There are so many misnomers about curated content. For the record, curating content is NOT creating an autoblog that pulls blog sections off of someone else’s blog onto your own.
True curated content is going to explode in 2012 and you should be onboard to take advantage of it. Like private label rights, curated content gives you some ready-made content – but there’s more work to do if you want to do it properly.
You never cut, paste and publish but instead find great snippets of information, share those with your readers while offering your own expert insight about them. These snippets can be in any form – a video, a blog quote, an article.
You have to get over your fear of linking off your site to someone else’s. It’s amateurish, to be honest. Linking out and having people link back to you is natural and authoritative.
You don’t see high profile sites being stingy with their outgoing links. If they mention something someone else had first, they link back and credit that source.
Are you wondering if it will cause link leakage?
Well if you’re not wise enough to use the “open in new window (or tab)” option, then perhaps. But whenever you create a link on your blog, you get that opportunity, so that your reader stays put in one tab, and has the ability to go read the full portion of the content you curated from in another tab.
Readers in any niche LOVE curated content. Why do you suppose that is? Because if it’s done right, then the site that oozes curated content provides a snapshot of an entire niche, AND also goes one step further to provide their own expert opinions on everything going on.
It’s like a one stop shop for information. Some news sites, like Huffington Post, are known for this style of news making and sharing. You can achieve this in any niche. You may even want to look into some really great books on curated content that you can read to become a pro at it.
Basically, you want to be a gatherer of information. Let’s say you run an allergy blog. You might see a news story about gluten-free diets curing people of most allergies. So you go online and open dozens of tabs seeking information on this – both pro AND con.
Use quotes from these sources (always linking back) and then share your opinion on what the other source said. You might disagree. You might have additional information to back up their claim. You might be using their data as a way to back up a claim. You might be using their data as a way to back up a claim YOU first made.
Curated content is a tool for marketers in 2012 to use to spearhead good information sharing. You also want to be open to being curated from yourself. Don’t go demanding your quote be taken down when someone links to you. You’ll look foolish and from that point on, they’ll be sure not to send any traffic your way.
