On the first post in this series, we talked about how to get started on the road to curating content. Today I want to talk with you a little bit about why it’s beneficial to travel on that curation road.
Now, a lot of the answers are probably going to seem rather humdrum to you if you’ve read about this subject before. For example, a lot of people talk about “link love” or “link juice” when they talk about curating online content. That’s because if you format your post just so, you are giving a lot of context-rich links to the person whose post you’re curating. Google loves contextual links, so you are doing that person a really nice favor. In return, many people will mention your curation of their post via Twitter or maybe even via their own blog, so you get some traffic love in return.
Another benefit we’ve talked about right here at this very site is that curating content can help you build community. You get to meet other bloggers, and as I’ve found, you also get to meet a lot of other curators. You get to read and share a lot of different perspectives, and you can build yourself a reputation, and a community, based on being a resource for valuable, well-written information.
There’s one advantage I don’t see too many people talking about, although Rachel Strella captured it in her comment on my last post. It’s a known fact that a lot of people, and I mean a LOT of people, in the online world are generating content. We’re all trying to improve our content. We’re all trying to get our content seen by as many people as possible.
The thing we’re noticing, though, is that even if our posts use the word “you” in every sentence, they’re really still about us. They’re our perspectives. They’re our viewpoints. When I write “how-to” posts here on my site, I’m not writing them from your perspective, I’m writing them based on my experiences, right? And that’s kind of how we have to do it. After all, you never know who’s going to be reading your content. You can’t write from everyone’s perspective, so you write from your own.
Curating content gets us away from that “me me me” aspect of blogging though. Sure, we’re gathering things based on our preferences, but what we’re providing our readers is a glance at what other people are saying. We may be introducing our readers to other great resources. We may be establishing ourselves as resources for our readers in the process.
Even better, there are so many blog posts out there in the blogosphere that we are almost guaranteed not to create an “echo chamber” as we curate content. The likelihood of two people choosing the exact same posts on any given topic is pretty small. So, as we gather what other people have written, we are also ensuring that we are doing something that can’t really be duplicated, at least not by accident. What topic can we blog about that has never been blogged about before? Sometimes it feels like there aren’t a lot of unchartered territories in the world of blogging!
What advantages do you perceive are tied to curating content? Do you feel there are disadvantages?
Let’s talk about it!
Image by Thiago Felipe Festa. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/thiagofest