You want your blog’s content to be the first choice in a Google SERP, or search engine results page. If you can’t be first you would at least like to be one of the top five because this is what drives people to your site and allows your blog to grow. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to post fresh and original content. It is always best to use your personal knowledge on a specific niche as a leader in your given field, but once you have shared all your knowledge it may begin to feel as though the well has run dry. This is where content curation can help keep you posting and in the running for those top spots. Here we explain how content curation can put you at the top:
What is Content Curation?
Curating content means finding content in other places that is related to your blog, your niche, or any particular topic that is relevant to your site. It is what some refer to as a mash-up a combination of information gathered together to produce a completely new and fresh explanation of information.
It might sound easy to be a content curator, but the truth is you have to be very careful when it comes to giving credit to this content, and you have to make sure that you’re choosing the best articles out there. After all, not only are you benefiting by getting great content on your site, but the site where the content was originally published will also benefit through increased exposure.
How You Can Become a Great Content Curator
Although being a curator isn’t easy, there are a few tips and tricks you can follow to help make the process go a bit smoother. Below are three “must-haves” of content curation:
- Key Words – As a curator, you act as an artist or storyteller taking the facts, timelines, opinions, and ideas and putting them together to tell the story from a new point of view. As you are searching for ideas on the internet, you are also getting a sense of what keywords to use in order to make it as easy as possible for others to find your publication. Keep in mind what the keywords were that took you to the information you were searching for and how you can use new combinations of those keywords.
- Links – Another valuable tool while curating is to include links to your sources of information, which will then notify the original author of your post. This sharing of information and giving credit where credit is due not only gives your new piece a sense of validity—it’s networking. Networking with other writers directs them to your posts. They may also post something to Facebook or tweet about you or your work. They may even use your work in the future just as you have used theirs.
- Appeal to the Masses – Don’t forget that like any great storyteller, you need to think of content curation as an art form. While you are telling the story of facts and messages you have gathered your main goal is to appeal to the masses. You need to be able to combine opposing viewpoints and tell your new story in such a way that it benefits your company while bringing readers to your site. Keep in mind what is popular and already mainstream. Also, keep in mind what continues to come up repeatedly while you are searching for information.
You can think of this job as being the same as one of the great assistants whom the top CEO or President could not live without. They gather the most relevant facts and present them as the need-to-know information the president could not live without, or in your case, the readers.
This is a valuable tool in this day and age of time limitations. Speaking of time, in no time at all you should be on your way to being a content curator who has readers flocking to your site, sharing your information, and putting you at the top of the search engine queries.
