Content Curation Software

Content curation is described as the process of sorting throughout the various contents available on the web. These contents are presented in a meaningful as well as organized way basing on a specific theme. Basically, the work would involve sifting, arranging, sorting, and eventually, publishing the information. The content curator will pick the best contents, which are important as well as relevant to share with the community.

The work involved in content curation is not just about collecting links or perhaps gathering as many information as possible. This is about placing the information collected into a context with annotation, presentation, and organization. Basically, the content curators will be able to provide a customized selection of the best as well as the most relevant resources for a given topic or theme.

Is Content Curation Valuable?

Organizations as well as people have already started making and sharing content and media over the web. For instance, if one internet user makes an average of 50 contents per day, the number of contents of the 800 million more users will exceed several billions of gigabytes.

Content curation offers great value to any person looking for quality content since finding information as well as making sense of this information will require more time, attention as well as focus. This would make what seemingly random web information valuable as this is arranged and organized in a way that is easy to find and simple to understand by people searching for information over the web.

Benefits of Content Curation

There are a lot of benefits that content curation provides to both the organizations and individual internet users. Here are some of the benefits:

• Helps Build A Community. Content curation can definitely help build a community. People who continuously do curation will gain followers and will eventually meet other bloggers.

Besides this, they will also have the chance to meet other content curators. Once this happens, there will be a chance to see things in a different perspective as curators will read and share ideas with each other. Moreover, a content curator will also be able to build a reputation as he or she becomes a valuable source of information.

• Promotes Recognition of Websites. Content curation can also help a website be recognized in the industry. Basically, curators will be empowered to research as well as gather information that speaks of a specific brand, organize it and share it with the public. This would promote the website and would definitely increase more sales as well as profit.

• Allows Sharing Thoughts and Influencing Others. Content curators will have the ability to write from their own perspective, which allows them to share their ideas and thoughts to an audience. This will influence the audience in terms of how they think, make decisions, and act.

Final Thoughts On Content Curation

Content curation involves creating content, building up contents from different sources, and showcasing this in an organized fashion. This is definitely a great way to capture specific information that is relevant to a given topic.

Author Bio:

Jason Miner plays a vital role for www.blogcarnival.com. He is an expert in writing topics of different categories. He is helping the carnival team to grow & working on making this an even better place for bloggers.

Content curation is the practice of collecting a wide array of relevant data to a specific subject and then recreating content based on this knowledge to deliver it to your target audience. In a sense, this practice is nothing new to the world. In fact, schools have been doing this for hundreds of years.

Any time you wrote an essay about a given subject has been the same as creating curated content for websites. You are basing your knowledge from fact and tailoring the content to fit your target audience, in this case a teacher.

• If this is truly what great content is supposedly based on, then why does it need so much attention?
• Shouldn’t all websites that focus on truth practice this form of content manipulation?
• Or is it just a way to get around plagiarism?

Finding information about Google’s official view of content curation practices is next to impossible. All we can do is look at the facts based on what others have experienced in recent changes according to their own traffic and search engine rankings. Although Google’s own official blog provides snippets of information on how to increase your page rank, they seem to be introverted with their information on how to succeed.

1. Links – What many found works well within a website are links to other relevant content that reflects or adds more basis to your own. These links can be internal among your website or external to cite your sources. Regardless of where they are located, the links need to be relevant to the content represented on the origination page.

Some believe this is Google’s way of weeding out the spammy websites that offer nothing for the reader except copy and pasted content from a separate viable source. They seem to want to give credit where credit is due and not to those who simply copy content for their own use.

2. Unique – Exactly how many ways can the same information be created before it starts resembling other websites? This is probably why blogs do so well. A blog can incorporate an author’s opinion regarding the subject matter which can provide a unique aspect.

However, how long will this practice last before too many people share the same belief within the same information? If you can incorporate something different that no one has done before, your website could do well according to Google.

3. Informative – According to various blog posts listed in Google about content curation, many successful site owners are informing others to provide as much information as they can when creating content. This should be another obvious point to make for anyone creating content.

