Content marketing serves many purposes. It gives you an opportunity to establish a brand, build a reputation, reach your audience, and turn clicks into conversions. Content is a powerful form of digital marketing, but like anything else, there are stumbling blocks that trip up marketers from reaching its full potential. If questions on your content marketing strategies are holding you back, an easy answer might just be within reach: content curation.
Content curation is booming in the world of content marketing, and with good reason. As a solution to gather limitless amounts of high quality content, content curating can serve as a seed of growth in your content strategy. Understand that it is not a fix-all solution to all of your content needs, but it is surely a significant option to give your current campaign a kick.
As a content marketer, here are several content questions that you may find yourself asking; and here’s how content curating can answer those questions.
Question 1: Where Can I Find Topics That Are Specific to My Niche? One of the toughest parts about finding great content in your niche is, well, finding it in the first place. Searching the Internet for hours on end is not an option for most marketers. It is too time consuming, and a lot of times you can come up empty handed.
Content curation can help you find topics in your niche by focusing on your most relevant sources. Sometimes these sources can be social media, blogs, social Q&A sites like Quora, or even your competitors.
It might take a bit of time to find your best content curating sources, but once you do, it’s smooth sailing for the future.
Question 2: How Can I Find The Time To Share Great Content?
There is no doubt that content marketers are busy people. Manual content curation can take up tons of time and yield little results. However, there are ways to streamline your content curating efforts without wasting hours out of your day.
Automated content curation tools like Scoop.it are designed to pull your industry’s best content into one convenient location. Instead of searching for content website-by-website, Scoop.it can do all of the searching for you. Results are displayed within seconds, and you can cherry pick the best content to share with your audience.
Question 3: How Can I Help Fill Up My Editorial Calendar?
Planning your content strategy in advance is best practice, but it doesn’t help if you have nothing to fill it with. Thanks to content curation, you won’t have a shortage of getting the good stuff on your calendar this year.
The key to this is curating content that is evergreen. Evergreen content doesn’t really have an expiration date, so you can schedule it on your editorial calendar without worrying about the content becoming irrelevant.
Question 4: How Can I Find Inspiration For New Content?
Coming up with original content ideas on a regular basis can be a tough gig. In fact, it is recommended that 65 percent of your content originally comes from you. So, with that much pressure to create fresh content, how do you keep great ideas flowing?
Content marketing ideas are everywhere, and that is no exception with content curating. With tools like Scoop.it opening a whole world of content, you can browse through the topics until that light bulb moment goes off in your head. Just remember to never flat out swipe someone’s idea and pass it off on your own; you can be inspired, but be sure to always remain unique.
Question 5: How Do I Know What’s Engaging?
It is a bummer when you think you have a bright idea for a blog post, only to have crickets chirping when you post it to your Facebook feed. Content curation can take the guesswork out of the engagement factor, leading you right into content that clicks with customers.
Content curating leaves clues to what’s engaging from several angles. First, you can browse blog posts to see interaction between the writer and readers. From there, you can follow the social media trail to discover how many likes, shares, or re-tweets the content has drummed up.
Knowing what’s popular ahead of time will ensure that you’re sharing the hottest trending topics in your niche.
Question 6: How Can I Supplement My Own Content?
With 65 percent of your content coming from your own brain, finding something to supplement it with can help give your content strategy a boost. Content curating gives you the opportunity to provide your own insight, which is especially helpful when you are an industry expert. Your strong content stands well enough on its’ own, but it never hurts to add a bit of variety to your strategy.
Question 7: How Can I Improve My Voice?
Giving your brand a strong voice doesn’t always come easy. Believe it or not, blogging and content development is a skill, and most marketers see improvement over time. As you work to mold your brand and voice, curating content can help you absorb the techniques from the best marketers in your industry. These techniques can help you find your own inspiration, while giving your voice its very own spark through your content.
Question 8: How Can I Establish Credibility Through My Content?
As one of the biggest advantages to curating content, establishing credibility is one of the top reasons to implement the technique into your strategy. It is a competitive world out there in content development, and it can be pretty difficult to establish yourself in your niche.
With content curation, you are sharing information from reliable sources, which in turn puts you in a positive light as a source of education. Content curating can also help to establish social proof as your readers like and share your curated content.
If that’s not enough, credibility can also help you perform better on the search engines. Credible websites naturally have a higher page authority, which is one of the signals that Google uses to determine your rank placement.
Question 9: How Can I Stay on Top of Trending Content?
Many marketers simply don’t have the time to spend all day studying up on the top content in their industry. Unfortunately, this is a vital element to a successful content marketing strategy. Luckily for your, content curation is a direct source to discovering content in your industry that is hot and trending.
This is especially easy to come by on social media and blog sites. You can see the engagement levels on comments, re-tweets and shares, which points you right to the content that is hot at the moment.
Question 11: How Can I Build Relationships With My Content?
Content curating allows you to build relationships with two different types of parties: your audience and your competitors. Building relationships through curated content with your audience is a little more straightforward; responding to your audience through comments and social shares is a no-brainer.
Content curation gives you an edge to connect to your competitors in an unexpected way. Curating competitor content shows that you are not afraid to put their content in the limelight. Once you curate your content, be sure to tag them in social posts and link back to the original source. This might give your competitor incentive to curate your content, too.
Question 12: How Can I Improve SEO With My Content?
We already talked about how credibility can help boost domain authority with content curating. However, there are several other benefits that this content curating has with SEO. First, providing fresh content on a regular basis is proven to give your website ranking a boost. Furthermore, quality content attracts inbound links, which is another primary element to ranking higher in the search engines.
As you can see, content curation is not only great for your audience. It gives your website some ranking juice, sending more traffic and readers to your website in the long run.
Question 13: How Can I Give My Audience More Value With Content?
Good quality content in itself is invaluable — it is educational, entertaining, informative, and relevant. However, you can really push the bar of valuable content by curating. Using your sources to find the best available content in your industry adds more value to your strategy, as you can weigh in on your discoveries and provide expert insight. Adding your own perspective to content curation is the real key to value; not to mention, it builds trust with your readers and puts you in the position as a thought leader in your industry.
Developing an effective content marketing strategy can be challenging —
there’s no doubt about it. Content development is about education and discovery; both of which can be satisfied through content curating. Finding the best content for your audience comes down to asking the right questions: What is my audience looking for? What kind of content is relevant? How do I attract my audience and engage?
Content curation doesn’t solve everything, but it’s a step in the right direction to dominating the content marketing game.