There is an elephant in the online marketing “room,” and the elephant’s name is Curation. Curation is the most important part of online marketing that no one is talking about. With the rise of inbound marketing, content has become front and center in the minds of marketers. This focus on content as an important marketing tactic creates two extremely important problems.

First, content creation is difficult. Having the time and skill to create relevant and interesting content is difficult for marketers who are already overloaded with daily tasks. The second major problem with the rise of content marketing is noise. Because content marketing has been proven to be a key ingredient in successful online marketing, more and more businesses are creating content. With this increase in the volume of content, it is becoming harder and harder for marketers’ content to reach new prospects.

Applying Curation to Our Problems

As marketers, how do we solve these two problems? Curation. Curation is the process of selecting and aggregating information into one place that creates more value for information consumers, because they don’t have to spend time researching and visiting all of the original sources.
Curation has become a fixture for many successful news blogs on the web today. Sites like The Huffington Post, Mashable, Gizmodo, etc., while breaking news and providing commentary for their given areas of focus, also use curation to provide value to readers and increase new visitors to their site. Stop and look at your email, Facebook, Twitter, or any other source you use for news. You will see that many of the stories that you are reading aren’t sharply written prose. Instead, they are groupings of valuable information, made even more valuable by their assembly as a collection.

Source: A Marketer’s Guide to Content Curation

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