5 Ways To Curate Content Like a Pro & Keep Your Blog Fresh

Let’s face it: many bloggers, brand executives, and small business owners find it tough to constantly churn out new, high-quality content for their readers. However, you also have to put out new content consistently if you don’t want your site to slip down Google’s search engine rankings or lose the attention of your target audience.

What if there was another way to keep up with content needs without always writing new pieces? Turns out, there is – content curation. Let’s break down 5 ways to curate content and keep your blog fresh.

First – Why Curate Content?

Many marketers and brand owners wonder why they would bother curating content when they can create it instead. Content curation can be likened to choosing the materials and exhibits displayed in a museum. Even if the museum has much more stuff behind closed doors than it can fit, the museum curator decides what the audience sees. This impacts the audience’s perception and can drive the conversation in one way or another.

There are many reasons why you might consider curating high-quality content for your brand, too. For example, curating content:

• Lets you effectively create or post new or mostly-new content for much less effort than whipping up brand-new pieces
• Can also boost your search engine rankings through clever linking and keyword strategies
• Can build brand authority for your target audience members. Curate the right stuff, and your website visitors will come to think of you as an expert in your niche.

However, you need to practice content curation wisely to see major improvements. Let’s take a look at 5 ways you can curate content effectively.

Create a “Current Stuff” List & Update It Regularly

One of the easiest ways to curate content regularly is to create a “list” or blog listicle of current topics, blog posts, or things you think your readers will be interested in. This “current stuff” list can be updated regularly, such as weekly or monthly.

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Then you can bump that blog post or list back to the top of your content stream. So long as most of the content within that piece is new, Google likely won’t penalize you. And you get the chance to bring people back to your site regularly to check out what new content recommendations you have in store.

You can build a “current stuff” list with posts from your own website, posts from partnered blogs, or news articles related to your industry/niche. It’s up to you! 

Bootstrap New Articles With Research From Existing Ones

However, you can also use content curation smartly and leverage this process to make new-ish articles. How?

You can take the research you’ve already done for existing articles, then use that research to provide new insights to your customers and target audience. You can bootstrap new articles for posting on your blog or business site in two main ways.

Using Your Own Articles

Firstly, you can use your own articles and their research points. Say that you wrote an article two weeks ago about a major insight in your industry. You can write another piece this week using many of the same high authority sources but focusing on a different aspect of the same topic.

For instance, imagine you wrote an article about the best ways to communicate with your customers as a veterinary office. For the new article, you can take the same research points from the old article but revolve the new piece around the best ways to communicate with long-term customers rather than new ones.

In this way, you’ve made a new article, and your blog will gain authority in the niche. But you’ll also do less research and spend less time on the new piece than you would otherwise.

Using Articles From Elsewhere

You can also take article points and research from other sites, including competitors in your industry. Note that you do have to be careful when you do this. For starters, every sentence you write has to be 100% unique to avoid being accused of plagiarism or being penalized by Google.

That said, taking the points or insights from other bloggers and sites in your industry and reframing them to be even better isn’t illegal or immoral. It’s just you staying ahead of the competition by beating other similar companies at their own game.

Draft Bite-Sized Posts With Multiple Sources

Modern audiences’ attention spans are getting shorter, so it might be wise to lean into this and make bite-sized posts or blog articles rather than longer pieces. However, don’t sacrifice high authority sources and research to support your points.

Try to create very small posts with lots of sources. Use bullet points to summarize all the major information and easily direct your audience members to your primary sources. This way, you can curate content by grabbing a bunch of relevant research points and data, then whipping together a basic summary of all that data without spending too much time writing a long blog post. 

Summarize and Streamline Social Threads

Social threads on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great for driving engagement, but they can also serve as a form of content curation.

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Imagine that you had an excellent conversation with one of your customers on Twitter. Instead of writing up a big blog piece about it, simply include a few screenshots of the Twitter thread and summarize the conversation.

You can bring the same points you introduced on Twitter to readers of your blog, then link them to your social media profiles. In this way, your social media conversations can bring your brand more into the spotlight and serve as a form of content creation (or curation, in this case), thus cutting down on how much time you have to spend writing original blog pieces.

Craft a “Highlights” Article With Links to Longer Pieces

Lastly, you can curate content from your own site if you have a huge archive of previous pieces that performed well. Instead of rewriting the articles (which takes a lot of time even if you use the same sources), you can create a highlighted article and link to all of that old content within it.

For instance, you can start with a new summary opening the topic to your readers. Then link a bunch of previous posts related to the current blog topic. Include a summary of each piece, so readers know which older blogs they want to click on.

Not only is this great for creating new content through curation, but it also drives traffic to old blog posts that may not be doing much for your site these days.

Wrap Up

There are lots of ways to curate content effectively and reap the rewards. Try to use each of these efforts together for maximum results. As you master these methods, you’ll save a lot of time and still put out as much content for your readers as before!

The post 5 Ways To Curate Content Like a Pro & Keep Your Blog Fresh appeared first on Scoop.it Blog.