7 Proven Ways to Use Digital Content Curation to Become a Recognized Authority in Your Industry

There’s a new marketing sheriff in town, and her name is digital content curation.

I’ve been reading about this process for the last six months or so, and since it seems to be gaining in popularity, I thought the process was worth a deeper look. Digital content curation is the process of finding, assembling and presenting interesting and up-to-date information on a certain subject. It is rapidly gaining popularity with bloggers and companies that rely on Internet marketing and content marketing, in particular. I’m also looking at some software that makes this process easier, as well as helps grow your list, but the jury is still out on whether or not I feel like it’s a worthwhile investment.

Digital content curation is very different from content marketing. While content marketing revolves around the creation of new content, the content curation process involves looking for relevant information about a certain subject, enhancing the curated content with additional ideas, feedback, and your own take about the matter, and then passing the curated information on to your readers.  Most often this happens on a blog.

Although the term is relatively new to many, it is highly likely that you have used a form of curation in the past. Content curation can take the form of blog links, online news mash-up, social media feeds, RSS feeds, pictures, videos, and songs among other digital content. The act of curation is practiced on a number of well-known blogs, like Mashable.com and HuffingtonPost.com.

The benefit to you as the blogger is that you get to serve as the information filter to your followers by finding the best content for your niche and making sense of what you find in a manner that helps your readers become aware of the most important activities going on in and around any niche.  You, then, become known as a go-to expert in your industry without really creating any new content yourself.

Here are 7 proven ways to use digital content curation to be seen as the go-to person in your industry:

1. Videos:  You can gather a diverse collection of relevant videos on a particular topic for your readers. This is even made simpler by the fact that most video sites allow embedding of their videos. As you curate these videos, you need to write a short introduction detailing the reasons why readers should watch the video and what they will get out of them.

2.  Expert Tips: As an expert in your industry, you can create a valuable list of tips on a particular topic in your industry just by pulling the various tips from other experts into a comprehensive guide. Then, aggregate these tips into a list for a valuable piece of curated content.

3. Social Media:  Social media is a great place to find quality and informative content, which you can save in a document and then push the content out to your social networks. How often do you retweet or repost something you like out to your list?  When you do so, you’re practicing basic content curation. However, you should ensure that the content is useful to your followers.  And, be sure that all of your social network accounts have a common profile name and are interlinked so that your fans and followers will recognize you regardless of the platform that you use.

4. Infographics:  Infographics are images that display information like data, copy, or both, presented in an easy-to-digest visual manner. If you’ve noticed some cool infographics in your industry, include them in a blog post and share your thoughts about them.  See a great infographic on the topic of digital content curation here.

5. Book List:  How about creating a list of relevant books for your readers? You can add a short review to each of these books, and then update the list regularly to ensure that return visitors would always find new information.  You can easily include ebooks in this list, as well. If you’re an Amazon affiliate, you can increase your revenue by using affiliate links in your list.

6. Resource Page:  Digital content curation makes it easy to offer large collections of information, like a resource page or section. To make it user-friendly, create an easy-to-navigate resource page that contains links to relevant content on the topic of the resource. Enhance that page by including your own information on the topic.

7. Case Studies: I love to learn by example, and I bet you do, too.  And, real-life examples provide great social proof.  So, if you want to emphasize or possibly disprove an idea,  pull together some case study examples from others that support or refute your point.

Digital content curation is not simply the act of posting the information that you find online. Rather, content curation helps you plan and execute a strategy that distinguishes your activities from those of your competitors, addresses the needs of your target market, and helps you become the go-to expert in your industry.