The more information you provide, the more likely you are going to fill someone’s need. This aspect works with anything in life. More information equals less misconception and misunderstanding.

4. Citations – Much like linking above, if you can cite your information then your pages will perform better in the search results. Well, at least according to various bloggers it does anyway. It is a strong belief among many that citing your information is linking relevant content with each other, which is what Google wants; relevant content to be featured in a search result.

Does that mean that our articles need to be the same format as a WikiPedia.com page?

As humans, we have to label everything in order to make it sound more politically correct. Content curation has been a practice of many for years and is nothing new. However, we have to give it a label in order to make it sound more professional. It’s a method in which we make ourselves seem more than we really are.

We are humans that have the capacity to regurgitate information and wording it in a unique manner to set it aside from those written by others.

Ken Myers is the founder of LongHornLeads.com and has learned over the years the importance of focusing on what the customer is looking for and literally serving it to them. He doesn’t try to create a need, instead he tries to satisfy the existing demand for information on products and services.

The practice of collecting is ingrained in human culture, and can be found in every era, religion and continent around the world. From stamps and oil paintings to taxidermy and teaspoons, collecting and displaying possessions shows that we still like to hunt and gather that missing piece, just like our ancestors.

Now that our world is more technologically and socially advanced than ever before, collecting is no longer just about keeping possessions to ourselves, it’s about sharing our finds and creating our own little galleries or lists of content on sites such as Pinterest and Reddit.

Increasingly there are also more and more websites out there that are doing the hard work for us, pulling in the best content from around the web for us to read, in the form of AllTop.com and Buzzfeed to name but a few. Content curation has become a buzzword and a key digital marketing tactic in recent months, but why is it so successful, and what makes the audience come back for more?

It’s Easy

The practice of collecting things is a relaxing pastime and, as much as we all love it, the internet is often the least relaxing space to be, especially when you can’t find the answer you’re looking for, or the exact opposite – you’re bombarded with information that could take weeks to sift through. With content curation, you’ve been presented with a cherry picked version of the internet, filled only with relevant information and entertainment.

It’s Social

The reason we love absorbing information in this way could be that looking at (good) content curation is like having someone dip into your mind and plucking out thoughts, ideas and imagery surrounding your favourite subjects. Curation exposes us to a whole new wave of influential people who love what we love and write, report on or photograph it too. It allows us to connect with specific communities and take part by ‘liking’ content and sharing it within our own circles.

It’s Educational

Apparently our attention spans are dwindling by the second, so having a selection of content that’s visually appealing to skim through makes life easier. If we want to read the full article we’ll click through to the original site and if we don’t well then, we’ve probably learned all we need to know from that annotated photo.

It’s Currency

Content curation provides readers with blogging content for their own websites in numerous ways, making it valuable. From giving you access to an expert in your chosen field and links to how-to ideas that your Twitter followers would love, to inspiration for that next post or content for your own curation platform.

So that might go some way to explaining your Pinterest addiction! What’s your favourite aspect of using content curation sites? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Elise Lévêque is a blogger with a passion for all things social media. She uses bloggingedge.com to help her connect with brands and she loves nothing more than perusing Pinterest when she gets the chance.

You know that you need to create amazing, high-quality content if you want to keep your visitors happy, but it’s super time-consuming.

Even huge companies like HuffingtonPost.com, AllTop.com, and CNN.com use a way of creating content that “samples” parts of other content called “content curation”. Here is a content packed webinar on content curation we did with Mike Thomas not so long ago.  Enjoy!

Content is everywhere online. Type in any word into the Google search box and you’ll get results. But with so much information available online, how can one manage what’s out there and create something that works best for your marketing needs?

The answer lies in good content curation. This is a process of taking in that third party data that you find online – articles, pictures, music – organizing, and sharing them so it works for your content marketing.

Let’s take Alltop.com for example. It’s an online collective of different articles talking about almost anything from work and health, to lifestyle and entertainment. It has so much content, much of it already in the front page. But you won’t get lost in all of it. You log on, take a second to scan the homepage and in that instant, you find what interests you.

