What is Content Curation? - Beginners Guide

Content curation is strategically gathering and putting together ideas to form a piece of content.

Usually, content curation is done to add more value to an already published content.

Let’s say you have a blog post on the best running shoes. Your content might be good, but there are still certain topics you’ve left out.

By curating this piece of content, you’ll:

Add more relevant data gathered from trusted websites and sources. Don’t forget to cite them.
Add more content to help people decide which shoe brand and what type of shoe is best for them
Collect more ideas about how running shoes work, how to take care of them, and so on.

So, curating content means gathering information from the content already published on the internet and organizing the obtained information into a whole new content.

You don’t develop a whole new piece of content from scratch. The topic is the only thing which belongs to you. The rest of it is gathered, organized, and shaped to look and read better.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking curating content means duplicating someone else’s work. Absolutely not.

It simply means you’re searching for information and ideas for your content. You come up with a seed topic and you have a foundation of your content.

The only thing missing is much data to prove your points, tips and tricks some guy over at a forum discovered and sub-topics you might have overlooked.

All things combined in creating valuable content is what content curation is all about.

It is hard to come up with new ideas to write blog posts, create youtube videos and podcast episodes. Even for an expert writer, there are times when everything is stagnant, and you don’t discover anything unique.

Content curation is the answer to that.

It’s not stealing. It simply means leveraging the content that’s already there on the web. But left undiscovered and underappreciated.

The golden rule of content curation is to cite the sources.

First of all, your sources should be authoritative websites with high relevancy to your content.

You should always cite and link to the source, if possible, to make sure you’re giving the credit where it is due.

By curating content regularly, you’ll be able to:

Build your authority
Generate more traffic from organic sources
Help people discover “undiscovered” information
Build a constant flow of thought sharing audience
Generate more leads

it also helps you to add more diversity to your blog. Imagine writing about the same stuff again and again. You and your readers will eventually get bored and may never want to visit your blog again.

By publishing highly-engaging long-form content on a consistent basis, you’ll gain more visitor trust and guile. Curating ideas from the web makes it easier to publish long-form content. It can be extremely difficult to write on your own without using fillers.

Practicing content curating on a routine basis will also enhance your knowledge. By subscribing to your competitor website’s RSS feeds and reading top publications in your niche will help you stay present in the game. You will not miss the latest updates and news in your industry.

Which in itself will help you become a better person. The more knowledge you have the more ways to grow you may find.

Below are some of the top content curation tools to get started: