Most entrepreneurs realize by now just how valuable content creation and curation can be. With excellent content, you can improve your reputation, attract more people to your website, and ultimately score more conversions. What’s more, your content can work synergistically with a variety of different marketing and advertising strategies. You can use it with email marketing, social media marketing, and even paid advertisements to foster a better environment for your brand. The latter process can turn out to be very beneficial for your business, but you might not realize just how quickly and thoroughly a little bit of content can work on your behalf. With the right approach, your content might function as a secret weapon to bring in more business for you.
Content Creations vs. Curation
Let’s start by defining the differences between content creation and content curation.
Content creation is pretty straightforward. It’s the act of creating new pieces of content from scratch. For example, you could hire a writer to create an eBook for your brand or use your in-house graphic designer to come up with an infographic. These are original works created specifically for your strategy and they can be shared in a number of ways. You can include them on your website, send them to your email list, or incorporate them into a formatted blog post.
Content curation is a little bit more subtle. Right off the bat, you can tell the two processes are apart because of the content’s creation process. However, they both involve selecting items from existing sources and either creating new content from scratch or using an approach similar to that of content creation to create new variations upon existing material. In fact, they both often involve a combination of elements from those two types of processes.
For example, if you have a well-established blog that includes commentary on your industry, presentation materials like infographics, and graphics, you could take the original content of that blog and create new pieces of content based on it. Those new works might call upon some of those existing materials to help spread awareness about your brand even more. You could then use the same approach with content creation to create illustrations from scratch for newsletters or flyers.
The Advantages of Content Creation
There are several advantages to content creation including:
- Originality – Creating a piece of content from scratch makes it totally original. You won’t have to worry about your audience seeing the content somewhere else.
- Control – You won’t have to depend on anyone else to create the content for you. This means that it can be whatever you want it to be and that there are no limitations.
- Specificity – During the creation process, you’ll have the opportunity to research your target audience and craft a piece that speaks to them directly.
The Advantages of Content Curation
- Lower time requirements – One of the obvious benefits here is that you won’t need to spend as much time on your specific objectives. Writing a new piece of content from scratch can take many hours, especially if you’re creating something that requires in-depth research.
- Diverse options – The internet is a big place, with more than 600 million active blogs and 1.7 billion websites. There’s no shortage of external content, so you should be able to find a wide range of sources in your field of choice.
- Relationship possibilities – Curating content can also be a valid way to flesh out your network, meet new influencers, and build better relationships with them. You can also look at it as a way to find new ways of doing things, like creating content you can curate on behalf of your company.
- Flexibility – Using content curation can help you build a wide range of materials, from infographics to video productions, and all in different formats. It’s totally up to you how you want to use those materials. You might create some originals but then also incorporate some free content from the web or sources like social media.
Blending the Strategies
Relying exclusively on curation or exclusively on creation will yield you inferior results, compared to utilizing a blend of both. These strategies also feed into each other, enhancing each other’s positive effects. For example, some types of content can be used effectively both on their own and in combination with one another.
For instance, while you might use a blog post to communicate with your audience, you might also want to use it as a vehicle for promoting an event or service. For this reason, if the blog post has been created from scratch, it’s best to publish it separately from the event or service. That way, you can take advantage of the unique qualities of each strategy while retaining those positive effects they have on each other.
If you’re going to use curation, try to think about how it might enhance your original pieces of content. For example, if you have a new blog post addressing a certain pain point in your industry, you might look for an old social media post that explains an extremely similar situation. You could then combine those two to create still another piece of content that can be shared on your website and social networks.
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