What is content curation?
Content curation is the process of sifting through all the various sources of content on the web to compile a list of the most informative or interesting pieces to then share with your target audience.
How to do content curation right
Obviously, you’ll need to determine the topics to share with your fans. Then locate the articles for those topics. There’s tools for this. You’ll see some shortly.
To decide on which posts to share, consider…
Content marketing vs. content curation
Content curation is not to be confused with content marketing; content curation is the process of sharing content from other sources rather than creating and promoting your own content.
For example, a social media marketer might curate the best content, or trending content, from other blogs in her industry and then share those articles from her own company’s Twitter account during the day.
Here are a few more ways that marketers can use content curation tools:
Buzzsumo
As a former content and social media marketer, Buzzsumo was a go-to resource of mine to find the most shareable content that resonated with the largest audience. While not your typical content curation tool, Buzzsumo allows you to type in any keyword or domain, and then provides an ordered list of the top shared content around that topic.
For example, when I type in the keyword “self-driving cars” the first article I see is from TechCrunch and has 62K social shares.
Buzzsumo also allows you to sort by date range, content type (guest post, infographics, videos, etc.), set alerts, view backlinks, follow certain authors, and more. Since these articles are being widely shared already, it is a good bet that they are going to resonate with your target audience.
Pocket
Did you know that the average person spends 10 hours a day in front of a screen, according to a study done by Nielsen Company? A large chunk of that time is likely spent browsing the web or scrolling through your social media feeds.
During that screen time you’ll likely come across several relevant articles aligned with your content curation needs. Perhaps you bookmark these or make a mental note to go back to them, but they end up falling off of your radar. Pocket is the perfect tool to prevent this from happening.
Pocket is an app as well as an extension you can add to your browser that will then save articles to read or link to later in one organized location. Pocket allows you to easily tag articles to group relevant topics or themes together. It also includes robust search functionality to easily locate articles in your Pocket account.
Feedly
If you were a fan of Google Reader, Feedly is a great alternative, since it serves as an RSS feed to curate content around specific keywords, topics, domains, etc. You can easily organize content into boards and flag content to read later. Feedly definitely takes the strain out of curating content manually.
While the free edition has support for up to 100 feeds, organization capabilities and the ability to share to various social platforms, the Pro (roughly $5/month) and Team ($18/month) packages offer unlimited feeds, a higher level of support, as well as more robust integrations. Try it for free, and then find the plan that best suits your content curation needs.
Curata
Curata falls into the enterprise category of content curation tools for businesses with more sophisticated curation needs. The power of Curata lies behind the INSPIRE discover and recommendation engine that powers it to find truly customized and quality content to suit your specific needs, based off of the profile that you customize.
The only downfall of Curata is that it is not super wallet-friendly. There is no free version, and the lower plans start as high as $499/month, but hey – if you’ve got the budget and you’re looking for a very robust solution, then it may be the way to go for your complex curating needs. (You can use it for other tasks, like content management and reporting, too.)
Quora
If you’re looking for content that answers niche questions around specific industry-related topics, Quora is the perfect solution. Quora is all about finding the answers to your specific questions with accuracy and efficiency. As their website reads, “Quora has content you will feel good about having read.”
Quora also works as a keyword research tool and is a great place to find question-based keywords to answer with your content.
Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a powerful content creation tool that is also extremely pleasant to use. Scoop.it runs by crawling more than 35 million web pages every day and then organizing content into the most relevant topics. The tool makes it easy to filter, edit, and share out relevant content.
“With an interface that will remind you of Pinterest, Scoop.it aims to make finding relevant, shareable articles simple,” says Mike Templeman at Forbes.
PublishThis
From free to $399 a month
Similar to Curata, PublishThis is an enterprise solution that prides itself on the powerful engine that runs it. PublishThis claims that the content it provides is so powerful that it can lead to 250% more revenue, 5X time savings, 3X the social reach, and 200% more clicks. Sounds pretty good to me!
