Creating and publishing high-quality content is indeed a challenging task. No matter how hard you try, you can’t always be the best in your niche. You’ll always find awesome content in your niche that you can’t resist sharing, quoting, or even linking to.
Content curation is one such content marketing technique that you can use to bring more value to the table. Curated content provides you with unlimited opportunities to share quality content with your audience at potentially no cost. As much as 57% of marketers believe that content curation is the best way to produce content continuously.
Why marketers are in love with curated content, let’s find out…
What is Curated Content?
Curated content is the content created by others that you share with your audience – of course with a citation (backlink). A more detailed definition comes from CMI that defines content curation as a technique to assemble, select, categorize, comment, and present the highest quality content to meet your audience’s needs.
It isn’t just limited to republishing a piece of content on your blog with a backlink rather you have to add your comments or review to it. Slashdot is a perfect example news website for coders and nerds. It curates content by sharing useful stories on technology and the editors add their comments and views with each story:
When you are curating a story, you can choose to leave your comments but it isn’t necessary. A good practice is to tell your readers why you are sharing a piece of content with them so as to develop their interest.
In most cases, content curation doesn’t involve republishing a complete article on your blog (that’s content syndication, read about it here). Curation involves picking content from several sources and then assembling it and sharing it with your audience.
Here is a better example of how curated content works:
HubSpot found the best quotes on creativity, compiled them, and created a blog post for its readers. This is how curated content works. You don’t have to find all these 45 quotes separately, you are just getting them in a single blog post.
That’s what content curation is all about. You have to do the hard work to find, select, categorize, and present content on a given topic and share it with your audience so they don’t have to do it manually.
Content Curation Benefits
Curated content offers a lot of benefits that make it a must-have content creation and marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes. The five key benefits of content curation are:
- You get new content that keeps your content calendar full
- Content creation cost reduction
- Cover trending topics quickly to stay ahead of your competitors
- Build connections with influencers
- Become a thought leader.
1. More Content at Low or No Cost
Content creation is one of the most challenging content marketing tasks that 84% of businesses outsource. It takes an average of 4 hours to write a blog post, curated content saves you from outsourcing and spending time on creating content from scratch.
Yes, it keeps your content calendar full.
Curated content provides you with more content that is already out there. It also helps you create different content formats in varied voices. A study found that 35% of marketers curate content because it provides them with a variety of content formats in different voices.
The best part: It is free content. You don’t have to pay a penny for curated content.
It is extremely valuable content at no cost, what’s better?
2. Cover Trending Topics
Your audience expects that you provide them valuable content on trending topics in your niche. This is where curated content can help you cover trending topics quickly.
Here is an example of how to curate trending content that your followers will love interacting with:
It is obvious that you can’t cover all the trending topics yourself. You must find and share valuable content on trending topics with your audience with your input (or a comment) about the story.
3. Grow Your Network
This is a built-in feature of content curation. You build connections with influencers and thought leaders in your industry when you share their content with your audience.
For example, when you curate content and link to it from a blog post, simply send an email to the author and thank him/her for the awesome piece. You don’t have to ask something in return (such as a backlink) rather focus on building connections.
Even if you don’t send a formal email, influencers will get to know you anyway as they’ll get a link from your website and of course, your curation will create buzz.
It eventually pays off in the form of building connections with authority blogs, influencers, and thought leaders when you continuously curate content.
4. Become a Thought Leader
Yes, curating content that is worth reading and sharing makes you an authority and a thought leader. Your audience will expect that you share the best content from around the web with your comments and reviews about the story, and that’s what makes you a thought leader.
Ask yourself: Why do you use the Google search engine? Why do you value it so much despite the fact that you know the search results it shows you don’t belong to Google? You know that the content isn’t created by Google but you still consider Google an authority.
Why?
Because it has proven itself to be the best search engine overtime with its powerful crawlers, indexation, and ranking factors. You are sure that it will show you the best content based on your search query.
This is what exactly happens when you curate the best content, add your views, and share it with your audience. You’ll become a thought leader.
Conclusion
Content curation should be a part of your content marketing strategy. It is a good idea to publish 1-2 curated content pieces per month so that you can enjoy the amazing benefits of curated content.
You must accept that you aren’t the only and the best authority in your niche (even if you are). There is always room for betterment and others might come up with better content than yours. And your target audience will find it (sooner or later). It is best to share it with your audience with your comments so that your audience sticks with you for your holistic approach to knowledge-sharing and appreciation.
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