Using curated content for populating your website or blog for the purpose of digital marketing is a great idea. It is a professional and respected way of providing your browsers with valuable and insightful information. This article was inspired by Eibhlin Macintosh’s The Content Curation Handbook - How to create curated content for your website (2012). Allow me to explain the who, what, where, and how of content curation.

Who

…curators plan and oversee the arrangement, cataloguing, and exhibition of collections…They also describe, catalogue, and analyse, valuable objects - MacIntosh, Eibhlin (2012).

Curators are usually appointed by libraries, museums, or other institutions that require a vast body of items to be analysed and grouped in a way that makes sense. Curators are specialist. It is usually a highly respected position as a vast knowledge and understanding of their specific field is crucial if curation is to happen in a comprehensive manner.

What

Content curators, like museum curators, will follow the following steps in the task of curation:

1. Collecting
2. Filtering
3. Evaluating
4. Arranging
5. Presenting
6. Distributing

This seems simple enough, however, the one most important factor, all-encompassing to the curation process is this:

Every curator will put a unique spin on this process. - MacIntosh, Eibhlin (2012)

Where

Content curation happens online. As part of a digital marketing or content marketing strategy, curated articles could form a large part of your pool of value-adding content, especially for your blog.

How

How do you write a curated article for the web? Here are the essentials:

• Be a writer. Curating does not mean that your writing should be simple. A curated article will be shorter than the standard article length, but this is all the more reason to be clear in your statements and use accurate diction.
• Stay current. You cannot curate in a specific field or niche if you do not keep yourself updated with the latest news, tends, events, scandals etc. occurring within that niche.
• Curate from reliable sources, such as highly recommended blogs or academic journals. More importantly, keep sources relevant to your angle/spin/argument.
• And finally, note that content curation is not a regurgitation of what you’ve heard or read, but an opinion or an argument with relating sources.

Information comes before opinion. Conduct research to get an idea, form an argument and then search related content. One niche at a time, one opinion at a time and one argument at a time makes it manageable to pull off successfully.

What you aim to do is to become an opinion leader at the end of the day….

Related articles:

Become an Opinion Leader Through Content Curation

Sound Idea Digital is a full service digital marketing agency. For more information contact 012 664 4227 or email to info@soundidea.co.za

Carla van Straten is a writer for Sound Idea Digital | Carla@soundidea.co.za|@SoundIdeaLMS | Sound Idea Digital l www.soundidea.co.za

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