Curating Content is a great way to develop visibility, build an audience and/or grow thought leadership on the topic you've chosen to cover. 

So how does it work? 

1. Where does traffic to Scoop.it topic pages come from?

As shown in the above graph from that study, traffic to content curated by Scoopiteers mainly come from 2 sources: Search and Social Media. This latter is the starting point of everything else for the following reasons:

- when getting started, that's the most accessible audience you have: your existing followers and friends on your social networks;

- sharing content there will increase your chance of being reshared and eventually picked up by others which will increase your search rankings;

(Note that the same will also apply within the Scoop.it platform creating opportunities of being followed, rescooped and having links back to your topic page, again helping visibility and SEO. But the vast majority of your traffic will eventually come from social networks and search engines). 

This article gives more details on combining social media with your curation activity which is an essential part. 

2. Develop a consistent content curation routine using best practices

A good way to think of your content curation activity is to consider the following cycle and the 6 associated best practices:

Who reads yesterday's paper? Publish frequently

Keep your topic updated with interesting news. As shown in that study, publishing fresh content is a key driver of traffic. Give them a reason to come back on your topic and to share your topic with others.

Be consistent: define a topic that interests your target audience and publish only relevant content

While people might not know you or your brand as an authority yet, they search for content on their interests and they're more likely to click on tweets or links shared on social media that match them. And when they do, they're more likely to reshare and spread it further. So make sure you have a well-defined topic and don't hesitate to be niche: Scoop.it's topic-centric model will help you be discovered by these people who share your interests, engage them by having them discover related scoops on your topic and spread your curated content further by making it easy for them to re-share it.

Leverage Scoop.it's content suggestions to save time curating

Out of inspiration? Check your suggestions: Scoop.it constantly provides you suggested content to be sure that you're always inspired. And if they're not good enough, optimize them by fine-tuning keywords or using the "Manage Sources" menu. 

You can also use the bookmarklet to post interesting articles while browsing the web.  

Content is king, context is god: add your insight to your scoops to be better indexed and drive more engagement

Now that your Scoop.it page has been sent into the wild wild web, you want to make sure of two things:

- that it will engage your visitors

- that it will be indexed in Search engines

To optimize both of these, enrich your scoops with your insights. By giving context - however short or simple it is - you will bring value to your audience, make it more likely to check out on other scoops on your topic and improve your ranking in Search Engine results.

Build it and they won't come: share your curated scoops to initiate the process

While eventually, Scoop.it will let you reach beyond your social graph, getting your content out there is an important first step. Scoop.it makes it easy to cross-post to your favorite platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ or even your blog on Tumblr or Wordpress and several other platforms and social networks. 

To do so, remember to connect your social networks to Scoop.it by visiting http://www.scoop.it/share/configuration 

You can always come back to this page by clicking on the Scoop.it menu in the top right corner next to your avatar and going to Settings > Sharing Options.  

Following that, sharing a scoop to your networks is as simple as checking a box.

Build your Interest Graph on Scoop.it

With the above steps completed, you've done your best to be discovered from Social Networks and Search. But how about the Scoop.it community? If you've connected Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, you will be able to see topics curated or followed by your friends and contacts by going to your profile and clicking 'My Community'. Pick the ones you like and start building your Interest Graph: they're likely to reciprocate. 

But don't stop here, use the Scoop.it Search engine and Scoop.it Interest channels (both at http://www.scoop.it/search) to look up topics to follow. Each time you do so, their curators will be notified and are likely to check your profile to see if you curate topics they're interested in. Over time, you'll build a powerful and priceless community of curators influential in the topics that matter to you. More on that at here.

Scoop.it topic pages are indexed every day by Google Search Engine and other search engines and new pages are added constantly. Scoop.it topic pages have received hundreds of millions of visits since the Scoop.it platform was launched and on average 40% of this traffic came from Google and other search engines - as shown in the graph above.

It will take a few days for your topic to appear and here’s what you can do to improve your visibility, based on what we’ve observed :

1. Again, add insights to your posts: curation is about adding context and we’ve seen posts with edited content perform much better than posts with simple quotations.

2. Share your posts: though not all sharing activities create back links, sharing generates re-sharing, comments and other reactions that will help.

3. Publish frequently: topics that are not updated for a certain period of time perform less than regularly updated topics.

4. Add insights to your scoops: even just a few sentences can help by adding more original content to your curated content and bringing context. A collection of curated content on digital marketing will have more chance to rank in search results for queries such as "best SEO resources for real estate" if most of the curated links are annotated with insights for real estate websites owners.

5. Use tags: to add even more context to your topic page.

Content curation is a great way to build an audience: some Scoop.it users have received millions of visits to their Scoop.it topic pages. The above are the best practices we've observed the most successful curators apply since we launched Scoop.it. And with our premium plans, you can benefit from this traffic and SEO directly on your website by hosting your topic pages on your own domain.