Content Creation Vs Curation – Understanding the Difference

There are essentially only two ways of getting together the kind of content you need to make your website a success – creation and curation. These days, everyone knows the importance of killer content, not only for the sake of readers but also to make sure search engines take a liking to the site. The trouble is, it’s only once a business owner or site developers set about the task of populating the site with content that it becomes apparent how hard it is to produce enough of the stuff to make it work.      What’s interesting however is the way in which most amateurs and first-timers don’t fully understand the difference between creation and curation. Admittedly, there’s a pretty fine line between the two and it does occasionally get a little blurry, but by fully understanding what it is that separates the two approaches, you’ll stand a much better chances of putting together a solid archive of website content.Content CreationContent creation is easy to define and yet pretty hard to go about. In short, to create content is to do exactly that – fill the pages of your site with content that’s 100% from the depths of your own creative mind and unlike that of any other site on Earth. For those with a flair for the creative stuff it can be a relatively painless and often a fun job to boot…it’s a case of letting your imagination run riot and offering all manner of helpful insights based on your own knowledge and experience. By favouring content creation over curation, you stand a real chance of becoming something of authority in your particular niche, perhaps even a guru that others come to for help and advice.As for the downside, it’s impossible for anyone to come up with this level of content unless they’re either a fully-fledged expert in the field or have been in the industry for years/decades. Which in turn means that if it’s a new business in question, it’s rather on the tricky side to create winning content from scratch.Content CurationThe other approach to filling a site is content curation, which can often be misinterpreted as spinning or outright plagiarizing. Now, the thing to understand here is that there is a massive difference between professional curation and simply copying the efforts of others. Each and every time a news story is rewritten and printed by a different newspaper or website, the content is technically curated. After all, it’s not as if each newspaper makes the news in-house…apart from a certain few tabloids, of course. This is a perfect example of curation, which means taking the fact, figures, knowledge and expertise already doing the rounds and recreating it in your own unique style. From looking at it form a different angle to forming it into opinion pieces right through to deliberately taking an opposing view to most, content curation is all about taking what’s already there and making it your own.Of course, the obvious downside is how easy it can be to fall into the trap of just ripping-off the work of others and trying to pass it off as your own, but if you can steer clear of this kind of malpractice, the world is literally bursting at the seams with useful and invaluable ideas your site could benefit from.