Today there is a lot of talk about content curation and the importance of organizing the vast amounts of content available for your niche for your audience. Some people think you have to pick: creator or curator. But, the truth is, there is no reason why you should choose between content creation and content curation. Let’s look at what each comprises.

Content curation – Finding interesting, important, relevant and valuable content for your target audience and compiling it in one easy location or package is very important. To choose great content to share with your audience you should be able to state why you chose it, why it’s relevant, why it’s important, as well as where you got it.

Content creation – Certainly within content curation you’re also creating content. You write original content that explains why the content you chose is important, why it’s relevant and some information about from whom and where it came. But, when we talk about content creation we really mean original, fresh, relevant, targeted content. Content that you either wrote, or you paid to have written for you.

To be truly relevant in your niche it’s important that you do both.

Create fresh content for your audience and curate content from other sources that is important to your audience as well. As the expert in your niche, doing both will get the most response. Not only will your audience respond well, but the movers and shakers within your niche will also respond well. And, it can be really hard to churn out fresh content every single day of every single year. When you can involve yourself in content curation it will take off some of the pressure but still elicit results from your market.

Content curation is an additional tactic to help you generate traffic and improve customer engagement. In addition, content curation can help establish you as the go-to expert in your field. By sharing smart, engaging, relevant content from others, and commenting on said content, people will “go to” your website or blog first to find content on the topic to look at all throughout the web.

Your market can come straight to you for the skinny on your niche instead of having to wade through multiple searches of results that they aren’t sure are accurate or legitimate. You can be the window your market uses to glimpse the important information elsewhere on the web. By organizing the information in an easy to use format, you’ll make your site stickier and more attractive to your audience.

But, that doesn’t mean you should avoid including original, relevant content. By producing original content in addition to curating other people’s content, you will further demonstrate your knowledge about your niche.

What’s more, since you engage in curating and sharing other people’s content, they are likely to do you a solid by sharing your content as well. Much like if you are a regular retweeter, you’ll notice that the same people will also retweet your information. Plus, by also producing your own content you will stand out from the other websites that service your niche.