In a world where content is King, it might be said that content curation is God. This is the hottest trend to come out in the years in the marketing and search engine optimization field. At its most simple, content curation simply means collecting the best content on a particular topic and publishing it with edits, additions, and specific advice.
It is an amazing tactic for gaining traffic, backlinks, and a targeted audience. The best part? You don’t have to do a lot of the writing! Now, that is not to say that it is an easy task that can be done by anyone. You need the right tools and the right attitude in order to make a piece of curated content that delivers massive value to your intended audience.
Scoop.it
Link – http://www.scoop.it/
This website is one of the best ways to curate content at the moment. It has a free version so you can get started for a very cheap price – only your time. All you need to do is pick a section of the website that you have knowledge about and start to add things – articles, blog posts, videos, social media, etc.
Storify
Link – http://storify.com/
This is an absolutely beautiful website that allows you to turn some kind of in person event into an online story. There is no better way to quickly turn something into a piece of online content than to use Storify. You can even add a badge to the events and give them some sort of social group and flavor.
The ability to export this content to other blogs is going to be the biggest benefit here.
Pearltrees
Link – http://www.pearltrees.com/
Although this website has a weird name, don’t let it turn you off. Similar to something like Pinterest where you can pin an item, this website lets you “Pearl” a website. That means that you can start collecting websites and organizing them into different silos of content. After time, your pearls will become extremely comprehensive – which is the essence of content curation.
Link – http://pinterest.com/
If you haven’t heard of Pinterest yet, it’s time to get your head out of the sand. Pinterest is the absolute best way to get content organized into different boards. The only catch is that you can typically only pin pictures, videos, or words that are in picture format. This limits Pinterest’s reach a bit, but if you have a media friendly niche then you can definitely use them to curate photos. You can pin your blog posts, but their impact will be limited as Pinterest is mostly a visual medium.
Delicious
Link – http://delicious.com/
My personal favorite. It allows you to bookmark links that you find all around the web and tag them with different types of information. For example, I have marketing, SEO, and link building tags that I use to tag a bunch of articles that I want to read. It is the absolute best way to get this done and can help you massively when it comes to content curation.
Content Curation is a Powerful Tool to add to your Marketing Arsenal
As more and more people focus on creating content to feed the Google beast, Content Curation becomes an essential aspect of an online marketing campaign. If you find valuable articles and add your 2 cents, you can feed content to your readers and create unique content that others will enjoy. Curating takes time as you want to only share the best of the best, but it is worth it as your audience finds that you are saving them time in doing their own research.
You can use content curation for your social media channels or to enhance your blog. Some people are even promoting their curated content websites as their primary sites and monetizing them. There are now WordPress plugins that you can use, as well as sites like Rebelmouse that offer widgets for curation.
Don’t wait for content curation to be outdated, join the masses now and start benefiting from this new technique!
