10 Reasons Why Content Curation Matters For Your Business

By now, most business owners understand the importance of putting valuable, relevant content onto the Web. This information helps with search engine rankings, and shows potential clients that you’re an authority in your field. However, this task becomes more difficult when you know you need to say something, but don’t know exactly what.

For many professionals, interacting with clients, focusing on marketing, and other tasks are easy. However, creating fresh written content can pose a real challenge. For this reason, content curation is often the best option for business owners who value marketing materials, but don’t have the time or energy to create this content themselves.

Content curation involves browsing the Web to find useful, interesting, and thought-provoking articles and blogs, and then sharing this information with your audience. If creating your own fresh content each day is simply not an option, content curation allows you to turn your site into a spot where visitors come to find out what they need to know that day.

If content curation is something your business values, here are the 10 easiest ways to do it effectively:

• Choose high quality materials: In order to establish your site as an authority in your field, you’ll need to display only the most relevant and accurate pieces. Though there are probably thousands of articles on topics relating to your industry, select only the most reliable works. When users know that they can trust your site to show them the best materials from that day, they will check back frequently.
• Put yourself in your reader’s shoes: To come up with pieces that will prove relevant to your audience, come up with your own questions and then go find content that helps to provide insight into these inquiries. Chances are that if you’ve got a question, so do other members of your industry.
• Check out Google Insights: This innovative tool allows a user to analyze search patterns from various geographic regions, categories, and time periods. It aims to predict the popularity of search terms, which can prove useful when it comes to keeping your website relevant.
• Stay on top of it: Just because you’re not actually writing the materials yourself, doesn’t mean that you can let the same content sit for three days. The Internet moves quickly, and you’ll need to keep up with this pace. If you’re still linking to a story from a week ago, chances are that your readers have seen that piece plenty of times and have moved on entirely to a different subject. In order to keep your site useful, update frequently and remain on top of breaking news and developing trends.
• Add your own insight: While providing readers with a bunch of important links in one place is certainly useful, this act alone won’t keep internet users returning to your site. You’ll need to contribute your own take on these articles in order to keep your page compelling. Even if you only dash off a few paragraphs that reflect on the piece, readers want to hear analysis and opinions on what they’re seeing. Hence the popularity of online comment sections.
• Keep focused: No matter how interesting or compelling a piece may be, if it doesn’t relate to your field or niche, skip it. Users want to come to your site to read about that industry, and overloading your page with links to non-related material will cause them to skip your site in the future.
• Stay organized: A slew of links and images can quickly become overwhelming; for this reason, organization is key. Using tagging and sorting methods can help a reader make sense of what they’re seeing.
• Think about it: Content curation is easy when you just grab a few links off of Google and throw them on a page. However, great content curation requires careful thought and analysis. Before linking to a blog, think about the article’s relevance and consider the quality of the piece. Well thought out content curation proves much more successful than a random assortment of links and pictures that are haphazardly thrown together.
• Work together with other curators: It’s not wise to simply duplicate what other curators are producing, but you can work together with these people to make your content better. There’s no shame in reposting with someone else has already identified as beneficial.
• Promote: In order to keep your site afloat, you’ll need to get the word out. Talk about it on Facebook and on Twitter, and send the link to friends and family members.

The best content curation is carefully planned out, and benefits the reader by guiding them toward fresh, insightful works.

The team at Grammar Chic specializes in a variety of professional writing and editing services. For more information about how we can help you, visit www.grammarchic.net or call 803-831-7444. We also invite you to follow us on Twitter @GrammarChicInc for the latest in writing and editing tips and to give a “like” to our Facebook page. Text GRAMMARCHIC to 22828 for a special offer.