What we can see here is how good content curation can effectively market a range of ideas online. Their data are neat, presented in a systematic manner with easy navigation, and you get a good idea what’s in store for you before clicking a link.

This year, why not follow the example of Alltop and be good curators of the data we have? Here are some strategies you can use to effectively curate content.

1. Pick your sources well.

You start your journey through content curation by gathering data from a topic you’ve chosen. And many sources are out there to help by doing some of the work for you.

News websites and even blogs provide you with RSS feeds, which sorts out information from within their own content and provide you with the data specific to your country, time, or topic of choice.You can also use websites like The Huffington Post and Alltop that do initial archiving of information and make it easier to find what you like.

2. Organize your data.

Organizing is at the very core of content curation and this is what makes it effective. Arrange your data into different categories within your topic of interest.

Even put them in bubble diagrams if you like.

From there, you can subdivide your data into the ones that are really important, what tells the story, and the ones that you don’t really need right now, but might want to save for later. After that, make a summary of each category so you remember what you already have when it’s time to use them.

3. Share it.

They say a good idea is only good as its execution. The content curator’s way of doing this is to share the organized data he/she already has where the audience can find it. Use snippets of the pages or small versions of the pictures with the links to the full content so the data can be social media friendly. You want your content list to be easy on the eyes. Twitter, Facebook, and even Youtube have proven that social networks are standing as one of the best (if not the best) ways of sharing information online.

Content curation is there because you don’t want to get lost or even drown in all the data coming in when you’re setting up your marketing plans. You want to keep true to your idea and not give unnecessary pieces of information. And more importantly, you don’t want your audience to get lost.

When swimming in a pool of data, always remember that good content curation keeps you, and the viewers inspired and stay on track of what the conversation is really all about.

Author bio:

+Tony Evans is a freelance web designer, an alumna of Business Management at Upskilled Australia and
a mother of a beautiful daughter, Athena.

She has a passion in Aerobics and cooking healthy recipes.

The irony of the web world today opening its doors to almost everyone who has something to say is – we’re fast running out of new things to say. With so much great content out there, how do you top that?

How can a marketing website make it to the upper echelons of the snooty Google search index?

And once there, it’s a tooth and nail battle to maintain the spot – so how do the successful websites do it? If you can’t create content, then you have to learn to curate content.

That’s the mantra for business websites that don’t have the time to create new content, or deal in services and products that are hard to create value-adding content around.

But content curation also requires some skill and focus. It’s not simply about channeling others content.

It’s about establishing a standard and maintaining it.

Here’s a look at 10 websites – both well-heeled and upcoming – that manage to curate content that is fresh, of high quality, relevant and valuable. These can offer lots of lessons for the attentive reader.

1. BMW

The BMW blog (at bmwblog.com) of course has its daily dose of BMW news, features and great, created content.

But the website likes to vary its content with a dash of curated, relevant video content, such as the Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol trailer which stars the BMW i8 alongside Tom Cruise.

2. The Huffington Post

The folks over at Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com) do content curation as well as – if not better than – BMW.

They create some content, gather some links from around the web, and invite some content from its readers. This is the way the best news websites keep at the top of the content game.

3. Google News

While The Huffington Post and BMW use human curated content, Google News uses aggregated content. Aggregation is automated curation of content.

While this method of curation is not recommended unless you are a giant corporation with plenty of clout (and great technology), automated aggregation has been used successfully by publishers and web owners in the past. Whether it will be completely replaced by human curation is yet to be seen.

4. Learnist

Learnist is a new website that features crowd-sourced lessons bringing together videos, web pages, e-books and other forms of information into one space.

This allows users who know enough about something, be it music, floriculture or science – to create teachings (or rather ‘learnings’).

Learnist makes a good use of content curation and creating a community around it.

5. The Monkey Cage

The Monkey Cage (at themonkeycage.org) does content curation really well, and with a difference. The blog presents social science research that is publicly available.

The focus of the blog is to curate such research that is socially relevant and draw interesting correlations between our daily and political lives in democracies today.

