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… by paper.li

What is content curation?

Simply said, online content curation is the organizing, filtering, presenting and sharing of the most relevant digital content for a specific audience. Good content curation requires both technology and people working together. Only by adding “the human element” can you truly bring relevance and context to content.

We often see that content curation is misunderstood, overlooked, or even dismissed in a bloggers’ content development plan because the benefits have not been made clear.

As a blogger your unique value proposition to your readers is the expertise that you provide in a niche or micro niche. People have found their way to you based on recommendation and interest in your area of knowledge and they trust your opinion.

The addition of content curation to your content development strategy can help you strengthen your position as a knowledge holder as well as provide additional value to your readers.

A few good reasons to curate:

• Strengthen your reputation: Curation further strengthens your position as the “go-to” person in your niche or area of expertise. You elevate your status in the eyes of your audience by pointing them to good content discovery.
• Saves you time: Keep your readers engaged with the content you would like them to discover and win time in between writing your posts. You off-set your down time with a mix of interesting content.
• Reinforce loyalty: Provide your readers with fresh and valuable content. Good content is time consuming and not always easy to find. They will remember you for pointing them to it.
• Brand visibility: Brand managers are looking more and more to niche markets to connect with users. Compelling content can elevate your visibility by building the bridge between them and their users.

A few curation tips to remember:

• Keep it focused: keep your content focused on your niche and your area of expertise. Good curation is about quality, not quantity.
• Prefer quality over quantity: readers place phenomenal amount of value on the discovery of good content. Take the time once to research quality content sources, develop focused twitter lists and develop a good query.
• Keep it human: Good curation is not about automation. Technology, algorithms and data intelligence are the tools that make it easier for us to curate and provide value to our audiences. However, it takes the human touch to fine tune the message.
• Be aware of the echo chamber: It’s easy to remain amongst specialists in one field. The outcome after time can be tunnel vision. Stay within the realm of your subject area, but weave your interest graphs and networks to allow also for sporadic discoveries that stretch to unknown territories.

Content curation helps bloggers put relevant content in front of the perfect audience. It provides you with an additional value proposition to your content strategy as well as a natural extension to your social media blueprint.

Good content curation requires the “human element”. By taking the time to tailor your message through curated content you can help strengthen your position amongst your peers, and your readers, and helps further cement your position yourself as an invaluable “go-to” resource.

Paper.li is a content curation service that enables people to publish newspapers based on topics of interest to share with, and be discovered by, other like minded people.

Learn more about our services on our blog, meet our publishers on our community site and follow us on Twitter @smallrivers