8 Reasons Why Content Curation Works
Content curation refers to the process by which content is gathered from outside sources, as opposed to crafted uniquely from scratch. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not just a good thing for your website, it’s borderline essential. Creating content from scratch will always be fundamentally important if you want to build your own voice and brand identity. Nevertheless, content curation should also make it into your marketing mix – and for at least 8 good reasons:
- A variety of perspectivesFirst of all, using content gathered from outside sources on your own website means adding multiple perspectives and voices. The kind of variety that can make all the difference when looking to create an engaging and credible experience.
- Expand your content offeringJust as long as the content you publish on your website is of the highest quality, more is always better. Content curation is a great way of significantly expanding your site’s content, without having to spend years or decades producing it from scratch.
- Improve your authorityContrary to popular belief, content curation isn’t interpreted by website visitors as lazy or amateurish. Quite to the contrary, it shows that you are dedicated, committed and authoritative enough to do your research, including outside perspectives on whatever it is you are discussing at the time.
- Expand your horizonsAt its core, content curation is basically a form of research in its own right. While going about the process, you can expect your own knowledge and horizons to be expanded significantly along the way. It’s amazing how your own thoughts and opinions can be influenced, just as soon as you begin diving into those of others.
- Pure gold for blogsWhen in need of inspiration for interesting and engaging blog posts, content curation is the way to go. For example, collecting together a bunch of important statistics, extracting a few highlights from the world of social media or simply bringing together a handful of news snippets of relevance to your niche. All pure gold for driving engagement.
- Build connectionsOf course, each time you come across an item you would like to share with your own audience, you can always get in touch with its creator to discuss possible collaborations. Which for obvious reasons can also be great for link building purposes.
- Save timeThere’s no getting away from the fact that when time is short, creating killer content from scratch often isn’t possible. By contrast, getting to grips with a little content curation takes no time at all.
- Save moneyLast but not least, the fact that content curation is so much faster and easier than creating new content from scratch also makes it significantly more affordable.
So as you can see, content curation can and most certainly does work for millions of websites all over the world.It’s simply a case of knowing where to draw the line between genuine content curation and ripping off other people’s work wholesale. Suffice to say, the latter really must be avoided at all costs!