There is well-written and illustrated commentary by the blogger – Political scientist John Sides – which sets the blog apart.While this is not an overt marketing blog, Sides did begin this blog to publicize his field. And so far, he has managed really well. The blog made it to the TIME’s top 25 blogs of 2012 list.

6. What Kate Wore

This is another blog that is on TIME’s list, located at whatkatewore.com. The blogger Susan Kelley has picked a big subject for her blog – the outfits that the Duchess of Cambridge is seen in.

She deconstructs the Duchess’ outfits, holds polls and links to events in the life of this public figure. Here Ms Kelley has followed an important element of good content curation – she has focused on a niche audience.

7. Reddit

The other two are not the biggest websites out there that have become household names, but this next one is.

Reddit (reddit.com), as we all know, is the place you go to in order to discover stories and conversations that you may never have heard of otherwise.

Reddit uses crowdsourcing to produce interesting, serious and silly content that keeps readers hooked.

8. Intel

Another website that uses crowdsourcing really well is the new Intel website (at iq.intel.com).

The site contains content that is sourced from Intel Employees via Twitter. This is an example of smart curation – Intel knows its sources will be relevant and good.

9. CMO

The senior marketing executive looking for digital marketing insights will find plenty of food for thought on cmo.com. The website is directed towards curating content for a niche audience, and appears to be a news website.

But readers will find that the content is highly relevant to the digital marketing industry. The website has a global traffic ranking of 57,170, which is great in a landscape of more than 600 million websites.

10. Inbound

Inbound.org is a partnership between SEOMoz co-founder and Hubspot co-founder to create a community for marketers and marketers interested in social media, content marketing, SEO etc. to come together and curate content.Readers can discover great stuff on these subjects and more and share them. This is a good example of how social ranking can be made use of to curate content in a given area.

Content curation is now fast catching on as a method for creating authoritative and useful content. Creating quality curated content is an art and with any such activity there are things that you should and should not do. Here are nine content curation best practices that you should try to follow so that the content you create is nice to read, useful to readers and fair to the creators of original content.

1. Make use of your creative abilities

Many people think that a content curator is just a person who finds and arranges other people’s work in an interesting and useful way. While that is essential, significant value addition is important in terms of opinions, recommendations and commentary. Curated content is actually an interesting and useful blend of collected content, original opinions and contributions from others.

2. Identify content that is related to your website, but interesting to the readers

Always keep the interest of your readers in mind. They are looking for something that is useful to them. Try to find content that will be very interesting to your readers, but is related to your website in some way. For example, if your website is promoting baby strollers, look for articles that the owners of baby strollers will find interesting. For example, tips on using baby strollers, reviews of popular baby strollers, feedback left by buyers of specific strollers, advantages and disadvantages of stroller features, statistics reflecting the popularity of different type of strollers, etc.

Try to develop a collection of sites which regularly publish such material and bookmark them so that you can periodically check them for new content. You can also subscribe to their RSS feeds or follow them on social media so that you are alerted when useful content becomes available. Content curation tools such as Curationsoft are excellent for finding related content.

3. Regularly publish new articles or posts

Your readers will find your website or blog useful only when there is regular useful content coming in. While even one article a week is good enough, try to publish it on a particular day of the week so that your audience will know when to expect new content from you. A great article is nice to attract attention of new readers, but regular content is what will make them regular visitors to your site and encourage them to bookmark it or share it with others.

4. Go where your audience is

Gone are the days when readers bookmark and visit sites. There is an information overload and scarcity of time. Most people have a few sites that they visit regularly including social media sites or YouTube. Find out where your audience is coming from and places that they visit regularly. Try to create content there and then gently bring the visitors to your site. You could do this by interacting or writing guest articles on popular blogs or social media websites.

5. Use platforms judiciously

When using multiple platforms, it is important to understand that a major part of your audience could be using more than one of those platforms. So if you are using multiple platforms to inform your readers about some interesting piece of information try to space it out. Sending it out together could hit the same users multiple times at the same time, which is a bit of a nuisance. Spacing out your tweets or comments will also serve as a reminder even if the same reader gets it again.

