Curating Content to Fill Your Content Marketing Needs

Content marketing is here to stay because it works. It helps people get to know you, positions you as an expert and helps people choose to do business with you.

Good content marketing is meant to help, not sell. People don’t want to be sold. The sale becomes a natural outcome of you being helpful and providing value to your prospects and customers.

It’s a cost-effective marketing strategy that any business can and should implement.

The key…

Create and publish content that is interesting, engaging, and fun while providing value. And do that on a consistent basis.

I can hear you sighing in exasperation right now, because you realize it is difficult and time consuming to churn out fresh, new content regularly.

Guess what?

You don’t need to write original content all of the time. (Was that a sigh of relief I just heard?)

The solution is content curation.

What I’m talking about here is selecting and sharing other people’s content that is relevant to your audience. Content curation features handpicked content, often introduced with a snippet of copy from the curator.

An effective content marketing strategy can and should include content from other sources. The content should still relate to your business and be helpful to your prospects and customers.

When executed correctly, content curation creates big value.

A few benefits…

• Sharing other people’s viewpoints, opinions and knowledge provides a broader perspective and invites conversation and interaction.
• You continue to learn and keep up on trends by seeking out industry/business related content to share.
• People will appreciate that you’re passing on helpful information, both the shared content and your opinion and insights about it.
• You don’t always have to come up with original ideas and write your own content.

How to do it…

• This isn’t copying and pasting someone else’s work and calling it your own. You need to give attribution to your source.
• A key component of curating is adding your voice, your commentary. Tell people why you are sharing this information. What is it? What did you find helpful about it? Why did you like it?
• If you have a newsletter or blog you can write a short introduction to the content you are sharing and then add links to the content itself. Maybe you have a theme for the post or newsletter and you add links to three or four different content pieces all related to your theme.
• You can also include curated content in the body of your newsletter or blog, but again, make sure you cite the source by prominently linking back to the original article in your curated piece. Retitle all of your curated posts and annotate curated pieces with your own insights or opinions. This ensures that search engines pick up the piece as a separate source of information and that you’re not just taking and reposting content from third-party sources. Annotating also provides new and diverse opinions for readers, increasing its value.
• Use a variety of content types such as infographics, images, videos, articles, e-books, guides, and podcasts. Many people immediately think of articles or written content when it comes to curation. Don’t limit your sharing. Take advantage of highly valuable content that comes in an array of forms. Curating different types of content makes it more interesting for your readers.

So as you surf the web bookmark and save any interesting content you come across that you may want to annotate and share later. This way you have some ideas to get you started when you need them.

Speaking of sharing let me know if you found this information helpful.

And if you’d like to share this article feel free, just give me attribution please. 🙂