Content Curation, the act of discovering and presenting digital content, is becoming increasingly popular among publishers and marketers. Instead of focusing on generating new content, content curation focuses on amassing content from a variety of sources, and delivering it to readers in a visually appealing and organised manner.

There are several content curation services that allow you to create online magazines with content mash-up from websites, blogs, RSS feeds, social media, and other online sources.

I have compiled a list of 10 free content curation sites that you can use to deliver content to your audience  creating your own digital magazine and newspaper. It is a very effective way to get the most out of your content and attract new audiences.

I hope you will find this list useful.

1. Storify.com

Storify helps its users tell stories by curating social media such as Tweets, photos and videos. Users can search multiple social networks from one place, and then drag individual elements into their stories. They can re-order the elements and also add text to give context to your readers.Based in San Francisco, storify was launched in September 2010, and won the Startup Accelerator at South by Southwest in 2011.

2. Paper.li

Paper.li is a content curation service. It enables people to publish newspapers based on topics they like and treat their readers & followers to a handpicked selection of fresh news and links daily. It requires a Twitter or Facebook account to sign up and start publishing your own newspapers. You can also use Paper.li to monetise your content by offering paid subscriptions.

3. Scoop.it

Scoop.it is an excellent tool for discovering content relevant to your niche as well as to deliver content to your readers. Use the dashboard to retrieve content based on keyword or date filters from an unlimited number of sources including websites, RSS feeds, specific social media accounts, and more. Scoop.it does the rest and delivers you a constant feed of exactly the type of content you’re looking for. Scoop.it, in their own words, lets you “Easily publish gorgeous magazines”. It is a great tool to leverage curation to increase your visibility and get noticed online.

4. Bagtheweb.com

BagTheWeb helps users curate Web content. If you wish to save the best content that you come across while surfing the Internet and access it later, then this is a resource you do not want to miss. Aptly named “Bag The Web”, it lets you save pages that you find useful and use it either for personal reference or for sharing with others.

You can create a bag for any topic to collect, publish, and share any content from the Web. These “Bags” can be used to serve many purposes – recommending products, sharing technical knowledge, building trip guides, championing a cause, even organising a meeting or preparing a talk.

5. Pearltrees.com

Pearltress is a free social service that will let you create the living map of the web. The aim of this is to let you easily save and retrieve any interesting content that you find on the web. The content you save is organised and presented in user friendly and visually appealing fashion, which you can then share with others.

6. Collected.info

Collected is a service where you easily gather feeds and news sources in to collections where you (and others!) can get a good overview and follow them on a daily basis. You can even export your collection to a new feed that you can use in your favourite reader such as Google Reader, Net News Wire, etc. Collected gather news websites, twitter feeds, flickr feeds, blogs, or just about anything that uses RSS, Atom or XML.

7. Trap.it

Trapit is one of the newest ways in which you can customize the news that you read online. The more you use the site, the more it gets to know you, and to recommend new content that you’ll be interested in. But the process in which you individualize the content that is appealing to you is a bit different, as you’re given the option to “trap” it, and have it turned into the basis for all the content that’s ever put your way.

8. Themeefy.com

Themeefy is a cool new way to discover, curate, compile and publish information from the web to create your personal Theme magazine. You can create a free account or use your Facebook or Twitter ID instead.

Themeefy lets you have web content turned into a magazine that can be accessed by anyone via a (unique) URL. It is very easy to use.  You can create your magazine and publish content by adding links or by uploading content from your computer.

9. Isuu

Issuu is a free service that allows you to upload any kind of document and make a magazine out of it. With 52 million monthly readers, Issuu is one of the fastest growing digital publishing platform in the world and a very effective way to drive traffic to your blog or your company’s website. It allows you to collect, share and publish information in a visually appealing, user-friendly digital magazine format.

It empower individuals, companies, and institutions to publish their documents across all digital platforms and is a very effective way for publishers build their audience.

10. Storination

To create in less than a minute a beautiful Storyboard with awesome content curated by you and others.
Storination lets you create online communities called a Nation, where people share social stories on the same topic. After opening your Nation, you organize your Storyboard, a virtual space where anybody can contribute by adding his own Storify story.

Conclusion:

Good content marketing strategy is an essential pillar of Internet marketing success.  The content curation sites featured in  this article are a great way to deliver content to readers and attract new audience for your website or blog.

How do you curate content?

Do you use any of the sites above? We would like to hear from you. Please share your response by leaving a comment below.