PublishThis is a one-stop content shop that will automatically curate high-quality, engaging content for you, as well as serve as a platform to organize and share this content to your audience. PublishThis also has powerful API’s to help you share the content to various platforms and applications. The pricing of PublishThis is not made public, but you can request a demo on their website.
These powerful tools are the perfect way to save you time, curate higher-quality content, increase audience engagement, and improve your content sharing efforts with minimal effort on your end. As you can see there are plenty of wonderful options to choose from.
Instapaper
See something you like on the web, that you might want to share later on?
Instapaper is waiting for you.
Sign up for a free account, create a folder (e.g. ‘posts to share’), and a bookmarklet, too.
For any article in view from your browser, click the bookmarklet in your browser bar. Instapaper will save the page in that folder. In seconds.
Do this all week long. Again, come Monday, yet another source of articles for you to share.
Flipboard
Flipboard is a mobile and desktop app that allows you to create mini-magazines with links to your favorite news stories, blog posts, or websites. After you create these magazines, you can set them to public so other users can follow your content or even share them on other social media networks.
If you're interested in showing that you're in-the-know of news and hot trends related to your industry, you can create a Flipboard account and start creating magazines that your fans might like with news links from other publications they also might enjoy. You can also place your own blog posts or links into a Flipboard magazine so users reading the stories there can also learn about your business.
Flipboard is free and easy to use. All you need to do is download the app, create an account, and tap "Create Magazine" to create your first piece of curated content. You can also look through the magazines of other users and share their stories in your own mini "publication with a quick tap.
Here's a quick demo that walks you through how to use the app:
Elink.io
Curating content for your email newsletter, website, or social media can be a time-consuming process. Collecting content from various websites and sharing them in a way that is presentable and context is key to successful content curation. elink.io is one tool that takes the pain out of content curation with ease and will save your hours.
This nifty tool allows anyone to save links on the go and turn them into beautiful shareable content. You can convert your links into a web page, embed it on a blog/website or send them off as a beautifully curated newsletter. They have a whopping 30+ responsive templates that are easily interchangeable. With over 80,000 users worldwide, elink is one of the best tools when it comes to fast and beautiful content curation.
Twitter Lists
Twitter can be a streaming mess if you don't organize the accounts you follow. That's where Twitter lists come in handy -- curated groups of Twitter users that you can categorize and follow separately from the rest of your feed. Here's one that I created, which I continually manage and update. Even better, if you create a Pocket account, you can easily save articles from Twitter directly into your account.
Click here to learn how to start your first Twitter list.
Newsletters
Newsletters serve as a fantastic daily reminder to get your content curation done. For example, I follow HubSpot on Twitter, but don’t always get a chance to see its tweets when I’m busy. Fortunately, HubSpot also offers an email subscription. That way, if I don’t catch something notable on social media, I’m likely to catch it on email.
Whatever industry you’re in, stay on the lookout for newsletter subscriptions. And if a good one doesn’t exist in your industry, that’s the perfect opportunity to create one. But before you start your own newsletter, learn from what other outlets are doing. Here are a few that are doing a great job in original content curation:
Quuu is a free software that integrates with most major social media scheduling tools, including HubSpot. The tool analyzes your social posts, platforms, and channels and recommends only content for you to share either in your integrated scheduler's dashboard or on your account on its website.
You can also set Quuu to auto-pilot and have it automatically schedule out Tweets or social posts with recommended content.
Here's a quick video that shows you how to integrate Quuu with your social scheduling tools:
UpContent
Pricing information not available | Demo available by request
With UpContent, which also integrates with HubSpot's marketing tools, you can set up an account and create a dashboard where you'll regularly see recommendations of content you can share from trusted resources. With the dashboard, you can select and interesting piece of content and then click on a dropdown list to mark whether you want to share it on a blog, social site, or other platform.
Scribble Live
Pricing information not available | Demo available by request
Scribbe Live, formerly known as Trapit, may have once been designed purely for content creation, but now, its capabilities have expanded into employee advocacy -- tools that help employees "follow best practices" on social media, as well as helping internal leaders become established thought leaders -- and social selling.
