Optimize content for your marketing goals

Content curation: There is a proportional relationship between the number of articles published on the website and the number of visits, the more content you publish, the more visits you will get. But the problem lies in the long time it takes to write a single article. On the other hand, we find a wealth of content published every day,

It is estimated that every month 70 million articles are published on the Internet. Then it would be a mistake to ignore all this content and try to invent the wheel and create content from scratch. So, content curation appeared.

What is Content curation?

Content curation is the process of searching, aggregating, selecting, and presenting the best content on the Internet on a given topic. Unlike content marketing, content curation does not involve creating your own content. Instead, it is based on researching content created by others that you believe your target audience will appreciate and respond to.

Like all other types of marketing, content systems add value to your brand and strengthen your relationship with your customers. The content curator is not required to create original content, but rather to mine the best online content related to a particular topic or field and pass that content to readers in a seamless manner.

The difference between content curation and content creation

Content curation is different from the content industry. As content creation is based on designing your own original content, which may be written content, videos, publications, infographics, or others. Content curation is based on researching and mining relevant content from other sources and brands rather than developing it yourself.

Advantages and Difficulties of Content Creation

The benefits of content creation are creating the value of your brand by creating brand-specific content that differentiates it from others. and make it possible to express and explain your products by explaining how your products and services work and your competitive advantage. It also helps you build a good reputation among the audience as creating your own content allows you to build your reputation as a trusted leader in your field.

Content creation also contributes to bringing traffic to your website. If the content you publish is unique, people will come to your site to follow your content and share it with others, which will widen your audience and increase the customer conversion rate, because if visitors like your content, they are more likely to buy from you and transact With you.

As for the difficulties of creating content, it is concentrated in a long time that it takes to create it, as creating high-quality content requires a lot of time and effort – especially if your marketing team is small. This necessarily comes down to the cost factor. If you are lucky, find good writers with good style, sound, and attractive language, and are able to plan and promote your content on social networks, they are likely to cost you a lot of money.

The advantages and difficulties of content curation

On the other hand, the advantages of content curation lie in saving time, as content curation takes less time than creating it from scratch. It also contributes to developing relationships in that it allows you to share content with another person, which is an opportunity to strengthen the relationship between you and that person. This will benefit your project, especially if that person is influential. Content curation also becomes a great way to get your voice heard. When you share someone else’s content, the author will thank you, or retweet your post.

The downside to content curation is that you lose a portion of your traffic because when you share a link to someone else’s site, you’re sending traffic to the other site. And you should pay attention to the reliability of the sources you quote, otherwise, you may damage your reputation if you rely on unreliable and lack credibility, and eventually, your audience will desert you.

Here, it is necessary to pay attention to intellectual property rights, as content regulation itself does not violate property rights, but some may misuse it, copy entire and long sections of other people’s content and attribute them to themselves, and this is plagiarism, which is an unethical act, and it can also lead to accountability. Legal. As you can see, there are advantages and difficulties associated with creating or organizing content. Perhaps the best solution is to combine them into your content marketing strategy.

85% of marketers use content curation technology for two reasons: They can create new content in less time than usual. It also allows the production of different types of content and its reformulation according to different formats and media. In order to carry out the content curation process efficiently and effectively, it must be thought of as part of the content marketing strategy, starting with planning and selecting topics, then searching for sources, and ending with professional publishing management.

1. Content curation layout

You need to plan for organizing the content from the start. Do not write randomly, plan everything in advance. Make a list of ideas and topics on which you want to organize your content. This will give you an overall picture of the content you’re writing, and help you plan for content marketing.

The first step in the planning process is to find the topics on which you want to organize your content. After selecting the appropriate topics, it may be useful to use a scheduling tool. Like CoSchedule, which enables you to schedule deployments.

It is important to define at this stage the goals you want from the content systems, do you want to reach a certain number of traffic? Or do you want to have a certain number of mail subscriptions and interactions on Facebook? Whatever goals you seek to achieve should be clear and measurable.

2. Focus on customer needs

Before researching the topics where you want to organize content, you must first understand the needs and expectations of your customers, the problems they face, whether in their lives or in their business, or those related to the products and goods you sell to them. You have to ask yourself questions like these: What are they looking for? What do they share on social networks?

Are they looking for comparisons and ratings, or are they looking for the latest industry trends? Are they looking for fun, inspiration, or knowledge? Remember that your sponsored content is there for your customers and audience, so it should be around them, not you. Don’t just write about topics you like, your customers should feel that your blog is theirs.

3. Choose important, high-quality content

Do not organize your content from inferior or even ordinary content, you should look for the best content on the net. Here are some questions to ask to determine if the content you’ve found is appropriate: Is this content well-written? Is it suitable for my audience? Does it meet their needs or curiosity? Was it recently updated or is it out of date?

Does it fit the content I posted earlier? Will my brand benefit? Is there enough data in this content to support further analysis and discussion? Do I trust the information in the source of this content? Do I have anything to add to this content? The more conditions are met, the better the content.

4. Diversify your content sources

The web is full of excellent content, a movie you might want to limit yourself and your audience to one genre or source. Make sure to organize your content from a mix of different sources and types of content, such as e-books, blog posts, social posts, infographics, videos, images, and infographics. This will make your curated content informative and attractive.

5. Find the best and deepest content

The Internet is big and wide, and there are many hidden treasures that unfortunately people do not see, either because it is in an unfamiliar language, or because the content owner is not good at marketing his content. It is a golden opportunity to use your content systems, by searching for this type of hidden and premium content and using it in your content systems. Certainly, this content will add a lot of value to your readers. But how do you find hidden content that people don’t see?

