Curating content is a popular, powerful strategy for improving your content marketing.
When you think of curating content, it’s no surprise if some of the most successful sites on the web come to mind. In its heyday, for example, Upworthy was perhaps the biggest and most trafficked site around almost solely dedicated to curation, racking up millions of monthly hits.
What is curation?
Well, the term curation comes from the world of museums. In theory, the curator is the person responsible for selecting certain artifacts, organizing them in a certain way, and thus creating an experience where everything relates to a particular theme.
Online curators do much the same thing, but without the archaeology degree.
When you curate online, you look for the best content for your audience. You gather that content from reliable and relatable sources all over the internet, then bring it together under one roof.
The end result: Your audience gets to see some of the best stuff around related to their specific interests. They don’t have to search for it. And they get a dose of your unique perspective with it.
With the advent of web 2.0, curating content has become a vibrant, fast-growing way to relate to people in any niche. There’s a space for curating content in any B2C or B2B vertical you name.
But, why should you choose content creation when you could handcraft amazing content?
What’s the allure – and what does it all mean for your brand?
Let’s take a closer look.
Content curation sites have the opportunity to spring up quickly and resonate widely within their market niche. As people see your site here, there, and everywhere, they start to gain awareness of your brand and what it can do for them – even before they actively seek it out on purpose.
Your brand is one of hundreds in an ongoing conversation between companies and people in your space. With curation, your audience will see the scope of your expertise and your site will send trust signals of depth, activity, and editorial maturity that decision-makers rely on.
Curating means that each member of your team will reach beyond his or her specific interest in your industry. By going further afield, you’ll learn more than you would have otherwise. Those insights contribute to developing a unique perspective you can easily interest others in.
Compared to building each piece of content individually, curating content is ultra-fast. Even a short post of 400 words could be appropriate when you’re commenting on a breaking story in your industry. Of course, you can continue to devise long-form content in parallel, too.
Since you can post content 2x-3x faster using curation, your social media accounts and email lists will always have something new to share. If it suits your goals, you can deploy a more aggressive strategy where subscribers get a digest of new content weekly or even daily. Wow!
Curating content means the sheer number of pages on your site will increase quickly, helping it establish authority faster as more people share your content and link back to it. As long as you follow on-page SEO best practices, you’ll find your organic reach growing.
With content creation, you can see at a glance what type of content strikes a chord with your audience. By keeping track of what they share and engage with, you can feed your original content platform with ready-made ideas. You can even optimize list segmentation this way.
When it comes to making B2B buying decisions, many leaders look to their own peers for advice first. Then, they consider industry experts. Vendors come dead last! With curation, you have the chance to add new streams of content from these voices, making your brand more trustworthy.
Once you start curating, something magical happens: Pretty soon, others in your industry start to value a place at your table. You can find yourself fielding requests for guest posts and more. That can help you monetize your following and solidify your thought leadership credentials.
Curating content makes a stellar plank in an overall content strategy. You can even develop a secondary content creation site as an adjunct to your main brand platform. This gives you a free hand to be more experimental and creative, especially in conservative industries.
There’s a wide world of awesome content beyond what you make yourself, so get curating!