Content is king. It’s a prevailing statement we’ve heard as online marketers over an over again. However, it couldn’t be truer. Content dominates as the primary reason your market likes (or dislikes) your brand. It has the power to put you from the bottom of the chain to the top-notch star in the realm of page ranks.
One of the most essential components of content is curation. Many still find it confusing as to what content curation is and how it works. To make it as simple and straightforward, content curation is the process of sifting through myriads of content and presenting the best and most relevant ones in an organized manner. Mind you, content curation doesn’t include creating new content. It means compiling and showing them to the right market.
If you’re having a hard time, then look no further. Below are expert tips for content curation, as shared by some of the industry’s finest.
- Courtney Capellan, Digital Analyst
Courtney finished her B.A. in the University of Washington in international studies, specializing in foreign policy and diplomacy. Her experties include digital media analysis, direct sales and marketing, hotel and restaurant management, creative writing, technical writing, blogging, yoga, teaching and team building. She is currently the digital analyst of Hotel Marketing Works.
Her tip? “If you’re sorting through an enormous amount of old articles, you have to stay focused. Avoid copying and pasting or editing many things at once. Have an outline or a brief written for your new content. Once you find your 3-5 articles that you are going recreate, read through each one thoroughly. Use your judgement and jot down the most important sentences. Plug those into the appropriate part of your outline (intro or body, etc.) and repeat with the next article. Once you have a robust outline, you’re ready to write new content from your curation efforts.”
- Rob Watson, Digital Marketing Consultant
Watson is best known for being the digital marketing consultant at Click To Sale. He’s worked in various marketing projects since 1994 and been heavily involved in digital marketing since 1999. Today, Watson concentrates on inbound and content marketing.
His advise? “Before you delve in to content curation, it’s important to remember why you’re doing it in the first place. In my opinion, you’re doing it to help build trust, rapport, and dialogue. All of these are long-term assets that you have to work hard to earn. One sure-fire way of destroying any of them is a direct sales pitch — that’s just not what social media is for.”
- Brittany Berger, Content Mogul
The young content mogul is the content lead of Mention. Despite her busy schedule, she manages to binge on Netflix to everyone’s envy.
Her personal mantra when it comes to content curaton? “It’s not a replacement for content creation. You can’t just copy and paste things together and press ‘publish.’ If you curate content without a plan for how you’re using it or how it will be presented, then curation holds no value. Instead, plan and organize a curation post just as you would a created piece. For example, take a weekly post roundup. Instead of just copy-and-pasting links and their meta descriptions, choose a different theme each week for what kind of links you’ll include. You can also write the descriptions yourself, including what made you choose to curate that piece of content. Regardless of how you do so, add something to the curation that makes it your own.”
- Brian Carter, Digital Marketing Veteran
Carter has been in the industry for quite some time now. In fact, he’s considered as one of the best. He is a 15-year digital marketing veteran and popular social media speaker, with client rosters including NBC, Microsoft, Dramamine and PrideStaff. He even runs his own company, the Brian Carter Group with world-class expertise using digital/social marketing and advertising for boosting profit.
His top tip for content curation is “I recommend you source content through both Buzzsumo searches and alerts, and then Buffer it (using followerwonk to get ideal tweet times for your audience, but buffering to all your social accounts) combined with Sharedby.co, which gives all your links a top navigational bar with your branding and links, ensuring you stay top of mind even when sending people to other websites.”
- Tracy Mallette, Internet Marketer
A journalist turned marketer, Mallette is he founder of Content Newsroom, a website that aids businesses in gathering new customers through quality web content.
Her curation advise? “Get set up with a blog aggregator like Feedly and populate it with the blogs you want to pull from. This saves a ton of time, because all of the content you want to curate can be found in this one location — and you can categorize the blogs by content type, topic, company, etc.”
