After Google’s crack down of microsites and thin sites, building an authority site becomes very daunting to many affiliate marketers and small businesses. A seemingly new buzz word went out in an attempt to give Google want it wants, more content and freshness. The solution: content curation. Content curation is not new and has been used by many publishers for decades now. This is not a replacement of creating original content but could complement it to keep your audience’s attention.

Curation is defined as the “exciting and new genre of search tool which is also a tool for scanning real-time environment as well as opportunities for evaluating the relevance and quality of emerging information landscapes [Valenza par. 3]. Teachers, students, librarians, researchers, bloggers and marketers can use this constantly updated digital archive to create a mashup that promotes synthesized thinking.



In fact, content curation is presently one of the the hottest topics for online marketers. However, only few fully understand the benefits of content curation especially the advantage it provides in building business and a brand name. Small and startup companies can also take advantage of this strategy for their blogs.

A content curator is a person who finds, collects, organizes and shares the most relevant and the best items for a particular collection. With this, content curation is basically archiving and curating within the digital world. [Bhargava, 2009, para. 4]

There are five subgroups for content curation that includes the following:

Aggregation. This is the act of curating data that is relevant for a specific topic within one location only. Distillation. This is the act of curating data in a simplified format wherein only the most relevant and the important information are shared. Elevation. This refers to the curation process with the intention of identifying a significant trend coming from small musings posted online. Mashups. This is a unique curation juxtaposition that merges an existing content resulting to a new and innovative point of view. Chronology. This is a method of curation that combines historical information and is organized according to time which will eventually show the evolution and understanding of a specific topic.

Content curation can be used as a kind of content marketing that publishes and editorially collects all the best and most relevant content related to a particular niche and should be targeting a particular audience. The content can be enhanced through addition of expertise and personal opinions of people who are leaders in a specific industry.

There are three key terms which make content curation different from content and link syndication between systemic aggregation that is popular and is due for enhancement, addition of value and editorial selection. Thus, a person can develop content curation for a business, ensure that it is enhanced through value addition and the human elements are prioritized in the efforts.

The following suggested ways on how content should be curated as part of the marketing strategy.

Curate Video and Images. Upon the launched of Pinterest, video and image sharing become one of the most important activities online. Online marketers can simply create an account with Pinterest then set-up pinboards that helps in describing brands. Users can curate images from all over the web, repin pins of other users’ and let their followers experience the brand visually.

Online curator can monitor and measure their respective social curation presence in Pinterest through Curalate.com. The site suggests the following to maximize their exposure.

Be Consistent. Curate content that are related to your personality or to the brand story. Be Authentic. Users are encouraged to invest on visual communication and with brand back story. Invest with interesting and fresh content. A lot of brand engagement in the site exists because of the brand website. Thus, it is encouraged that pinning or adding of pins are done consistently.

Curate from Online Magazine. There are a lot of free content curation tools that you can find online, this will be shown below, and thus it is best that you choose and use one. Start curating from the online magazine that is most related to your respective topic or industry. It is important however, that you curate content your target market will find value, enjoyable and interesting. Otherwise, they will not be reading or even looking at it.

Storify co-founder, Burth Herman explains that great curation narrates a story and takes the audience to an experience. Every video or image puts together a story. Herman adds that curation should be about people and in considering what the audience desire to see.

Curate Using your Blog. There are several ways on how users can curate using their blog content. Commonly, bloggers curate and publish individual contents in a day. Each post includes analysis and commentary that adds value to its original content. One of the best examples for this perhaps is The Daily Beast who started as a site that primarily curates the best news content coming from all over the web and is enhanced by letting its writers include their personal thoughts. Other sites publish roundup posts that provide overviews from great content in the online community that provide links to the complete story. These two methods of curation equally give positive results to a business blog.

There are several curating tool like Google Alerts and Social Mention. You can maximize use by working with keywords related to the business. This can be monitored on Twitter.

Curate for your Email Marketing Strategy. Curation of content happens also in the email. Emailing newsletters give a perfect opportunity for curator to share useful content to their target market. You can always curate for your own use or for a third party and use the content of your email campaigns.

