As a blogger, you don’t always have to create content from scratch. Content curation helps busy readers – and you.
The more comfortable you get with blogging, the more you can focus on providing value for your readers. Here’s an area where readers will greatly appreciate your help.
TMI—Too Much Information— and FOMO—Fear of Missing Out—demonstrate the conflicts and confusion that dominate our participation in the online world.
We experience TMI every time we go to Facebook, LinkedIn, or a news web site. Twitter is a storm of TMI.
On a mundane level, we don’t need to know that Sharon Z went to the doctor and got a medical all-clear, although we’re vaguely glad for her. On a global level, a lot is going on that no one person can understand. We’re inundated with data that we can’t process. Just look at the Ukraine war and the flood of headlines we received.
We may decide to take a break from all forms of news, but then FOMO kicks in. What if we’re missing out on something important that we need to know? We may especially worry in the areas of business. Lack of knowledge could cause us to make poor decisions.
This is why your readers will appreciate content curation. The idea that somebody could collect information around a topic of interest to us makes the content curation blog post very appealing.
Content Curation Defined
As the writer of a content curation blog post, do some research on a topic that will be of interest to your target market. Include a headline that introduces the topic, a small introduction, and then three or four blog posts or articles or videos around that topic. You comment on these, giving your analysis.
You’re pulling the information together for your reader, but by commenting on it, you’re also showing your expertise as the author of that blog post. Also include the link to those articles for those people interested in reading the original source. The outbound links also help your search engine optimization.
You Can Go Broad or Deep
This method of content curation may present some diverse viewpoints or highlight different aspects of an issue.
You can also go deep by focusing on a single video or an article that you particularly like and provide your own reaction to the information. Somebody else has pulled that content together for you, but you specifically provide an analysis.
These are very popular blog posts because people want to know what you think about a topic, and you’re going a little bit more in-depth. You might, instead, take a contrary view and say, “Here’s this article, and I don’t agree with it.”
I must feel strongly about an issue to take a contrary view. This type of post can generate lots of comments. My recommendation would be to take the contrary view judiciously. Think of it as a spice that seasons, not one that burns the mouth.
Note: Do not copy each of those articles verbatim into your blog post. Summarize them in a couple of paragraphs. It is a violation of copyright law to put the entire article into your blog post. You give the author credit, of course, for the summation of what you’re talking about. That’s where the link to the original blog post comes in.
Pat Iyer began blogging in 2009 and writes 2 posts a week now.
