How to Curate Content Ethically

Many small business owners understand the importance of having a steady supply of content for their website, email list and social media sites.

This helps improve your search rankings, increases exposure and traffic, enhances your reputation and encourages more sharing of your content through social media.

The advantage of curating content is that it’s a quick and easy way to provide useful information to your audience – if done properly. The disadvantage is that if it’s done poorly you can lessen your reputation with your audience or end up with legal copyright issues.

Choosing Articles to Curate

Focus on content that your audience will find helpful and interesting. Think of the most common questions asked by prospects and customers. Give your opinion, explanation or background information on industry news and trends.

Curation Approaches

The key to good curation is to have your own commentary. The article suggests to “explain why it matters, how it impacts readers, or what may happen in the future”.

You can add additional information not found in the source article.

Another approach is to mention different approaches or viewpoints from the article, or create some controversy over certain points in the article.

Staying Legal

These best practices for sharing content written by others will keep you from getting into trouble with existing copyright laws:

• Add your own title. Don’t copy the original article title.
• Always credit the author and prominently link back to the source article.
• Quote sparingly. In your commentary, only use one or two sentences in a pull quote.
• Be careful with images. If you use images from the original article, only use thumbnails – or get permission from the author to use full-size images. Even better, find a free image on the web or purchase an image from a stock photo agency for a dollar. You could also use an image from Flickr with the appropriate permissions.
• Vary your content sources.

Invite Viewers to Comment

At the end of your commentary, ask readers for their opinions or their experiences. For example, “what do you think?” or “what’s your experience with …”

Source article written by Pawan Deshpande is here:
http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/11/ethical-content-curation-checklist/