5 Ways You Can Use Content Curation to Write Killer Blog Posts
By LitExtension
Putting together a blog and publishing content routinely can be challenging. Authoring content from scratch on a regular basis sounds exhausting. Moreover, it needs to perform well to keep the inbound traffic flowing.
How do you keep on providing your readership with a variety of blog posts that are fresh? This is where content curation comes in. It proves to be an efficient way to reduce the time taken to come up with multiple pieces regularly.
What does content curation mean and how does it help you?
The raw definition of content curation would be to collect relevant information around a particular topic or niche.
For marketers, its definition is more than that. It is a medium through which the eminence of a brand can be strengthened. It involves researching the topic that pertains to your brand and then turning the collected information into something valuable for the public.
The episodic writer’s block is something that every author goes through and curating content helps with finding inspiration: the biggest hindrance in creating original pieces.
By focusing on high-quality sources and drawing inspiration from existing articles can help you come up with larger amounts of data for your blog and enable you to increase the frequency of posts per month.
What are the ways to use content curation?
Now that we’ve comprehended how content curation can prove to be highly efficient to produce fresh content, we need to understand that just collecting content and throwing it to your audience doesn’t cut it. This could result in a negative impact on your blog’s SEO and cause plagiarism disputes.
There are 5 guidelines you need to follow to curate content for your blog.
1. Planning and researching topics
If you’re trying to build your brand then sticking to your niche/industry is a good rule of thumb. Consistency is key to building an audience that finds your blog to be a reliable source of information. Going by the same logic, this is how you can find topics- by exploring reliable sources in your industry.
One quick method to monitor your industry is by creating feeds and adding dependable sources to aggregate content from. Cronycle has nifty pre-curated topics that have top thought leaders/influencers and content shared by them. This can be a quick way to come across new sources to either curate content from or explore their content to see what their sources are.
Using your competitors as sources to curate content is another good way to get an idea of what type of content they are sharing and what’s performing well. Ahrefs shows organic search terms and metrics for competitors which helps track them and outrank them.
2. Selecting sources to aggregate content
First and foremost, a strong source needs to be reliable and recognizable to your readership. A source that has a large following is more likely to boost your traffic as well.
You’ll want your sources to be credible and factual. Checking a website’s Domain Authority (DA) on Moz helps to distinguish the credible ones from the not-so-well-known ones. The higher the DA, the better it is, after all, they wouldn’t be ranking high if they produce poor quality content.
Relevance to your brand and your target audience is one of the most important things that you want to consider to qualify a website as a source to aggregate content from. Preferably, you would want it to be functioning in the same industry as yours and targeting topics in your niche. It’s hard to reel in an audience that doesn’t provide them value, so you need to provide them with subjects that are custom-made and targeted towards them.
3. Enriching curated content
The content you just curated should be considered as raw data for you to act on. This is where a bit of creativity comes in, people always love to hear unique perspectives that haven’t been fully unearthed yet.
You need to add value to the raw data you collected by including your personal conclusions and analysis, something that makes your blog unique and makes people want to come back to you. Unfortunately, there are no cutting corners here because plagiarism won’t earn you any respect.
You’ll also want to optimize your content for SEO to give you a better chance at ranking higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Identifying a few relevant keywords using SEMrush and including them in your content regularly usually helps with rankings.
Google’s ranking algorithms ultimately work towards one thing- providing value to the user. So, you don’t want to include spammy links and overstuffing keywords. The best way to go about this is by looking at your content through the eyes of a user and ensuring proper readability and accessibility to other links that might be helpful to them.
4. Publishing and sharing content with your audience
There’s no shortage of channels to promote your content and you need to take advantage of every channel that aligns with your brand.
- Social media
- Newsletters
- RSS feeds
- Emails
- Medium
Social media is a solid option for self-promotion especially when you don’t have a huge budget. It is the easiest way to engage with your audience and initiate a conversational thread with them. Acknowledge what the people have to say about your piece of content and this also becomes a valuable source of feedback for you to act on for your future pieces.
There are popular options like newsletters and RSS feeds that you should definitely experiment with. This serves two purposes- creating your presence as a brand on popular channels and providing accessibility for your audience to reach your content.
5. Analyze the performance of your content
This is the final piece of the puzzle and the numbers reveal everything. The analysis involves figuring out what got you the most clicks and how you got those clicks, then capitalizing on the how and why.
You can head over to your Google Analytics account to see what type of content performed well and what didn’t. This gives you an insight into what you need to do next to pull in more traffic. The engagement that each channel gets is an indicator of what works best for you and which channels you can prioritize your energy towards.
It’s really easy to track new and returning visitors on each channel, and the session duration metric is a good indicator to identify the posts that are performing well. Usually, the bounce rates for blogs are on the higher side, so the articles which have lower bounce rates are worth noticing.
Conclusion
Content curation is not an exact science but following these steps does get the formula right which might seem easy on paper, but it can take some time to master.
It involves thorough research of your industry and figuring out what the people want to read about. Qualifying credible sources and carefully selecting the pieces of data that you want to use can be tricky but rewarding.
Raw data can be found anywhere on the internet but turning that information into something unique is what leaves people wanting for more, something that belongs to you and can’t be found anywhere else.
Content curation is the key to efficiently taking your blog to the next level, both quantitative and qualitative. You should give it a try and see for yourself how efficient it proves to be.