Of course, the content element still remains. Some of the major pillars of Scribble's platform include the ability to discover, organize, personalize, and distribute content. That's where the social selling comes in -- it helps users prospect, network, and build relationships by sharing the information that's going to be most relevant to their targeted audiences.
1. Curate other people’s research
Example: The Ideal Length of Everything Online
Including your own commentary, provide a roundup in the form of an infographic.
Actionable tips:
2. Spotlight the best images in your niche
Example: World’s Coolest Offices from Inc. curated via Huffington Post
Selected by: Jennifer Ristic of Point To Point
World’s Coolest Offices is a great example of how to curate images and make them your own. Use vibrant and engaging photos to draw in readers. In this case, the images are put together so that readers must keep clicking.
Of further value from a curation point of view is that this article was curated on Huffington Post where it gave full credit for the piece and linked to the original.
In Ristic’s words, “The Huffington Post has mastered the art of content curation as an integral part of providing newsworthy and appealing content at an incredibly fast rate every day. While Huffington Post’s editorial staff generates a large volume of unique content, it curates existing content aligned to human-interest topics.”
Actionable tips:
Example: Simon Dumenco’s Six More Media and Marketing Buzzwords That Must Die from Ad Age
Selected by: Kim Adams, Vitamix
Dumenco curates commentary from a previous column of his that received a ton of social shares and comments. He drives new traffic to his older column by referencing and linking to it. He utilizes user-generated content and gives credit where credit is due. It’s an easy-to-read, shareable piece of great content.
Actionable tips:
Example: How 10 Winning Salespeople Spend 15 Minutes Before a Sales Call on the Salesforce blog
Selected by: Jennifer Tribe, Auvik Networks Inc.
This is a classic list post that collects input from 10 sales influencers. It’s great content that makes the readers feel like they’re getting the inside scoop from a bunch of pros.
The words “winning salespeople” in the headline add a juicy appeal to the target readership while giving these influencers extra incentive to share the post with their followers.
This is an example of original curated content. Further, apart from the brief introduction and conclusion, this post is 100% contributor written.
Actionable tips:
Example: You may not realize how important trucking is to our daily lives
Selected by: Alison Turner, Ryder System Inc.
This example should be in every content marketing playbook. Heck – it’s on BuzzFeed. It shows how to connect a boring business, namely trucking and transportation, to the average reader.
In Turner’s words, BuzzFeed tells how the trucking and transportation industry impacts the average person’s life in many ways every single day in a digestible, easy-to-understand format. While transportation may not be sexy, it’s a component to nearly every other industry.
Actionable tips:
Example: 20 Amazing Examples of Brand Content Marketing Hubs from B2B Marketing Insider
Selected by: Erin Winker, Aetna
B2B Insider Michael Brenner encouraged members of his audience to share their favorite brand content marketing hubs. It’s a useful example of content curation. You don’t have to do all of the work yourself. The objective is to extend your relationship with your target audience.
Actionable tip:
Example: Unverified Voracity Says Let’s Win Football on MGoBlog
Selected by: T.J. Basalla, HP
MGoBlog, one of the most successful and funniest college football blogs, posts a regular feature called Unverified Voracity. Curated content makes for a useful way to build your thought leadership in a specific niche.
Like any good piece of curated content, Unverified Voracity is more than just a collection of links on college football. MGoBlog proprietor Brian Cook adds strong doses of his unique humor and commentary.
Actionable tip:
Example: 5 Amazing Things I Learned at #CMWorld That You Can Use in Your Content Marketing Efforts on The Connecticut Innovations Blog
Selected by: Brandon Gearing, Connecticut Innovations
This curated roundup should be a staple of every conference producer and attendee. It’s a great way to show your love for the people who presented.
Where possible, get a photo of the presenter or some special commentary that everyone else isn’t already sharing on Twitter.
