As a social media marketer or a start-up entrepreneur, content curation may be a key strategy that allows you to re-purpose previously written content to share with your audience. It is extremely useful when you have only so much time to create fresh, long-form content from scratch. Curation tells your audience that you’re willing to take a broader view of topics and stay on the pulse of industry trends.

Curation serves an important purpose in brand marketing. It tells your audience that you’re not only interested in promoting your brand, but care about sharing useful information with them. After all, brands aspire to share content of relevance and meaningful value to their audience, regardless of whether they’ve created it themselves or sourced it from a third-party.

Studies show that the average information worker spends 2 hours a week looking for information which costs companies and individuals millions of dollars in productivity.  Organizing access to information will solve this problem.  KBrowser allows you to manage your context and work more efficiently.

The fact is we are always in research mode.  Every day we receive tens of emails, go online to LinkedIn, Facebook and visit various news and information sites to stay informed. During all these activities we find gems.  Articles and insights that we like, re-tweet and share in various fashions to inform our social groups.

Content Marketers use content curation as a strategy to promote their own brand. This method is most effective when the curated content drives traffic back to your site first! KBucket, where the letter “K” stands for knowledge, is a plugin for WordPress sites that let’s publishers curate, organize, and share third party content by driving traffic back to their site first.

Not all curation tools are the same. Some are built to tell a story, and some are built to record history. Our KBucket solution is built to record history. In this post, I’d like to explore the difference between these two forms of communication, point you to curation tools that serve each market, and share some ideas on content marketing using KBucket.

How do you compete with big brand publishers.  Brands like NYTimes, Huffington Post or Daily Kos, with staff or network of writers able to generate new content on a continuous basis creating engagement and online ad revenue.  The answer is content curation.  Curation allows any small publisher to create valuable and fresh content continually. Most probably you are already receiving tens of news letters, Facebook posts and twitter massages related to topics of interest.  If you start organizing and tagging this information, soon you will have pretty valuable knowledge base that can generate new ad revenue for your site, help you with ideas for new posts, and create tens of new links for your social media messaging.  See our KBucket page for an example. [ad name=”LTB ATF”]

Curation takes insight, effort and adds value for both your own accessibility to your research as well as others interested in similar topics, but how can you monetize it?  The KBucket plugin for wordpress is designed optimally to generate significant revenue for curators. A KBucket page is highly targeted directory of links creating premium value for targeted ads A KBucket page invites transactions with related topics and tags resulting in more pageviews Exploring and optimizing monetization is a focus of this blog.   I will not only analyze the RPM (See Knowledge base for Advertising definitions) but also explore various inbound traffic methods to boost revenue. [ad name=”LTB ATF”]

A study by “The online Journalism Review” and the other by “Pew Research” investigate how users interact with news online and make the case for News curation.  I will share excerpts of each study and then share my insight on how this relates to our curation tools.

You often hear people say that Content Curation is a disruptive business, but what does that really mean? Curation is a new layer of activity that sits between the content creators and the consumer, in essence disrupting the original flow of information – providing tools that empower a mass of users to manage the context of information.   Curation is an entirely new activity with 3 distinct phases of operation. Searching & Finding Listening tools, source monitoring and quick navigation of multiple sources are of primal importance in this stage. Crowd-sourcing features improve the quality of the end product Organizing The number of groups, meta data filtering (taxonomy) and the purpose for selecting the tags (ontology) matter Systems that provision for crowd input and easy editing of the taxonomy will produce superior results. Sharing Context matters here.  Curation is all about context, which means making it easier for users to find a wealth of related  information on a topic. Navigation matters – How easy is it to go between related topics without losing your place. Modules and plug-ins matter – the ability to take all or part of your curated content and share it on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or package it and share it on Mobile apps provide added benefits. Just like blogging platforms provided Content Management Systems that empowered a generation of users to become content creators, Curation will empower a generation of users to become context editors. This is significant and a power shift.  Today media channels and blogs control the context of the information they create and share.  With Content Curation a larger group of users will be empowered to manage the context of information shared.  The benefits of this new and disruptive activity are explosive.