you as we discover them. In the course of this we can hopefully make things more clear to our readers.

With this in mind, here’s a “Guest Post” written by Sameer Panjwani in Search Engine People:

An In-depth Guide to Content Curation – Search Engine People

http://www.searchenginepeople.com Wed, 26 Mar 2014 13:27:16 GMT

“Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community.” … Beth Kanter

There are a few simple rules that absolutely must be followed when curating content.

Quality & Relevance

“Make sure the final piece of content you publish is of high value. Get the bits and pieces from real experts. If you land on some questionable content, discard it; its part of what curation is!”

Add Value

“Add your own input (annotations, commentary) to what you are sharing. Its going to make it more interesting and more relevant, and thus adding value”

Attribute the Source

“Always give attribution to the original source. You don’t want to be sued, sent DMCA takedown notices, or be accused of trying to pass off others content as your own by your readers.

The sources are providing you with good content you can share with your audience. The right thing to do is to give them attribution for it, preferably in the form of links to their website.”

Read More At: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/925-content-curation-guide.html

The Vital Components Do Not Change

Whatever any specific “expert’s” definition of curation might be, most of them agree on a few “indispensables”. For instance, everyone agrees that a good curator adds value to the information being curated. If there’s no “value added”, then you’re merely “aggregating”. Adding your opinion or your own “take” on the subject is a vital component of good curation. Don’t be shy of taking the “pundit’s position”, and becoming a commentator. After all, part of the objective of good curation is to establish you as an “authority” in your niche! Welcome that role by adding your opinion … and thereby adding value to your curations.

The image on the left was created by Curata.com. Curata, Inc. is the leading provider of business-grade content curation software that enables marketers to curate the most relevant and highest quality content as part of a  successful content marketing strategy.

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