The idea of content curation, assimilating content from multiple sources as a way to add value to your own content, is becoming more widely accepted and practised these days. The reason is, it’s a win-win-win situation. What I mean by that is your readers win by finding more than one valuable content resource on your website, Google wins because they are providing good content for those who use their search engine, and you win by gaining readership and hopefully earning more money with this sudden influx of quality traffic.

Some people may say that content curation is unethical because the naysayers claim that it’s simply stealing content from other authors. I suppose if one simply copied and pasted another writer’s content without the courtesy of at least linking to the original source…or, took credit for content they didn’t write…then yes, that would most certainly be unethical. However, that’s not what content curation is about.

For example, I see content curation being used on news sites. Here in the UK, one such news site is news.sky.com. If you visit any of their articles and scroll down, you’ll see a list of at least a dozen “related information” type articles which are merely links to other articles on their site as well as other news stories on other news websites. They are providing their readers a chance to “read more” so to speak by visiting related stories on other websites.

For you, you might write about a topic from your own perspective but then do a little research to see what others are saying and either paraphrase and link back to these original sources, for sake of comparison or argument to your own thoughts or simply link to these other sources to provide a greater information base to your readers. Your readers can then comment on this curated content adding more value to your content and a more engaged readership.

Content curation, if done correctly, can provide extremely valuable information to your readers who are interested in what you have to say. Give it a try!