Content Marketing and Content Curation 2013

What Is Content Marketing

Published on October 8, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

Broadly defined, content curation is the process of discovering, organizing and presenting web based information about a particular subject or topic. Content curation is somewhat different than content marketing. Content marketing is essentially creating and publishing online various types of content. Content curation gathers multiple, related pieces of content marketing efforts to create a mini-pool of information.

Content curation is not a sketchy black-hat SEO trick although there will be those that try to use it as such. The true and proper use for content curation is to inform the reader and persuade them to take a particular action or make a preferred decision. Obviously the content should be very light on the sales pitch and heavy on the features, benefits and factual data.

Sources For Content Curation

For anyone interested in content curation it will quickly become obvious that finding information is not a problem. A great feature about content curation is that you are not violating copyrights or plagiarizing content but simply sharing it.

Common sources of content for curating are RSS feeds, blog articles, video content, unique website pages, whitepapers and news articles. Using a news aggregator or a free tool like Google Alerts can somewhat automate the process of finding valuable content.

Content curation in 2012 is a polished form of what many people have done for years. Finding and sharing information via Twitter or social bookmarking sites are the old school ways. Being able to gather related information and present it in a portfolio of sorts is much better.

Content Curation Best Practices 2013

Content curation has really begun to find a place in 2012. Moving forward, content curation in 2013 will definitely be an instrumental tactic for SEO and building brand awareness. Online marketing professionals will be able to develop an authority presence by curating mass content of high quality. They will also be able to develop branding by curating content about a single subject, from a single source (company). The latter approach is building a Content Curation Silo.

Content curation should be designed to support other areas of your internet marketing plan. Cross linking your content curation silos with social media pages will help to get your information in front of somewhat qualified prospects. Using sites like Twitter can get your information in front of new prospects.

Content Curation Tips In 2013

The first order of business is to determine the topics, subjects and areas where you want to engage customers or other internet users. The next step is to identify authority sources for high quality (non-spam) content that fit within your niche. Ideally you will try to mix new content with previously curated content to develop a seasoned content portfolio.

Content Curation Etiquette

We would be remiss in writing this article if we failed to mention basic rules of etiquette for content curation. It is good form to always provide due credit to the content author or publisher, and retain or add links to the original source.