Actionable tip:
Keyword Tools: Generating Content Ideas
Answer the Public
Except the “seeker” is animated. It’s weird. Don’t get distracted. As with any other keyword tool, you just plug in a topic and go. It’s a UK-based tool, but you can select a different country from the dropdown:
Here’s the cool part – the results come back in visual form. First, you’ll see a “wheel” of question keywords related to your topic. I entered “AdWords,” and here’s what I got:
They’re organized into questions that begin with where, which, who, what, when, why, how, and are. I love answering question keywords with content; it’s a really effective way to demonstrate expertise and generate leads, and they can drive a ton of organic traffic (especially if you manage to rank in the featured snippet box, AKA position zero). We’ve already targeted a bunch of these keywords, but I also see a lot of questions that we haven’t tackled yet:
Answer the Public also returns a visualization of keyword phrases containing prepositions, like for, with, without, and versus:
Some keyword ideas I got from this visual include:
FAQ Fox
Speaking of question keywords! FAQ Fox specializes in them. This isn’t quite like any other keyword tool I’ve seen. It scrapes Q&A sites like Reddit and Quora to find questions related to your topic of choice.
If you click the “marketing” category, the tool will automatically search relevant marketing subreddits as well as a few popular marketing forums like Wicked Fire and Warrior Forum.
You can also enter your own sites. I searched for “adwords” on Reddit and Quora.com and got a great list of questions:
The questions are linked to the actual threads so you can go check out the full question as well as any answers it already has.
These questions tend to be much more specific and complex than the kinds of terms that people enter into Google, so if you decide to use one in your content marketing, you’ll probably have to use another keyword tool to find a phrase with search volume that you can map to the question. For example, if I wanted to create content to answer the question “Why are branded keywords costing me more in AdWords?” I could go into Keyword Planner to see that my best bet for this topic is the keyword “branded keywords”:
KWFinder
When figuring out which keywords to target, it’s always a good idea to take competition into consideration. This will help you prioritize your keyword research – you don’t want to go for the super-competitive keywords first, but you also don’t want to only go after keywords that have very low volume, and that aren’t going to have great return even if you do rank on them.
KWFinder is a cool free keyword tool that shows you search volume, average CPC and both PPC and SEO competition. As with the above tools, I entered “adwords,” then clicked on the magnifying glass icon next to “adwords training.” This gives me a ton of data:
Higher scores are more competitive, so you can see that while “adwords training” is a highly competitive term in paid search (with a score of 91 and an average CPC over $12), the organic competition is pretty low (26). On the right-hand side of the screen you can see a snapshot of the search volume for this keyword over time, as well as some data on the pages that are currently ranking on the Google SERP for this keyword search.
Content curation is the process of sifting through all the various sources of content on the web to compile a list of the most informative or interesting pieces to then share with your target audience.
How to do content curation right
Obviously, you’ll need to determine the topics to share with your fans. Then locate the articles for those topics. There’s tools for this. You’ll see some shortly.
To decide on which posts to share, consider…
- Who should I share this with?
- Why would this help them?
- Is this a trustworthy source?
- Is it unique and worthy of sharing?
- Will it make the reader grin, snicker or blush?
Content marketing vs. content curation
Content curation is not to be confused with content marketing; content curation is the process of sharing content from other sources rather than creating and promoting your own content.
For example, a social media marketer might curate the best content, or trending content, from other blogs in her industry and then share those articles from her own company’s Twitter account during the day.
Here are a few more ways that marketers can use content curation tools:
- Find the most shared and talked about stories in your industry to get ideas to blog about
- Find top sources to link to in the content you’re writing
- Get inspired by top-performing headlines
Buzzsumo
As a former content and social media marketer, Buzzsumo was a go-to resource of mine to find the most shareable content that resonated with the largest audience. While not your typical content curation tool, Buzzsumo allows you to type in any keyword or domain, and then provides an ordered list of the top shared content around that topic.
For example, when I type in the keyword “self-driving cars” the first article I see is from TechCrunch and has 62K social shares.
Buzzsumo also allows you to sort by date range, content type (guest post, infographics, videos, etc.), set alerts, view backlinks, follow certain authors, and more. Since these articles are being widely shared already, it is a good bet that they are going to resonate with your target audience.
