5 Ways to Curate Content on Your Blog

It’s important to understand the difference between content aggregation, content syndication, and content curation before you can effectively curate content to publish on your blog. Here are some simple explanations of each:

Content Aggregation: When you gather links to content and provide nothing else but those links (and perhaps content titles) in a single place, you’re using content aggregation. Alltop and PopURLs are examples of content aggregation websites.

Content Syndication: Syndicated content is aggregated and redistributed (in whole or in part) for consumption or publishing through a third party. Sites like Newstex and NewsCred are examples of companies that offer varied content syndication services.

Content Curation: When you review content from a variety of sources, gather links to those sources, share descriptions of that content, add your own commentary to that content, and publish all of those pieces in a single location, you’re curating content. While aggregation and syndication are primarily automated processes, curation is not. True content curation requires human intelligence, interpretation, and intervention.

With that definition of content curation in mind, you can read, watch, and listen to content from a variety of sources that you think your blog audience would enjoy and benefit from, collect links to the best content, share a snippet from the content, add your commentary, and publish it all in a blog post. Just don’t forget to always cite and link back to the source to provide appropriate attribution.

One of the most popular methods of leveraging content curation to increase your blog posting schedule and to share interesting content from across the web with your audience is by publishing round-up blog posts. For example, you could publish a weekly round-up post where you share links and descriptions of great content from multiple sources about a specific topic. You can even add your own brief commentary with each link. This is a great way to not only share great information with your audience but also to show other content publishers that you like what they’re doing. Think of it as a step in developing a relationship with other publishers whom you respect.

Slideshows are visually appealing and can boost page views for your blog because visitors have to click through each page in the slideshow to see all of them. If your audience likes slideshows, they’re great for sharing curated content. Rather than just publishing a blog post filled with a list of links and commentary, turn each of those links into a visual slideshow where each link gets its own image and commentary page. Slideshows can also easily be repurposed into Twitter updates, Pinterest pins, and more.

There are a variety of tools that can streamline the content curation process, and some of those tools enable you to embed the content you curate on your blog. Typically, the formatting is done for you, so the process is quick and easy. You just pick the sources, add your commentary to each, copy and paste some embed code into a blog post or blog page, click the publish button, and you’re done. For example, tools like Storify and Rebelmouse both offer easy ways to embed curated content on your blog. You can see an example of curated content embedded into a blog page using the Rebelmouse tool on Women on Business.