It’s not easy for small business owners, brand executives and bloggers to consistently produce high-quality, new content. You must also produce new content regularly if your site is to stay on the top of Google’s search engine results or to attract your target audience.
Imagine if there were a way to keep up content requirements without writing new pieces every time. Content curation is what it turns out to be. Let’s look at 5 ways you can curate content to keep your blog fresh.
First – Why Curate Content
Many marketers and brand managers wonder why they bother curating content when they could create it. You can think of content curation as choosing the exhibits and materials displayed in a museum. The museum curator chooses what the public sees, even if there is more material behind closed doors than the museum can accommodate. This can impact the perception of the audience and drive the conversation.
You might also consider curating content that is high-quality for your brand. For example, curating content:
- You can create and post new content with much less effort than creating brand-new content.
- You can also increase your search engine rankings by clever linking and keyword strategy
- You can build brand authority among your target audience. If you curate the right content, your website visitors will begin to consider you an expert in your field.
To see significant improvements, however, content curation must be done well. Let’s look at five ways to curate content efficiently.
Make a list of “Current Stuff”, and keep it updated regularly
A blog listicle or “list” of current topics, blog posts or other things that you believe your readers would be interested in is one of the best ways to regularly curate content. You can update this “current stuff” list weekly or monthly.
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You can then move that blog post or link back to the top in your content stream. Google won’t likely penalize you as long as the majority of the content in that article is new. You also have the opportunity to encourage people to visit your site frequently to see what new content you have.
You can create a “current stuff list” with posts from your website, posts from partnered blogs or news articles that are related to your niche. You can do it!
Bootstrap new articles with research from existing ones
You can use content curation to create new articles. How?
You can use the research that you have already done on existing articles to create new insights for your customers or target audience. There are two ways to bootstrap articles that you can post on your blog/business site.
Use Your Own Articles
First, you can make your own articles. Let’s say you wrote an article about a significant insight in your industry two weeks ago. Another piece can be written this week, but it will use the same high-authority sources and focus on a different aspect.
Imagine that you write an article on how to communicate effectively with customers in a veterinary practice. You can use the same research points as the previous article to create a new article. However, the article should be centered around how best to communicate with your long-term customers and not new customers.
This will allow you to create a new article and increase your authority within the niche. You’ll spend less time researching and spending less time writing about the new piece.
Use Articles from Elsewhere
You can also use article points and research on other websites, even those that are competitors to your industry. You must be careful with this. To avoid being accused or penalized by Google, you must make every sentence unique.
Taking the insights and points of other blogs and sites in your industry, and reframing them to make them even better, isn’t illegal. This is just about you beating similar companies at your own game.
Create Bite-Sized Posts with Multiple Sources
The attention spans of modern audiences are shrinking. It might be a good idea to use this as a springboard and create bite-sized articles or blog posts rather than long pieces. But don’t compromise on high-authority sources and research to back up your points.
You should create small posts that contain lots of information. Bullet points are a way to quickly summarize the main information and direct your audience to your primary sources. You can easily curate content by gathering relevant research points and data. Then, you can quickly put together a summary of all the data without having to write a lengthy blog post.
Summarize and Streamline Social Networks
Not only are social threads great for driving engagement on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, but they also can be used to curation content.
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Imagine having a great conversation on Twitter with one of your customers. Instead of writing a lengthy blog post about it, you can simply take a few screenshots from the Twitter conversation and summarize the conversation.
The same points that you shared on Twitter can be brought to readers of your blog and linked to your social media profiles. This will allow your social media conversations to bring your brand into the limelight and act as content creation (or curation), which can reduce the time it takes you to write original blog posts.
Create a “Highlights Article” with links to longer pieces
If you have an extensive archive of previously published content that has been successful, you can curate it from your site. You don’t have to rewrite the articles, which can take a lot of time, even if you are using the same sources. Instead you can create a highlighted piece and link all of the old content.
You can, for example, start by writing a summary that introduces the topic to your readers. Next, link to a number of other posts that are related to your current topic. You can also include a summary of each article so that readers will know which older blogs to visit.
This is a great way to create new content via curation. It also drives traffic back to older blog posts that might not be doing well for your site.
Take a bow
There are many ways to curate content efficiently and reap the benefits. For maximum results, combine these efforts. These methods will save you a lot of time, and you’ll still be able to provide as much content for your audience as ever!
The post 5 ways to curate content like a pro & keep your blog fresh appeared first on Scoop.it.
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