This is a guest post by Sarah Williams, Editor of Business Winners
Content Curation is the ethical technique of discovering relevant content from multiple portals and sharing a summary of it on your website or social channels with an original-source back link. This act of curating has grown tremendously as its benefits become more known. Curation allows you to add value to your web space by sharing quality content with your readers while giving you a break in between creating new content. When done correctly, curation can help increase your rank in search engine while also helping generate more assets via affiliate marketing and improve your sales through ecommerce.
How to Curate and where to Find Content:
Curating is so much more than copying and pasting already published content, instead, it is customizing the headline, providing a summarized teaser and clearly linking back to the original source. Curating isn’t limited to textual content; anything digitalized can be curated, this includes videos, photos and audios. As long as you can link it back to the original source, you can curate it. The main purpose of curating is to find high quality content to share on your website so that your website grows in strength, so it is important to only curate the best in your niche. Portals such as Curata, Scoop.it and paper.li are among the many curating sites that help you find high quality content.
How can Content Curation Help with Affiliate Marketing:
Content curation can be described as a form of art. You are essentially sharing a snippet of content that already exist only you are sharing it in a new and fresh way. Affiliate marketing is a form of monetized promoting that many website owners try to master because of the continual profits it can generate. Content curation can help with affiliate marketing in two ways; directly and indirectly. Curation helps directly if you can curate high value content to your targeted audience in a subject that you are affiliate with and naturally share a link to the product or service in your summery of the post. And it helps indirectly in the sense that the visitor was drawn to your site because of the content you curated but explored and clicked on the embedded links in your other pages.
How can Curating Content improve my Rank?
- Linking back to Authoritative Sites: When you point to relevant websites that have authority, then your blog’s worth grows
- Search Engine Values Content: Although you are sharing content that already exist, it is new to your site, with your own unique spin. When you post fresh and relevant content on your site even if it’s pointing somewhere else, search engines get happy and your rank improves.
- Strengthens your Site’s Relevance: When you are curating the best content within your niche, it strengthens the relevancy of your website because you are offering content of high value.
Building Lasting Relationships by Curating Content:
Being a content curator is synonymous with being a referrer or a resource to valued information within your niche. Once your visitors realize that they can come to your site not just for great original content but also to be pointed to high value content with your niche, that relationship between visitor and webmaster will grow. You will be deemed a high value resource for the subjects in your sector and you will begin to see repeat visits. A good example of this would be VirtualHosting.com – web hosting review sites are extremely popular on the internet at the moment. There are tons of options out there for web hosts, but the great thing about review sites is that they are real people with real and hopefully honest opinions. Your visitors are the lifeblood of your website, so it is important to attract them with the best content you can share to build lasting and honest relationships and that way they will hopefully buy one of your products.
2 Things to Avoid when Curating:
- Don’t over Curate: If you want to stand on your own and be your own authority then it is important to avoid over curating. Curating isn’t meant to replace original content, instead it is meant to be used as a supplement in between your original content to strengthen relevancy and give you a break.
- Don’t Forget to Link back: It is important not to plagiarize and claim the content as your own. By copying the original content un-summarized, you will be competing with the original in search engine which isn’t good. Search engine deems plagiary as spam and this will hurt your site’s popularity. It is important that you credit your source with a link to the original content and that you alter the title so you are not competing.
Content curation has become an important form of marketing for webmasters both big and small, because when done ethically, this practice can be a valuable strategy and an honest portal to generating more income, more traffic and more value. This technique is not limited to your website, you can curate content in your newsletter and on your social networks; as long as you clearly link back to the original source, then the possibilities for sharing and growing are seemingly endless. Curating is a wonderful way to share the best in your niche while proving you are a quality resource and increasing your presence in the website world and ideally improving your bottom line.
Author Bio: Sarah Williams enjoys blogging about business and marketing. She likes giving out useful tips and advice to small businesses and start ups.
