Guide to Curating Content for Marketing

Curated content is extremely useful in that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time with the most amazing and unique content. You can quickly and easily find great content and put your own personal opinion on it by adding more value to the topic. After all, valuable content is 1 of the 5 keys for website success.

Typically it begins with searching the internet using online tools for trends or industry related topics, sorting through them and finding the best ones, and then adding to it, putting it in your own words, and sharing it within your industry.

So what’s the point in curating content that is already out there and been talked about? There are a few reasons really:

• Get more traffic to your website because search engines love fresh content and you are providing good information in your niche.

• Is less time consuming than creating infographics, whiteboard videos, widgets, etc. but can still be resourceful in your industry and be shared and talked about.

• You become an authority in your industry or niche. When you sort through content in your industry to curate, you are finding content that has audience engagement so you know it is of interest to them.

• If you become the trusted authority in your niche, that is when you will start to notice more traffic, better rankings, inbound marketing and more brand awareness.

Using Alerts and Feeds to Find Content to Curate

You can use internet alert tools like Google alerts, Mentions, RSS feed apps like Feedly or your favorite RSS feed application to compile content from your industry. Then you find the most talked about topics that are trending, and write a unique article with your own spin that adds value to the topic.

Google Alerts

It is very simple to setup and easy to use. Just input your search query, choose if you want content from everywhere, or just video or news sites, blogs, or forums. You can also set the language, region, how often to get the alerts and how many results to get.

If you want to filter it the best and plan to check it every week you can set it up to do daily or weekly alerts, or even as they happen if you wish. Once you have these settings, you will notice a sampling of results to the right.

If there is irrelevant information you can change your search query to not include those terms by adding a “-“ to your query to exclude any word you wish just like you would a normal Google search.

Don’t have a g-mail work account? Either setup a free one and check it once a week or setup a filter to forward alerts to a folder in your work e-mail.

Mention

Similar to Google alerts, Mention is pretty simple to setup but you are limited to the amount of keyword mentions to keep track of with the free plan. What it does do differently is also alerts you of mentions on social, and sometimes it tends to send alerts for something that Google alerts missed.

The paid plans are great for working together with your team or agency, for a place to see all of your mentions, as well as your client’s and competitor’s. The app is available for both PC and Mac, and includes an in-app browser to see the pages where you got mentioned and can easily join the conversation.

Fresh Web Explorer

Probably the most advanced resourceful and useful alert monitoring system out there. Chances are if you are in marketing you have heard of Moz and subscribe to use their pro tools.

Fresh Web Explorer allows you to use more advanced search operators, such as getting alerts when specific pages get links, or root domains get mentioned, among many other advanced operators.

Rand Fishkin of Moz put together a great whiteboard video comparing these alert monitoring tools among others, as well as giving some great tips on using them.

RSS Feeds

With the demise of Google Reader it gave room for other alternatives to step up into the RSS reader spotlight. Probably the most common amongst content marketers would be Feedly because it integrates with a lot of other online tools that most marketers use like Pocket and Buffer. It also has a mobile app for on the go use available for iPhones and Androids, and you can easily e-mail yourself content you want to curate or share out content quite easily.

Sometime it’s not trending or being shared a ton, but you know the topic is great and maybe the original article didn’t touch on a few main points so you can curate their content, add to it and make it better. When it’s a popular topic and other people are talking about it and linking to it, chances are you will get some shares and mentions as well.

On a side note, engage and share industry influencer’s content so that when you have content of your own to share there is a better chance they will return the favor. This will extend your audience’s reach as those that follow that niche influencer may also be interested in the content you have to provide. Also, always be sure to attribute where you got your content from to give them credit for your curated content.

Curated content will take up most of your content marketing strategy and blog because it is less time intensive as well as more cost effective because of it. Using online tools like following RSS feeds in your industries and keeping an eye on trending alerts that you can easily curate and create content for.