The What, Why and How of Content Curation for Ranking
The benefits of blogging are abundant. Most importantly, recent changes within search engines make the need for quality content extremely important for any business with a web presence. Blogging allows businesses and organizations to circulate new content on a regular basis and search engines love new content. If your content is original and relevant to your business, search engines will visit and index your content often.
Blogging also provides additional doorways into your website. Each new article or blog you post to your website creates a unique entryway into your site. The more articles you post, the more doorways you offer up to search engines and users. Writing about the many different topics your business addresses provides new and unique information that people online, aka your customers, may be looking for.
Though the benefits of blogging are numerous, the number of businesses with actively updated blogs is few. Webmasters/business owners simply do not like to blog. Many people have a hard time putting original thoughts into a blog post. For those who can’t find the inspiration to write regularly, there is now a solution Content Curation.
What is Content Curation?
Content Curation is the process of discovering, compiling and presenting digital content that relates to a specific topic or idea. Content Curation has been around for quite some time, but most people are probably not aware of its existence.
Some examples include the Drudge Report, considered by some to be one of the Internets founding forums for popular curators of online content. Others include Reddit, which promotes the sharing of use-generated news, along with a variety of sometimes off-topic posts and a relatively new website called Upworthy. These three websites post and link to information shared through other websites as their only means of content. Having literally no original content of their own, websites such as these and thousands of similar sites spread across the Web receive millions of unique visitors daily. Quantcast data shows that the Drudge Report alone receives almost 2 million unique visits every day.
Why should I curate content?
Curated content is an easy way to blog about your business topic without taking the trouble to write an original piece or article. Some examples could be local businesses posting links to things going on in their community or linking to articles written by other experts in their business field. Provide some personal commentary about the article you have linked to and you are curating content.
Popular types of content to curate include: links to other blogs or articles, quotes from other blogs or articles, Internet videos, infographics, tweets and almost any type of content that can be posted online. Add to that some opinion or personal commentary, and viola! an easy and very effective blogging strategy.
Content Curation Examples
Tweets can be embedded in blog posts. To embed a tweet, hover your mouse over a tweet and click the more link from the menu.
Curate Content Like You Mean It!: A Guide to Engaging Content Curation http://t.co/LBLRfdXfGu
Business 2 Community (@B2Community) June 18, 2013
YouTube videos are also an excellent piece of content to curate if the video applies to your topic. Videos are extremely popular and always a great addition to any discussion.
Infographics are also great example of content you can use to relay information to your audiences in a fun and simple way.
Curated content can be an easily manageable blog posting strategy that has countless benefits. Along with creating those doorways we mentioned earlier, blog posts containing well curated content have been found to receive equal or better treatment from search engines than original content.
There are some guidelines to curating content. Most importantly, never post the content of others without attributing the source. Check out this post for the most up-to-date best practices for content curation.
So, now you have it, there is no longer an excuse for not posting regular content to your blog. If you can, monitor a few news feeds regarding your community and industry. Spend a few minutes every other day reading up on current events in those alerts and you can begin to formulate some original thoughts and ideas. Before you know it you will be a content curation expert, successfully posting new content to your websites blog on a regular basis.