If your business is looking for an edge over the competition, the best way to establish your superiority is by successfully curating interesting and relevant content that your customers find valuable and read-worthy. The more valuable content you share, the more your customer base will grow.
Creating valuable content can be as easy as finding great content and then altering it to fit your specific business needs. Always be sure to give it a personal touch and add your opinions and tips.
The entire content curation process, from start to finish, can be broken down into these three distinct steps.
- Discover: Check your go-to sources for interesting articles, blogs, and news stories. Follow interesting people and always keep up with social media so you never miss a great piece of content.
- Read: Read, or at least skim, everything! Mark the valuable content in favorites or place in a share-worthy folder.
- Share: Tweak relevant content to fit your business needs. Add your opinions, tips, suggestions, and ideas. Share your content with your followers!
Now, as easy as this sounds, many business owners continue to struggle to find great content without searching the internet for hours on end, so how do you find this great content as quickly as possible?
Well, the key is knowing where to look, and how to decipher between the relevant and irrelevant quickly.
Tips on how to discover content, fast
1. Curate from Successful Content Sources:
One of the biggest secrets that curation professionals don't want you to know is that they often curate from curators. They also subscribe to newsletters, browse social media, and read articles and blog posts in hopes of finding an idea on a topic they want to write about. They look for stories that have been popular and up-voted by customers, essentially "crowd-sourced curation."
2. Have a Set list of go-to content sources
Aim for an average of about 20 great content sources. From newsletters, websites, articles, blogs, people, and social media, but any more than 20 probably means every source isn't phenomenal. There may be more than 20 great sites out there, but remember that your ultimate goal with discovering content is finding the best, original stuff — so beware of sites also curating from curators.
Once you find a website that is repeatedly producing great content, bookmark it! Reference it often, and see what they are posting about most often, what is popular, and what is interesting to you!
3. Give new content sources a probationary period
As you discover more promising publications and sources, add them to your repertoire, but on a probationary basis. It takes at least two whole weeks before you can determine for certain that a source is unwaveringly producing useful content. A single relevant article could be a fluke, so be sure it deserves its spot on the list before you officially make it a place that you invest your time in every single day.
Likewise, it’s also beneficial to be quick to cut any sites that aren’t quite passing muster for you lately. Your time is valuable, and being a great curator means being smart about where you look and how long you look there.
The majority of any content curation strategy is in the discovery stage. It is the most important, most difficult, and also the most time-consuming step of the curation process, so it is okay if it takes a little bit longer than you think it should be taking to discover valuable and relevant content. You want to take a little extra time and find the stories that your competition missed.
Guard your go-to sources like the family jewels they are, and never feel guilty about spending a few extra minutes diving deeper into the depths of an obscure website in hopes that a juicy new story might be hiding there.
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