Why curation rocks, part 1

Internet marketer Jack Humphrey has curated some great content in a post called “The Content Guide for Bloggers” which I in turn, have curated for you…

“Content curation as a blogging model is widely misunderstood by most bloggers and marketers. Many people would tell you that curation is about finding and posting links of related material around a certain topic or keyword.

And they would be wrong if the goal was to get people and search engines to appreciate and react to said content. (And if your goal is to use curation as a means to get attention, then make money, from what you are doing.)

Real content curation is a set of links and snippets to other material on the web along with insightful, expert analysis provided by the curator.

There’s been an explosion of content on the web around “curation.” And new services that seek to make the process easier for different groups of users.” Source: The Content Curation Guide for Bloggers | Internet Marketing Consultant Jack Humphrey

In the model I teach my students, there are two main types of blog posts; creation and curation. Optimally, in my model, about 5-10% of my posts are creation posts. The rest is all curation. Why?

“It takes less time to create a very high quality post when you curate and “riff” off of other thought leaders, adding your own spin to the topic and providing great information to readers, than it often does to write a post from scratch.

Much of the time, bloggers struggle to come up with something to write about or share each day. Adding a curation model to your content development plan for your site can certainly erase the writer’s block most bloggers face.

Being in the middle of your market and knowing what’s going on, what’s most important for your readers to focus on, and providing that extremely valuable filter so they feel satisfied with you as their main source of intel is a winning strategy practiced by hundreds of popular sites on the web today.

The world doesn’t need more content. It needs help digesting and sorting it – and is willing to pay with clicks, likes, subscriptions, and eyeballs.” Source: The Content Curation Guide for Bloggers | Internet Marketing Consultant Jack Humphrey

For me, creation posts and curation posts are analogous to emailing and bookmarking, albeit with a much broader audience! A creation post is an email to the world while curation on a basic level is a form of public bookmarking. If a quote or infographic is significant enough, I post it with attribution and a source link as a blog post. If it’s just nice to know, I share it with Google Reader to my blog and to Twitter without comment. The key for me is that — despite what it may appear — I don’t randomly curate content. It all must fit my editorial focus of ‘marketing, sales, and technology for small-medium business, non-profits and academic institutions’ so that my faithful readers know that most of what they find on my blog will be relevant to them and consistent with the insight they have found in the past…

“Each thoughtful post on your blog is a public demonstration of your thought leadership, personal integrity, humor, and professional insights. You don’t have to refute one of Einstein’s theories to get respect.” says internet marketing firm HubSpot. Ideally, I put my own spin on the great content I find and it helps build my brands and win me ‘friends’.

““The reality is, there’s too much content and not enough time,” says Rubel. “More content will be created today than existed in entirety before 2003.” With limited time and attention spans, people are experiencing information overload as well as “people overload.” Rubel called it a “friending arms race,” referring to the Facebook phenomena in which “he or she who dies with the most ‘friends’ wins.”” Source: Gaining Authority in the Age of Digital Overload

Thanks to Jack Humphrey and Steve Rubel for inspiring me to curate this content. Stay tuned for part 2…

Related articles

• Gaining Authority in the Age of Digital Overload (mashable.com)
• Book Review: Curation Nation (hilarytopper.com)
• Autoposting Curated Video to WordPress.com via Posterous (e1evation.com)
• Shaping the Future of Curation (blogworld.com)
• Why Curation Is Important to the Future of Journalism (mashable.com)