If you’re looking for a competitive edge, a way to establish your authority, a way to get more followers, one of the best, proven paths to online success is content curation. All it takes is finding great content and sharing it with your audience. While it sounds easy, it can be fairly time consuming to find that awesome content that your audience will find interesting and helpful. Searching for content can accidentally take hours if you don’t set up an efficient system.
Successful curation involves Discovering, Reading, and Sharing. Those are the three steps you need to take to constantly have a stream of interesting content on your site. Once you get it down, you can spend just an hour a day to post daily.
Discovering great articles starts with finding great sources. Start making a list of blogs, newsletters, and sites that are relevant to your industry. Bonus points if you subscribe to newsletters sent by other curators – you get an instant list of the best articles of the week or day. Go to Twitter, major publications, small unknown-blogs, whatever interests you.
Keep an open mind as you discover your go-to sites. Do the sites resonate with what you’re trying to find? Check to see how often the site publishes new content, how well the article is formatted, and how well the site is designed. If you like the author, check to see if they are a regular contributor to the site, or if they have their own blog (then add that blog to your list). Creating this master list of great content sources can be time consuming, but once you’ve got it, you’ll be set for a long time.
Once you’ve got 25 source sites, stop. Any more than this, and it’s too difficult to check them frequently, and then you might miss some valuable content.
It’s also a great idea to follow interesting people in your industry on Twitter or other social media sites to stay up-to-date on the latest industry news, and to track what the experts are sharing. One way to find them is with a hashtag search. If you have a particular keyword or two that is central to your brand or area of expertise, look for people sharing content with that keyword. Sort by most followers if you can. What types of content do they share, and what is the most successful? Learn from them and start incorporating their techniques.
Now that you’ve got your sources, start discovering great content! Help yourself and do all of your content discovery at the same time, while your brain is in the hunting mentality. Then, do all your reading at the same time. Try opening all the articles you want to check out in a separate browser window, then go through and skim them in a big batch.
When you read new articles, it’s important to be efficient. Stop reading as soon as you know if it’s a yes or no. Remember, if it doesn’t hold your attention, it won’t hold your reader’s. It’s okay to skim and get the gist of the article before calling judgment. Does it have a great quote? Interesting statistic? Amazing graphic? Is it just an awesome article? Then share it!
Use these tips and you’ll be sharing content in no time. Not only will this help establish you as an expert in your industry, it can help with SEO and put you in the forefront of your customers minds.
