5 ways to curate content on your blog

Content curation is a popular method used by bloggers and online publishers to increase the amount of content they publish, share great content from across the web with their own audiences, and add personal commentary to hot topics discussed on other websites.

You can curate content that you think your audience would find value in, add your own commentary, and publish it on your blog.

As long as you don’t plagiarize, break any laws, publish duplicate content, or fail to attribute the source with a backlink to the original content, then content curation is a viable way to bring interesting content to your audience and increase your blog post publishing schedule.

Susan Gunelius, About.com Guide to Blogging, is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She is also a published author, speaker, and a marketing and branding expert.

You can curate content that you think your audience would find value in, add your own commentary, and publish it on your blog. As long as you don’t plagiarize, break any laws, publish duplicate content, or fail to attribute the source with a backlink to the original content, then content curation is a viable way to bring interesting content to your audience and increase your blog post publishing schedule. Following are five easy ways to curate content on your blog in a useful, legal and ethical way.

1. Publish Editorialized Content that You’ve Curated

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 NewsCredare 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.