I’m not the creative type, and find it hard to come up with new content for my blog. I turned to content curation to help me set up some form of regular posting schedule. Along the way, I found that there is more to curation than just gathering content.
Content curation is a very inspiring practice for me, bringing me in contact with great writers and insightful ideas every day. Being exposed to a stream of articles and posts in the niche’s that you are following lets you start to see the topic from so many different points of view. It becomes a great educational experience, not only broadening your understanding of a topic, but sparking innovative ideas for your own business, products or blogging.
Building Authority
Many articles on curation highlight that content curation on your blog or website can help you become an authority for your clients or community. But its not the fact that you have a bunch of articles about a topic that provides that authority. It is the act of curation, of reading through many, many articles on the topic and learning from those points of view and ideas that you begin to gather authority. It is the curator that gains authority.
You, as a curator, can then demonstrate that authority through your choice of content to display and the insights and ‘story’ you provide to your community. It is your own passion and curiosity for the topic, your exploration of it in detail, and your creation of a narrative about it that makes for good content curation. You can establish with your clients and prospects that you are deeply interested in the field, or just have a passion that is reflected in your business.
Some Examples to Motivate your Curation
To tap into your passion and curiosity, you may find that you need to take an approach that is not just about your business or product.
- Maybe a Real Estate agent doesn’t curate the latest local market news like everyone else. Tapping into your interest in home remodeling trends, or the newest landscaping ideas may spark your curiosity and make it easier for you to build that authority.
- A Financial Planner may curate topics on tactical asset allocation strategies in some of the new ETF’s instead of the usual market news. Maybe throw in some articles on biking experiences and routes. It wouldn’t hurt to be known as the ‘biking guy’ to your clients and prospects.
- A marketing firm’s founder may curate unique approaches to branding a small business rather than the latest social media trends.
- A single issue site where you curate content about an issue or trend that you are passionate about. You might link to this site from your business blog giving your community another view of your interests and why you may deserve their trust in your business.
In fact, a single issue site, where you curate articles and ideas on a specific topic that interests you personally, are becoming a new wave of curation for many people. Sites like Pinterest and Scoop.it are full of individuals finding content and sharing it with their friends and connections. This can not only be an inspiration to your own personal life. You will find that these sites can be an asset to your business presence, rounding out your clients view of you as an authority on many topics.
How can you keep up your motivation?
In curating content, you really need to read through 10, 50 maybe 100 articles a day to find new and interesting content. How many of you have a job description that says you will spend hours per day reading on the web? One of the biggest hurdles to keeping up your motivation is the sheer volume of information that is constantly growing on the web. Yet at the same time, this ever growing volume is what makes content curation even more important. That is where some automation can help.
I like to look at automation as a personal assistant to help you read through the huge flow of articles on the internet. Just like you wouldn’t want to go without a spam filter for your email, you can use some help in weeding out the many off topic articles that come through your network of alerts, blogs, twitter and news feeds. For your WordPress blog, a plugin such as MyCurator uses an AI based feed reader to find new and interesting content.
With the help of automation, you can increase your scope of content sources and find new and interesting insights that you would never have time to find on your own. Expanding your curation horizons lets you tap into the thrill of finding a great writer, or a challenging insight, that increases your interest. It helps build your own motivation and increases the innovation and insight you bring to curation, building your thought leadership.