6. Always give credit to the original content creator

Irrespective of the platform and irrespective of how little of the information you quote, always give credit to the original author. This is an essential courtesy and the author will appreciate the gesture. You are also making your article, post or comment more useful because readers will be able to click the link to get more information. When we say original author, it is the first person who put that content in the public domain. So if your source is itself quoting someone else, you should find the original source and give credit to them.

7. Don’t create duplicate content

When you quote someone else, quote only the part of the article that is relevant to your discussion. Copying an entire article will most likely get you penalized by the search engines for creating duplicate content. Try not to quote more than 15 percent of the original article. Quoting an entire article could also be seen as copyright infringement unless you have the permission of the original source.

8. Be careful with graphics and videos

Many content creators who put up graphics on sites such as Pinterest appreciate your quoting them. However, creating graphics and videos involves a lot of work and not everyone will like you to copy their work to your site. Check the copyright notices carefully and when in doubt get the permission of the creator of the content.

9. Encourage discussions

Interactivity is a great advantage of the web and you must encourage reader interaction by allowing comments and responding to them. You should also interact and comment on the website or blog of the original author. This can also be done on social media such as Twitter, but be careful to read the linked content before you decide to re-tweet it.

Content curation is a nice strategy for content marketing and creating nice curated content is an art. Try to follow the nine content curation best practices discussed above and you will soon be creating valuable content which your readers will appreciate.

10 Minute Curator’s Success Guide

1. Introduction to Curation with CurationSoft
2. Drag and drop
3. Making a post with CurationSoft
4. General Settings
5. Google News Search
6. Google Blog Search
7. YouTube Video Search
8. Flickr Search
9. Twitter Search
10. Wikipedia
11. WordPress

Intro to Curation with CurationSoft

CurationSoft gives you the ability to quickly find content from Google News, Google Blog Search, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr.

What this means is you can “curate” a blog post about a topic and drag and drop the best stuff you find from all of the sources, just one source, or any combination of sources.

Saves Time – A lot of it!

The reason this is a much faster way to curate is that you can immediately pull up the latest, greatest content from any source, check it out quickly to check for quality and relevance, and drag and drop it right into your post editor.

This saves at least 4 steps (on average) where you’d normally have to copy a title, go back to your post editor and paste it, then go back and forth each time to get a text snippet, and the link to the source.

That’s 4 steps for every piece of content you curate into a blog post.

Trackbacks

The other great thing about curating with CurationSoft is that it gets you backlinks in the form of “trackbacks. When you link to another blog, they get a notification that you’ve done so. They come and check out your post and see that you’ve done a great job with it and they see your link to them. They can then go back and approve your trackback (as a remote comment) and you get a link back to your post.

The link back to your post is actually in the form of your post title. So you get a great anchor link that helps you in Google, while also getting direct traffic from readers of the blog which approved your trackback.

Better Curation Means Better Traffic, Links, and Social Buzz

Doing a great job at curation means you will attract people (followers, readers) who save a bunch of time just watching what you curate rather than having to find all this good stuff on their own. They don’t know how easy it was for you to quickly “bubble up” this great content using CurationSoft. All they know is you save the time and find interesting things for them to check out.

This kind of content marketing is catching on big time around the web in most niches because the web is a sloppy mess that has very few single, reliable sources for the best content around certain trends, issues, and topics.

It is no small coincidence that well-curated blogs like Huffington Post, Mashable, Boing Boing and many others are some of the most popular and profitable blogs on the web today.

Drag and Drop

After you find information you want to use in your blog you can simply drag and drop it where you want it in your blog. If you mouse over the item you will see the cursor change to four arrows. Now drag it into your blog. You can do this in any rich text editor of any blog software, as long as you can set it to HTML text. If you are using a WordPress hosted blog you can create your blog post here in CurationSoft using the Post Builder button.

