Category: Articles

Content curation can be a great way to overcome ‘content famine’ on your site! View our Reno Tahoe WordCamp Presentation that covers the elements of content curation and how its regular practice can build content for your site. An even bigger benefit is that regular content curation can lead you to feel more comfortable or become better at writing your own posts and articles from scratch.

Think of content curation as a self study course in writing.  Here are the key elements from the presentation:

• Disciplined, regular discovery of articles, authors and writing examples
• Start with ‘reactions’ to practice writing your opinions and ideas
• Expand to longer comments and opinions as you gain confidence
• Feedback from your community and the wider web to judge progress
• Curation can lead to more and better original content for your blog or site

You can view just the slides at Slideshare.net

As content curation and aggregation grow, questions about legality, ethics, copyright and fair use continue to swirl about it.  Is content curation plagiarism?  Is content aggregation stealing?  These and other headlines testify to the murkiness surrounding curation and aggregation on the web.  I think this is fundamentally due to the disruptive nature of curation and aggregation on physical media.

You know you need to start writing content for that new marketing site or blog, as well as your social media accounts.  But that’s not something you’ve done in a while, especially creative, interesting articles that would interest your clients or community.

How should you get started?  You could read some of the relevant articles in your niche or industry and follow some of the pundits on twitter.  Maybe subscribe to a few blogs and industry news sites on your Flipboard reader.

Do you keep up with your competitors and industry trends as often as you should?  As a small to medium size business, you know that keeping track of your competition is important for your future growth.  Maybe you commissioned a study, or have a paper file of competitors or a summer intern did a bunch of research on the web.  When it was created it was very eye-opening, but how do you keep your information up to date?  Does your executive team have time to keep up with all of the articles out there on your competitors and industry?

Imagine a central location where a daily stream of articles on your competitors, industry trends and client news appears.  This Competitive Research Portal can easily be set up using MyCurator.   The key is that the information is highly selective and very targeted, not another fire hose of mostly irrelevant news.  Using MyCurator’s relevance engine, you can weed out over 90% of articles, delivering the ‘must see’ information automatically.

I’m not the creative type, and find it hard to come up with new content for my blog.  I turned to content curation to help me set up some form of regular posting schedule.  Along the way, I found that there is more to curation than just gathering content.

Content curation is a very inspiring practice for me, bringing me in contact with great writers and insightful ideas every day.  Being exposed to a stream of articles and posts in the niche’s that you are following lets you start to see the topic from so many different points of view.  It becomes a great educational experience, not only broadening your understanding of a topic, but sparking innovative ideas for your own business, products or blogging.

Building Authority

Many articles on curation highlight that content curation on your blog or website can help you become an authority for your clients or community.  But its not the fact that you have a bunch of articles about a topic that provides that authority.  It is the act of curation, of reading through many, many articles on the topic and learning from those points of view and ideas that you begin to gather authority.  It is the curator that gains authority.

Like so many small businesses, you’ve got your site up, you are connected on twitter, facebook, google+ and your blog is all set to go.  Yet it stays empty because its so hard to come up with new content.   You just don’t have time, and so your blog, and all of the downstream media like twitter and facebook, just languish.

What about Content Curation?

After reading some articles on content curation, you think that this is a great way to start providing some content to your community.  Yet even content curation can take a lot of time and effort to do it well.  To be effective, you need to be searching through 10,20 maybe even 100 articles per day to find new and interesting content.  How many of you have a job description that says you should spend hours per day reading the web, twitter and blogs?  You could use a personal assistant to help read through the fire hose of articles that come from your Google alerts, blogs, twitter feeds and news feeds – but those days are long gone.

Many bloggers these days are turning to content curation as a tactic to add to their repertoire of blogging tools.  As they do so they are finding that content curation can be hard work.  Maybe not as hard as content creation, but it does have its own hurdles and can be very time consuming to do well.

The biggest hurdle to content curation is also why it is valuable to your blog’s community – there is so much information to read through and digest out on the internet.  To do well at curation, you need to process 20, 50 maybe 100 articles and posts per day to find great information to curate.  Just skimming a bunch of titles from your RSS feed and posting them without comment just doesn’t cut it these days.

Content Discovery

The first component of the volume hurdle is that you really need to cast a wide net to find the interesting and insightful articles.  You should have Google alerts set up on the keywords that you want to track.  Using Google alerts provides the widest search available, as Google doesn’t narrow the content based on your recent browsing history.  This brings in a range of articles you wouldn’t normally see if you do an online search each day.