How to Create Curated Content for Your Blog

curating-content

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In an upcoming book, I listed content that bloggers can use without even writing much, such as info-graphics, videos, images and also “curated content”.  It prompted a question what curated content means.
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News aggregation websites, for example, have been curating content from other news websites and from the wire since online news reporting began, and even before that, at newspapers and TV media. Almost every non-fiction guidebook, how-to-guide, and self-help title is an accumulation of curated content.

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What is Content Curation?
Content curation is finding information relevant to your audience from a variety of sources and then sharing it via your blog, website, social media and other communication channels.  You write a post based on a given subject and within that post you add snippets from other bloggers posts written on the same subject.  In layman’s words: You write about what others write, you comment and you create a summary of their articles.
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Important: Linking
However, you have to give full accreditation in the form of one or more links back to their blog post and other important sites of these authors, e.g. “about”, “bio” or other posts they have written about similar topics.  Whether you’re recommending a blog post, article, video, social media update or another online resource, always use the permalink (permanent link) for the specific item, rather than the general website address.
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Any Content can be Curated
As long as you include a link to the author, you can curate any kind of content, for example, you can curate written content, any video material which is shareable and can be embedded, such as YouTube and Vimeo videos, any video images, news from aggregation sites. However, always be aware of copyright issues and check if you are not sure.  If you want to engage your visitors you need to find specific and relevant content, whether it is text or images, video or audio.
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Content curation doesn’t include creating totally new content – it’s more about discovering, compiling, and sharing existing content with your online followers (from your blog or social media).

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Blog Post Planning
Set the scene for your subject with a couple of paragraphs and try to include quotes or mention other authoritative bloggers or experts in that field, and introduce other relevant content. There are even tools, such as Zemanta a free WordPress plugin which scans your page as you type and suggests images and content for you to use.
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An example of curated blog content is my former post from Monday this week: “Amazon Book Reviews Worldwide?”
https://www.savvybookwriters.com/amazon-book-reviews-worldwide/
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Accreditation
Keep your quotes brief – one or two sentences – to adhere to fair use guidelines. Simply by placing a link to the original article and a mention of the author will suffice.  Images are more mostly covered by copyright, so use your own ones or get them at free photo sites.

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Commentary
Without an engaging commentary, content curation will be no more than taking someone’s content and placing it on your blog page.  Give the reader quality content which is relevant to their search, if you can give your own take on the subject and then inject the curated snippets and content into your own thread then you are getting the reader to engage with you on your own ideas.

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Find Great New Content
List the best posts before moving on to the curation process, and check the page rank of the post.  A higher page rank will help your own page to rank higher.  Choose a part which is interesting to build the story you are writing, copy and paste it into your article and link back to the article that you are taking the snippet from.

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Add a Commentary

In an article ContentMasteryGuide.com suggests:

  • Do you agree with the premise of the article? Why or why not?
  • How does the content relate to your specific audience?
  • What points do you think were missing from the article?
  • What is your unique way of presenting a similar message?
  • Are there examples from your life or business that illustrate points from the article?

This is your opportunity to demonstrate your expertise by drawing on great work others have published.  Explain why the content you are sharing is relevant to your audience. You could for example start with an introduction to the subject, followed by a snippet taken from another blog, followed by more of your own words, then insert a video from YouTube or an image from your own files.  The great thing about curation is that you can use anything as long as it doesn’t affect the copyright, you even could use some text from Twitter or explanations from Wikipedia.
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By designing new interfaces, and making information more accessible, innovative companies have just begun creating the “Curated Web”.  With Google recently stating that it favors sharing news and information, it can only enhance your web presence.
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Read More About Curated Content:

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-curation-tools

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-collis/6-powerful-tips-to-effect_b_5901856.html

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