Making a Post Using CurationSoft

The workflow is as follows:

1. Open your blog editor. (Unless you are using a WordPress hosted blog. Then click Post Builder)
2. Find content using the searches.
3. Check the content to see if you want to include it in your post.
4. You like it, so go back to the CurationSoft results pane.
5. Drag and drop the info into the blog editor as HTML. (Or into the blog pane of CurationSoft)
6. Find more content, if you want to add some more info.
7. Repeat process until the post is complete.
8. Save the blog post. (Or click the Post button in the Post Builder pane, and add the required details)
9. Done.

General Settings

When you open Settings>Options you will land on the General Settings page. In this settings window you will be able to manage your username and password, the program’s docking options, and you can clear your search history as well.

CurationSoft has an autocomplete feature when you do searches more than once to save you time in future searches. It also automatically searches the new source, such as YouTube for example, without having to hit the search button each time to go between sources.

Google Blog Search

Google Blog search allows you to search all the blogs on the web that Google has indexed. There are specific settings for this search. You can set the number of results you want to show per page and the language you want to search in. Choose from Spanish, English, French, German, or Italian.

Twitter Search

Twitter settings are simply how many results you want per page. You can drag and drop not only the tweet and any links that come with it, but also the link to the poster’s Twitter profile and their profile image.

YouTube Video Search

YouTube settings allow for several different setups. You can control the number of results per page, sort by relevance, search just for high definition videos or all videos, and choose whether you just want to drag the video itself, or also the accompanying title and description given by the video’s producer.

Flickr Search

Flickr settings allow you to change the number of results per page, choose restrictions, different sorting options, and search all photos or simply those with Creative Commons attribute.

(We recommend you leave it set to Creative Commons, to protect yourself from using an image that is restricted by the owner.)

Wikipedia

You can set how many results you want per page and if you want images included in the results.

WordPress

This option allows you to set your login details for the WordPress hosted blog. Enter the URL to your blog, the userid and the password. After you have set this correctly you can post blogs straight from CurationSoft.

You can add more than one blog. When posting a blog you created here, CurationSoft asks you which blog you want to post this to.

It is known to many that Google released its authorship markup feature for Google plus users. It is predicted that soon Google will use these authorship markups as a basis of ranking. In this article, we will discuss on how you can dominate the search results when the time comes for author rank to be the basis of search results. What can you do now? Here are five suggestions.

1. Practice Writing

Before you can even get to have quality content, you should take time to practice your writing skills. This is if you are not thinking of hiring freelancers or hired content contributors or developers to write for your blog. It’s best if you can write for your own because you get to express what you need to share in the first voice and in a very engaging way.

Don’t fret if you create bad first drafts. Most of the time, initial drafts of really good writers as well don’t get approved and published. Rather, writers have to revise and proofread their piece until they satisfy their publishers. In the case of a blogger, you don’t need a publisher to see if your content is anything unique and noteworthy. To gauge whether or not your draft is okay to send out the public’s view, you can submit it to your trusted friends and mentors and have them conduct a review. When you receive all good comments, then take them as a go signal to hit the publish button.

2. Create Google+ Profile

If you don’t have one yet, do not anymore hesitate to create your own Google+ profile by creating an account with Google. You may have already established strong connection with your fans in Facebook and followers in Twitter. But having a network in Google may prove to be much effective in the coming months. This is because Google must be basing the author rank to get search results on the authority of the content provider. Having as many people in your circle then will multiply your traffic by a hundred fold.

3. Link Account for Google Authorship

The next thing to do after setting up a Google+ account is to link your profile to the blogs where you contribute content. This is simply by adding the blogs to your Google+ page and inserting a snippet of code “rel=author” to your blog backend. As there is now great competition for traffic, you can lead up the hits in search engines by adding this markup as yours will contain not only the summary of text description in the results but also your profile picture. So people would see your content as more authoritative, if you include a decent photo of yourself.

4. Social Media Reach and Influence

When you write, keep an authentic and friendly tone to inspire your readers to comment and interact with you as the author. Encourage them to like your post in Facebook, recommend it to Google, tweet it to their own followers and spread your link elsewhere on the web. Doing so will increase your social media reach and influence. This will make your rank higher in Google. Make sure to have your social media sharing buttons visible on your blog pages as well.

