The question is, do you have to be an expert in your field in order to spread your message and share hope?
Many people have actually sabotaged their own success by thinking that to be the expert or the authority in their field, that they have to know everything about their industry and subject.
But did you know that by curating content, you can still become an expert or thought leader in your field by legitimately using other people’s content?
You can be the content creator (original content) and/or the content curator (the reporter) and still be a thought leader and authority in your industry.
In my view, a combination of the two, content creator and content curator, is going build your credibility and give you more voice that simply either curating other people’s content or creating your own.
No one would sit down to write a book without first doing their research and finding out what others have to say on the subject.
Even the Bible is made up of 66 books and 40 authors.
Now, you’re probably asking yourself, “how can that work?”
The first thing to consider is that this strategy is not one to be outsourced to anyone who has no knowledge of your field or your industry. You can’t pay someone $4 per hour and expect them to curate the best content. I personally regard content curation as a serious strategy for becoming an expert in your field as well as getting better search engine rankings. Even if you produce a news site that purely publishes industry news, the content curator is assumed to have some knowledge of his or her industry.
To read more about best practices in content curation, check out the Content Strategy Hub’s Ultimate Guide.
Here is a sample from the guide written by Eugene Farber, which will give you a basic overview of what content curation is.
What is Content Curation?
Curation is nothing new, really. Historically, “curators” have been associated with museums and art galleries. They pick out what to put up for display.
Radio stations are also curators if you think about it. They hand pick what genre of music will be played, what the individual songs will be, and what order they will be played in.
But never has the ability to curate content (be it visual, audio or text) been so available for the general public.
In fact, most people that have any sort of online presence have curated content at one point or another. Most curation doesn’t happen with marketing in mind, though. I’ll mention more on this later.
Content curation is really just the sharing of other people’s information.
This is similar to how a museum curator would research different art pieces for an exhibit, sift through them, analyze them, and finally decide what to display.
Of course curation isn’t limited to just digital content, but that is really what we’re focusing on here.
David Meerman Scott recently stated that he believes that the use of guest writers is a form of content curation.
I have to disagree with this view point. To me, curation is based on content that already exists; not original content. Publishing new content, even if it is written by a guest, is not curation in the strict sense of the word.
Many blogs accept guest authors. But they often have the stipulation that the content must be original. This is not curation – it is creation (by someone other than the blog owner).
Read more: http://www.contentstrategyhub.com/content-curation-guide#ixzz2AccRcOUF
Expert By Association
By quoting or adding content that another expert has created often promotes you as an expert by association. And as I said earlier, you have to have a certain level of knowledge in order to curate the best information.
To become an expert in my view, you have to be well read. Therefore, whilst you’re reading, why not share what you’ve been reading with others and raise your profile at the same time.
Not only will it keep people engaged and reading, it will keep you researching and learning.
Until next time,
About Trish Jones
[...] Trish Jones talks a bit about who historically were the content curators, before this phenomenon came to the Web, in the article named ”What Is Content Curation?“: [...]