Content creation is an important marketing strategy for a business and so is content curation.

At the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA in August 2010 Eric Schmidt said, “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until  2003. That’s something like five exabytes of data.”

With that perspective in mind, it makes sense that curation on the web is really important.

Seth Godin explains it in his post Nearly Infinite, “If you know 100,000 words, names and brand names, there are now a hundred trillion different searches you can do… with only two words in combination.  No, you might not want to search on Starbucks Matzoh, but you could. Just knowing what to search for is now as difficult as the search itself.
In the face of infinity, many of us are panicking and searching less, going shallower, relying on bestseller lists and simple recommendations. The vast majority of Google searches are just one or two words, and obvious ones at that. The long tail gets a lot shorter when you don’t know what’s out there.”

A business can take advantage of this problem that most people face online by curating content for their blog. Use the purpose of your business as the theme of your blog and then find other blogs and content out there that focus on that same content and re-post it. If your business purpose is something that people want to rally behind then your blog can be the rallying point.

Magazine publishers don’t sell magazines and web sites don’t sell content, they sell their audiences to advertisers. They do it by focusing on a topic that attracts a lot of visitors and then churning out a lot of content, most of it curated, on a daily basis for advertisers to sponsor. There’s nothing really special about what publishers do that a brand couldn’t do. So instead of paying publishers to be able to brand their content, make your own content and brand it all for free.