What makes email curation easy is significant number of tools that makes curation easy in an email form. XYDO provide a useful tool in curating content coming from email marketing, this helps boast the clicj-through rate by 8 times higher compared to non-curated emails newsletters.

Curate Using Top Quality Content. It is always encouraged that quality content should be curated. You can do this by reviewing your sources and ensuring that the content is a perfect match for your business and brand.

Content Curation Tools Resource List

Given the above information, you might be asking what the best curation tools available online. Below is a list of different curation tools that can help you in discover, share and curate contents for your social media presence, blog and website. The following are listed in no particular order and reflects all the best curating tools that ultimately intend to drive more traffic to your site.

Pinterest. As mentioned earlier, this site is considered the most popular curating tool online wherein content sharing feature allows its users to pin videos, images and other objects to their pinboard. This site is a great way to discover visual content online. Google Reader. This is considered the best RSS feed reader online. You can regularly check your favorite blogs, news sites and other RSS feed about the newest content and then deliver them to your own stream. Curation Soft. You can find, curate, and review content coming from You Tube, Google Blog Search, Google News, Flickr, Twitter and other RSS Feed you choose using this tool. Lynkly. This is a news curation tool coming from your Facebook and Twitter feeds. Google Currents. This tool is especially made for tabloids and organizes your favorite publications. Zite. This tool provides a personalized magazine for iPhone and iPad. Pearltrees. The tool lets you share and collect everything you like online. Curated.by – a curation tools that composes a collection of topics as well as interests that are curated by everyone. Surfmark. This tool primarily captures, organizes and annotates web searches. You can save effort and time spent in looking for information in the web and turns it to something that you can use. Scoop.it. This is a leveraged curation that builds gorgeous magazines easily. Target Info’s Mycurator. This is a WordPress plugin that uses cloud services in automatically posting all of your curated articles into your own WordPress site. FlashIssue. Especially for people who hates creating email newsletter, this tool serves you best. You can work with FlashClipper curation app and then curate, share and produce great looking email newsletters in minutes. Delicious. Before, this was just a bookmarking tool, but now Delicious was upgraded and presently includes more curation features like the capacity to create stacks. Zootool. Also a bookmarking tool that visually helps in organizing and in sharing your favorite documents, images and videos plus your links across the web. Gimmer Bar. This is another former bookmarking tool that now allows saving your favorite sites. It helps you store and organize your entire saved web clipping to your personal library stored in cloud. It also lets you back up everything in Dropbox. Thus, you can make public collection that you can share and discover. Faveous. This tool collects all your favorites posts coming from Google Reader, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in a single place, thus giving you ease in managing and curating your collections. iFlow. This tool allows you to follow, create and curate flows of whatever topic you are interested in. You can always create a mixing board for everything and anything that of interests to you. Flockler. You can use this tool if somebody invites you. It requires Social Content and CMS + Flocker’s Social Algorithm + Employee Curation = Choose to become a content Editor-in-Chief. You can publish your magazine on iPad, iPhone and Desktop. Prismatic. This tool helps you connect with the Social Networks. Prismatic learn your interests and how you interact that will help you showcase the most interesting conversation and content to your friends. Kweeper. This is the easiest tool in gathering, organizing and sharing things that interests you. The Tweeted Time. This tool is a real-time and personalized newspaper generation tool connected with your Twitter Account. It aggregate news coming from your Twitter Stream and rank the items according to popularity of your friends. Addict-o-matic. This is a cool and simple tool that allows you to create and customize a page instantly especially with the newest buzz on any topic and will allow you to get a glance with what’s happening. Utopic. You can “never lose a bookmark again” because this tool helps you save web pages quickly by using Utopic as your browser extension. With Utopic, you can automatically tag keywords so that you will be able to find it faster for later use. You can also discover similar items coming from top contributors. Mass Relevance. This is a social integration platform that enables producers as well as marketers to filter, aggregate and integrate real-time social content to a virtual brand or a media experience. Collected. With this tool, you can always grab news sources, videos, blogs and social media and then merge them to your personal collection of a blog-like stream that covers a particular topic, person, group or people or simply anything. PostPost. Using PostPost