• Search a lot on search pages

Google (and other search engines) ranks search results according to several factors, and in many cases, the first results are good, excellent, and relevant to the topic you’re looking for. But this does not mean that they are the best, it means that the owners of these topics are good at SEO. As I said before, the network is very large and contains a lot of hidden treasures, and unfortunately, not all of them appear on the first page of search results on search engines, try to dig deeper into the search pages, visit the second and third page, where you may find a special topic with a special perspective.

• Search in other languages

If you write in English, but if you understand other languages, such as French, German, or Spanish, this is a good advantage. Search websites and blogs written in this language, and you may find content worth curating your content from.

• RSS

RSS technology allows you to follow the latest news and publications of specific sites without having to visit each site separately. Instead of visiting all your favourite blogs and sites one by one, RSS technology makes it easier for you to browse all those blogs and sites from one place by subscribing to an RSS feed like feedly and the Google Chrome RSS Feed Reader extension.

• Do not limit your search to specialized sites

It is true that specialized sites offer the best and latest content, but sometimes you may find excellent topics in public forums, or in personal forums and sites. And if you like the posts of a site or someone, subscribe to their newsletter mailing list. Because you may forget to watch it in the future.

6. Add your touch

Organizing content isn’t just about compiling and pasting other people’s content, you should add your own touch to it and make it stand out from the content you’re inspired by. You can do this by adding a brief introduction in your own style. You should create the content in your own style, not rely on copy and pasting. It’s also important to put the content in a context that works for your audience and make them understand why you think the content you’re giving them is useful.

You can also make a number of simple additions that will have a huge impact on the content, including changing the title so that it is attractive and distinctive and using different images to add your perspective. And add a call to action or a link to a related post on your site. Don’t forget that the content must represent your brand.

7. Don’t forget to create your own content

Organizing content does not replace creating your own content. Despite all the advantages of content systems, you should create your own content that reflects your vision, mission, and goals, and addresses the specific problems your customers face. Remember to focus your content around your customers and audience, customers can get bored with non-stop self-promoting brands. This is why successful brands think beyond beautifying the image of their products and services. You have to offer them something useful and interesting so that they will follow you back.

8. Recycle content

Content recycling allows you to reuse old content, view other people’s content in a different way, and enables you to reach a new audience. There are several possibilities to transform the look and layout of the content: for example: converting a lesson written on your blog into a video and posting it on your site or on YouTube and social networks, this will gain you a new audience. Some people prefer video lessons over written ones, and this will also contribute to your brand’s popularity, because they will be published on additional channels, and visual content gets 44% more engagement.

Another way to reuse or recycle is to turn your post into a tutorial, graph, or PowerPoint slide. You can use a specific post or content to craft a number of tweets or posts and publish them on social networks. You can use your existing content credit to create interactive content such as quizzes and questions. This will make people interact with your brand for longer, and it can also be shared on social networks.

9. Take advantage of the self-employed

Organizing content requires a lot of searching and sifting, filtering out good content from bad content. If you have a large blog, or your company publishes a lot of content on many channels, you will need someone to help you organize the content.

It’s not easy to find someone with beautiful language and marketing, and the ability to research and reformulate the right content in line with your vision and goals. Fortunately, you are no longer restricted to your geographical area and now you can hire the best professional writers and content creators by searching the internet for them.

Content curation tools

It is true that organizing content takes less time than creating content in general, but it remains a cumbersome and effortless process. Fortunately, there are many tools that can automate many aspects of the content planning process, including but not limited to:

• Buzzsumo: This tool helps you to find the most popular online content in a specific field, in the past hours or days, for example, you can follow what big influencers are posting in a specific field.

• Twitter Lists: Use Twitter Lists to share and reply to followers on Twitter. No matter how many followers you have on this platform, this tool will help you categorize and organize them so that you can interact with them in a personalized way.

• Pocket:: This tool allows you to save videos and articles from any page or app and from any device. This tool is excellent. We often find content we like, and we like to create or organize our own on it. Instead of saving the addresses of those pages in a text file, this tool takes care of that for you, putting all the stuff you picked up from the network in one place.

• Hootsuite: This tool enables you to manage all your social channels from one platform. Instead of logging into each app individually and navigating between them and participating in them from multiple windows. You can use Hootsuite to do all of this with a single system.

• Feedly: This tool is an RSS feed to keep track of the latest sites and blogs you are interested in. You can sort and categorize them by topic, save them to read later, and even share them directly on your social accounts.

• Scoop it: With Scoop.it, you can harvest content from multiple sources and publish it to your social accounts, blog, website, or newsletter.

• Curata: Curata’s strength lies in its ability to recommend to users and help them discover content that best suits their audiences. This tool allows you to configure, configure, assign and categorize content sources for review, then distribute and publish them, all from one central platform.

• Zest: is a Chrome extension for marketers, and it allows them to share and find content in a specific field and in several formats, such as videos, articles, and charts, and its advantage is that it works directly from the popular Chrome browser.

Content curation etiquette

Some people confuse content systems with content theft. Undoubtedly, the difference is huge. The content systems process does not in any way involve stealing or stealing the contents of others. It is a strong inspiration from others, but the wording is yours. Therefore, this literature should be strictly adhered to while formatting content:

• Attributing the content to its owner, placing links to source articles.
• Do not violate copyrights.
• Don’t rely too heavily on one or two sources, the more sources you have, the better.
• Avoid copying and pasting, if you like a paragraph in the original content, paraphrase it, and do not paste it as it is, this may be considered plagiarism, which is unethical, and may harm your site’s ranking on search engine results pages.

I hope you have benefited from this guide, and gained enough knowledge of this technology to apply and incorporate it into your content strategy, if you have any feedback or comments, we are happy to share them with us in the comments.