5. Hard Work

To top all the above-mentioned suggestions, your competitive edge has to be your hard work and dedication to increase your ranking. You will not be able to keep your influential rating if you can’t continue your good efforts. So you need to always be inspired in what you do if you are already moving on the right track. It’s not wrong to get ideas from other authors but you have to put your own perspective and commentaries on them to build your own. You can even steal concepts and ideas from outside your niche and take the inspiration from there to fuel your writing.

Conclusion

To dominate the search when author rank becomes the basis of search results, you should become a better writer few times more than you are today. To achieve that, the least you can do is follow these steps and let your personality shine through naturally.

Author bio:

+Tony Evans is a freelance web designer, a holder of a Diploma of Management at Upskilled Australia and a mother of a beautiful daughter, Athena. She has a passion in Aerobics and cooking healthy recipes.

Writing curated content is way of providing good value by using existing articles on the internet. Let us understand what curated content is all about and how to write a curated article or blog post.

Why curated content?

Whether it is about remedies for common ailments or the features of the latest smartphone, most people depend on the internet for information. There are a lot of articles on the internet about any subject. Often these articles contradict each other, are biased or motivated. It takes considerable research to find good authoritative articles and then make an intelligent decision about what information to rely on and what to discard. Many people don’t have the time or patience to do this.

Curated articles or blog posts provide snippets from authoritative and reliable content on a platter with commentary about how those articles add up to valuable information on the subject along with the author’s opinions.

Readers are happy to use curated content from a website they trust because it cuts short the research they have to do on the subject. The original content providers are happy because they get an incoming link which helps elevate the ranking of their web pages.

Essential ingredients for writing a curated article:

1 – You need a collection of high quality content from trustworthy sources.

2 – A catchy headline that attracts reader attention and indicates what the article or post is about with any necessary SEO considerations like including the keyword that is being targeted.

3 – A commentary about each snippet of content that you include and how it relates to the topic and other content that you are including.

4 – Some nice pictures and if appropriate and possible some video links.

Step 1 – Selecting the topic and doing the research:

Once you have decided what to write about, the next part is doing the research. The heart of a curated article is high quality content for which good research is essential. Remember this is one important value addition that you are offering apart from your views.

Writing a poorly researched article or post will make your article weak, uninteresting and non-trustworthy. The viewers will quickly leave the page and the purpose will be defeated. So get this part right. Collect information from other sources and make notes as you go so that you can fit that piece of information well into your post. Curation tools like Curationsoft will help you with both the research as well as the note taking.

Step 2 – Plan your article or blog post:

All skilled writers plan how they are going to lay out the article for their readers. It is important to use your article writing skills here so that the post flows nicely and does not look like a collection of random information. You will need all the usual things – an introduction, logically arranged pieces of information each one leading to the next and a conclusion.

Step 3 – Fitting the content into your article:

This is where curation tools like Curationsoft will be of valuable help. If you are using Curationsoft you can simply drag pieces of content that you have collected to the right places. Your notes will help you fit those pieces of content together.

Step 4 – Giving credit to the original author:

Giving credit to the original author for any content that you use is not just an issue of being within the copyright laws. It is your way of showing your appreciation and it also speaks about your honesty to your readers. For articles, usually a link to the original article will suffice, but in some cases you may need to seek permission. For images it is best to check the copyright notice of the original source. Publishing images with acknowledgement and links may not be enough for some media companies, especially the larger ones.

Step 5 – Giving your own opinions and recommendations:

Your opinion is the other important value addition that you are doing apart from good research. It is the soul of your article or post. This is what differentiates your post from an organized collection of well researched information.

If you consistently give reliable advice, the reader will notice and appreciate this and it will contribute to the authority and popularity of your website or blog. It will also encourage the users to share the site and articles with others.

Curated articles are a great way of creating high quality valuable content from information that already exists in the public domain. It is an ethical method of creating content and if done properly will benefit the readers and win the attention of search engines. Apart from knowing how to write a curated article or blog post, curation tools such as Curationsoft will cut short the time required to write the article.