5 ways to ethically curate content as a marketing strategy
In order to keep the attention of your audience, you need to deliver current and relevant content. While this steady stream can be a challenge to come up with from scratch, many businesses are looking into content curation as a primary marketing strategy. Content curation is the process of annotating, organizing, finding and sharing content about a specific topic for your targeted audience. Compared to generating original information, content curation can be so much easier. Plus, it’s a lot faster. Unfortunately, bad curation can put a blemish on your business and ruin your company’s brand. It could also lead to legal and copyright issues if you’re not careful. The following tips will help you ethically curate content as a marketing strategy.
Use Several Sources
The right marketing tools can help reinvent your business. You also need to develop the right marketing strategies for your targeted audience. While you may rely on one source to help develop new and interesting content to wow your readers, it could also be unethical because you’re profiting off someone’s original creations. To prevent curation missteps, you want to use several resources. This could be a mix of A-listers and first-run upstarts. You also want to ensure that the content and sources are somewhat related to your targeted target.
Don’t be afraid to add your own insights and thoughts during the curation. In addition to offering your audience more of a variety on the subject, you’ll also be able to input some of your own ideas. This can set you up as an expert in your field.
Give Credit to the Originator
An ethical curator will actually give credit to the original source by linking and citing their unique article. You also want to avoid linking to another curator who is just sharing the information with their own audience. While it can take some additional effort and clicks to find the main source, it’s worth it in the end. Other dishonest practices to avoid include using microscopic fonts and embedding the links in a similar color font as the entire article.
Less is More
A well-designed website should be easy for your audience to navigate. The right company offers businesses a website builder that is simple to manage and a result that will captivate the attention of your customers. In addition to a website that looks stunning, you also want to deliver content that will be useful to your readers. If you curate an article from another source and quote from a specific section using the original, you want to keep the passages short. This gives readers just a sampling, enough to whet their appetites and get them to click through to the entire piece. Quoting extensively can also be considered copyright infringement. After inserting the short passage, summarize the restinyour own words. Think of the original quote as just a stepping stone to what you were trying to convey to your readers.
Share Your Point of View
Regurgitating pieces from an article and summarizing them isn’t actually curation. A good curator will show the importance of a topic and share how it will impact the reader. They will also use their own voice to share their point of view. Curation allows you to delve deeper into the conversation and add your own unique brand to it. This is definitely different than just getting out a thesaurus and replacing the original words with something different.
Provide Additional Information
If your original resource has left out quite a bit of interesting information, you can incorporate relevant information that pertains to your business and clientele. Whether you add key stats or share personal experiences, this extra context makes your article stand out from the competition. It also adds value to your business.
Be Leery of Images
Using text from an original source will causecopyrighted laws associated to the document. If you’re thinking about using images, you’ll want to obtain permission from the original source. While it may be a challenge to gain someone’s permission for every image that you’re thinking of using, try searching for smaller thumbnail images or royalty-free items without copyright laws. Google advanced image search, Flickr and TinEye can prove helpful when you’re looking for copyright-free image.
Come Up with Your Own Headline
While you may be tempted to use the original headline of an article, coming up with your own version ensures that you’ll be consideredthe primary author when your site shows up in the search results. It also lets you showcase certain tidbits of the article that you’ve penned. Try to incorporate phrases or keywords that will captivate your targeted audience and initialize clicks.