Over this past week or so I have been asked on three separate occasions about content curation. Here’s an example of the kind of questions I have been asked:
Furthermore, here’s a question I received from JT on Facebook (July 2015):
“I think the content curation sort of scares me not because I’m afraid to share others stuff and points of view, in fact I rather like that, I’m just not sure of the proper way to curate and use it on my own blog. Can you point me in a direction to show me the proper way so I’m not getting nailed for duplicate content or someone thinking I’m plagiarizing, though I know to always, always credit the original content! Thanks again.”
I have written about content curation before and I’ve included links throughout this article. However, what I haven’t gone into detail about before is specific examples of content curation to help you create your own ideas for your content curation strategy.
It wasn’t until I started answering these questions that I realised that content curation has been, and still is, a significant part of our content strategy and we have curated a lot of content over this past year or so.
In short, the process of content curation is simply searching and sifting through existing content (blogs, news, videos, podcasts, images, infographics, etc) to find information that is relevant to your audience and to your niche.
The metaphor of a Museum Curator is how I like to explain what content curation is.
A Museum Curator is tasked with deciding what art to display, when to display it and what exhibitions to feature in the museum. They have to think hard about what their audience would like to see and what will bring people to the museum so they can increase traffic and sell tickets.
The art that’s on display has been created by an artist and the museum is simply displaying it in their building. They didn’t create any of it, they selected it to showcase it to their audience.
The same is true with your content curation for your business. You don’t have to create all the content you share with your audience. If you think just like a Museum Curator, you can cherry pick the best and most relevant content that already exists and display it on your platform for your audience to see.
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Most of us are not looking to be the next Buzzfeed, The Poke, or The Huffington Post. These websites and blogs are well known for curating content where their main (only) goal is to drive huge amounts of traffic to their websites.
In my opinion content curation is about delivering relevant and great quality content to your audience. Through curating you are either making relevant content easily accessible, making it convenient by making it easy to consume, or you are signposting people to content that they will get value from.
It’s therefore important to think about what your motives and objectives are for curating content, and your content curation strategy should align with the same motives as your wider content marketing strategy.
This article is not about driving huge amounts of traffic to your websites and blogs using the tactics that the bigger players use.
This is about curating relevant content that your audience will find useful, helpful and valuable.
There are several reasons and benefits for why you may want to add content curation to your wider content marketing strategy.
Here are a few:
Content curation is a completely valid and valuable content marketing technique, and I’d like to get you started on thinking about how you can use curation as part of your wider content strategy.
Here are 10 ideas to help you out:
Most people will not take the time to watch a longer video. However, you know that there are valuable lessons for your audience in this video. What you can do is pull out the best parts of the video and put the content into a bite-sized format to make it more convenient for your audience.
Click here for a specific example of how we pulled out the 6 main lessons from a 90 minute video presentation from Marcus Sheridan.
In every industry there are thought leaders who create and publish fantastic content. Although your audience may be aware of these people, they may not have the time to consume all of their best content.
You can be useful and helpful to your audience by gathering up the best stuff and making it easy to consume.
Click here for a specific example where we cherry picked the best business networking lessons from Stefan Thomas’ blog
Each week we send our our ‘Content Marketing Companion’ email newsletter, and the content is 90-95% curated. Typically we take single topic, do our research, and then send out 5-8 of the best sources on that topic from the Internet.
Obviously, we aren’t out to pretend that someone else’s content is ours. Done correctly you can take a blog, video, infographic, podcast, etc and draft it into your article followed by your thoughts or comments.
Just don’t forget to credit the original source and link back to the original content.
Click here for a specific example of how we took the Chemistry of Content Marketing and followed up with 4 reasons why we thought it was a really helpful piece of content.
You can take a series of videos from Youtube, put them into a single blog article and follow up with your comments on them.
We’ve done this a few times to help draw out the lessons in the content and place the series of videos into an accessible location.
The idea here is similar to that of idea two, where you take someone else’s content and draw out the best parts.
Click here for an example where we took 10 lessons from Marcus Sheridan’s eBook. In this case we wanted to tell people that Marcus has a great eBook, but also get across our main lessons from reading it.
We occasionally include quotes from discussions and comments that we have had in our Facebook Community. Click here for an example where we took what people have said and placed them in an article to help get a point across.
You could take this one step further and gather information from people and create a chunky piece of content. For example, a good friend of mine is currently compiling an eBook that has 50 contributors on a single topic.
Here are some other examples:
This example is from Nick Loper and how he compiled 500+ online resources from Entrepreneur on Fire podcast episodes. Click here for the full story.
“I set out to compile a blog post of the online resources named in each episode, partially out of curiosity, and partially because I knew the resulting list would be nothing short of epic”
This must have taken some amount of time and dedication to pull together, but it turned into a great resource for entrepreneurs.
Click here to grab a copy of the book from Amazon UK.
Colin Gray, our podcast ‘Sensei’ has created curated ‘Podpacks’ on his website, which have been put together to help people like you and I access relevant podcast on specific topic.
Click here for an example of how Colin has curated podcast episodes from different sources on a single topic.
Collecting data and doing research can take up a lot of time, however there are a lot of other organisations that collect data that we can take advantage of.
Click here for an example of where we took multiple sources and collated specific data and findings into a helpful infographic. You will notice that we didn’t just leave it at that, but we also added more value with comments, discussion and suggested applications and tools.
One of the main reasons that people curate content is to save time, but I have to be honest and say that pulling together curated content still takes time, especially if you want to create an original piece of content.
Another side benefit of content curation is, especially if you are curating content from thought leaders, is that you can get on people’s radar quite quickly by mentioning them in your articles, linking to their content, and then tagging them in your social media posts.
In summary, content curation is a perfectly valid strategy for creating more relevant content for your audience, and from all your research you will learn a lot in the process too.
I hope that these ideas and examples have given you some inspiration and motivation to get stuck into curating content for your audience.
Let us know by joining the conversation in the comments section below
Don’t forget to be awesome!
Chris
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Whilst I was pulling this together I had a quick look to see what other articles were available on this topic. Here’s some of the best ones I found:
Featured Image Source – http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/12/how-to-curate-content/
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