What Is Content Curation?

If you pay attention to the Internet marketing trends of 2012, you will know that content marketing is one of the trends predicted by many marketing experts. Online marketers use quality content to inform and educate readers to make a buying decision. Creating content from the scratch is very time consuming. How to write fresh and original content efficiently?  Content curation may be the answer.

Content curation is the process of filtering and organizing information on a niche topic to come up with the best articles, videos, photos, or social discussions going on at a given time with human work involved.  A good content curator usually adds his or her opinion and comments. People love this idea because they don’t need to search different sources in order to find a piece of information.  That’s why curated sites such as drudgereport.com, huffingtonpost.com and mashable.com are extremely popular.

Is content curation same as autoblogging?

No, it is not.  Autoblogging is to use software to “scrape” content from other sites and posts automatically on a website.  There is almost no human work involved once it is set up.  From the above definition of content curation, you can tell the difference.

Does content curation violate copyright?

According to Wikipedia, fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders.  Therefore, you are allowed to use limited copyrighted content.  However, you have to make sure that you do not cross the line.  As a good practice, only use one or two paragraphs of the borrowed content and add your own introduction, comment and conclusion.  Don’t forget to link to the original source.  In this way, you abide by the copyright fair use doctrine.  If you are not sure, you’d better check the original website’s copyright terms or contact the author of the original content.  Jason Keath has some good advices in his blog “How to Use Content From Other Blogs Without Violating Copyright“.

What are the benefits of content curation?

Content Curation Tool – CurationSoft

You can create more valuable content in less time and focus on more keywords. You keep readers engaged and loyal to your source of information because you have filtered and organized on the topic for them.  People can easily share the content through social media sites. It helps you build more traffic to your site through social sharing and rank high for long tail keywords.

Content curation is a great idea for online marketers to explore in 2012. One of the most popular Internet Marketing tools content curation tools is CurationSoft. If you are interested in getting more traffic and more loyal visitors, try the free version of this  content curation software.