search result helps you get full-filled results complete with relevant information coming from people who are following you on Twitter. You can get photos, links, reviews, news, and insights that are missing from real-time search. You simply need to sign-up in PostPost and then you automatically gather what you are following then share it according to demand. MyTweetMag. This tool turns your Twitter links to a stream in your personal blog. You can always curate a topic then show how passionate you are about it. Thus, instead of simply embedding it to a Twitter Stream, you can use MyTweetMag to turn all these links into a beautifully organized magazine that you can curate with you blog. News Pin. This tool allows you to follow news topics you find interesting. You can also publish this into a news stream for a customer or a team. You can start with a topic then start fine-tuning it by adding keywords or RSS feeds. News.me– This tool provides you with must-read news coming from Facebook and Twitter. LiveBinders. This tool combine all your cloud documents, your website links, and lets you upload your own desktop documents then access easily, share and update the binder anywhere with ease. NetVibes. You can curate everything that matters to you in a dashboard. This can include personal preferences, news, weather, blogs, search queries, videos, images, etc. Trap.it. This is an Al-powered curation toll that helps you learn your interests and continuously deliver on-topic content even if your preference evolves. This tool helps you capture what you want and deliver it spam-free and fresh all day. retickr. This is a Mac Apps that lets you stream Twitter, Facebook ad RSS to your own desktop. attrakt. This tool is small search engine that allows you searching and reading your favorite sites including a save option. You can also share your ideas and knowledge to other people. Just create a box or boxes for a specific theme of your interest that will eventually make your visits to your favorite sites faster and in discovering their specific content easier. Hitpad. This is an iPad app that alerts users about the newsfeed on facebook. Feedly – the tool is minimalistic with social news reader intended for creative minds and can be personalized according to interests. Pulse. This tool transforms your news to a colorful mosaic. Postano. This is a premium social media content collector, integration and syndication tool. This tool integrates real-time content from joined social media to your personal website. It also creates displays and alerts from the social media that help boost up events, deploy Facebook Apps and a lot more. The creator of this tool offers free trial. Flud. This is a social news reader wherein everyone creates a personality. Skloog. You can have all your bookmarked sites in one location for one central access. Bonzobox. A sharing and bookmarking site where you can add a site or multiple sites to make them easy resource for your family and friends. Smartr. This curation tool lets you create and share a personal newspaper. Curata. Easily find, organize & share relevant content for your business. Find Organize Share. Bundlr. This tool creates topic pages that you can share. Darwin Awareness Engine. This is a discovery tool that gives real time experience of identifying patterns of events happening across the web. This tool is designed to help professionals who require knowledge on what going on right now for a specific subject. Qrait – this is a real time content curation tool. WP-Drudge. This is a website Template on WordPress that lets you post external articles as well as your own blog and other links to other sites. You can add image and display the featured content and even insert ads easily using this tool. Taptu. Want to be cool like a DJ? Your DJ News curation tool. Paper.li – this tool can now become a digital publisher and help you start an online newspaper. Searcheeze. This tool lets you create magazines on topics of your interest and in result; you gain authority within the online community. You can do this by collecting photos, text, videos and articles coming from all over the web while Searcheeze turns them into a customizable magazine that you can curate and manage. Pinboard. A fast social bookmarking site for introverts. Alltop.com. Created by Guy Kawasaki that aggregates all of the top stories in the web in different niches. Wavii. Claims to be an auto-magical news feeds for any topic of interest you want. BagtheWeb. It helps users to curate any web content that interest them. Create a bag, collect and publish, for any topic then share it to your networked friends. Youversion. A great tool to discover any topic that’s relevant to you. Historious. A great way to capture your history. In A gist. Curates top tanked stories only from top ranked stories by popularity. Pluggio. Pluggio is a web based management system that allows you to take care of your social media profiles in Twitter and Facebook from one place. It helps you keep track of multiple accounts and lets you get a more targeted following. With a variety of free and paid plans available, Pluggio gives you the management flexibility you want based on your social media needs.

With the list above, you can always choose one that best fits your activities online. Start experiencing a whole new environment in searching the web and in organizing things that matters to you.



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