Did you know that the average person spends 10 hours a day in front of a screen, according to a study done by Nielsen Company? A large chunk of that time is likely spent browsing the web or scrolling through your social media feeds.
During that screen time you’ll likely come across several relevant articles aligned with your content curation needs. Perhaps you bookmark these or make a mental note to go back to them, but they end up falling off of your radar. Pocket is the perfect tool to prevent this from happening.
Pocket is an app as well as an extension you can add to your browser that will then save articles to read or link to later in one organized location. Pocket allows you to easily tag articles to group relevant topics or themes together. It also includes robust search functionality to easily locate articles in your Pocket account.
Feedly
If you were a fan of Google Reader, Feedly is a great alternative, since it serves as an RSS feed to curate content around specific keywords, topics, domains, etc. You can easily organize content into boards and flag content to read later. Feedly definitely takes the strain out of curating content manually.
While the free edition has support for up to 100 feeds, organization capabilities and the ability to share to various social platforms, the Pro (roughly $5/month) and Team ($18/month) packages offer unlimited feeds, a higher level of support, as well as more robust integrations. Try it for free, and then find the plan that best suits your content curation needs.
Curata
Curata falls into the enterprise category of content curation tools for businesses with more sophisticated curation needs. The power of Curata lies behind the INSPIRE discover and recommendation engine that powers it to find truly customized and quality content to suit your specific needs, based off of the profile that you customize.
The only downfall of Curata is that it is not super wallet-friendly. There is no free version, and the lower plans start as high as $499/month, but hey – if you’ve got the budget and you’re looking for a very robust solution, then it may be the way to go for your complex curating needs. (You can use it for other tasks, like content management and reporting, too.)
Quora
If you’re looking for content that answers niche questions around specific industry-related topics, Quora is the perfect solution. Quora is all about finding the answers to your specific questions with accuracy and efficiency. As their website reads, “Quora has content you will feel good about having read.”
Quora also works as a keyword research tool and is a great place to find question-based keywords to answer with your content.
Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a powerful content creation tool that is also extremely pleasant to use. Scoop.it runs by crawling more than 35 million web pages every day and then organizing content into the most relevant topics. The tool makes it easy to filter, edit, and share out relevant content.
“With an interface that will remind you of Pinterest, Scoop.it aims to make finding relevant, shareable articles simple,” says Mike Templeman at Forbes.
PublishThis
From free to $399 a month
Similar to Curata, PublishThis is an enterprise solution that prides itself on the powerful engine that runs it. PublishThis claims that the content it provides is so powerful that it can lead to 250% more revenue, 5X time savings, 3X the social reach, and 200% more clicks. Sounds pretty good to me!
PublishThis is a one-stop content shop that will automatically curate high-quality, engaging content for you, as well as serve as a platform to organize and share this content to your audience. PublishThis also has powerful API’s to help you share the content to various platforms and applications. The pricing of PublishThis is not made public, but you can request a demo on their website.
These powerful tools are the perfect way to save you time, curate higher-quality content, increase audience engagement, and improve your content sharing efforts with minimal effort on your end. As you can see there are plenty of wonderful options to choose from.
Instapaper
See something you like on the web, that you might want to share later on?
Instapaper is waiting for you.
Sign up for a free account, create a folder (e.g. ‘posts to share’), and a bookmarklet, too.
For any article in view from your browser, click the bookmarklet in your browser bar. Instapaper will save the page in that folder. In seconds.
Do this all week long. Again, come Monday, yet another source of articles for you to share.
Flipboard is a mobile and desktop app that allows you to create mini-magazines with links to your favorite news stories, blog posts, or websites. After you create these magazines, you can set them to public so other users can follow your content or even share them on other social media networks.
If you're interested in showing that you're in-the-know of news and hot trends related to your industry, you can create a Flipboard account and start creating magazines that your fans might like with news links from other publications they also might enjoy. You can also place your own blog posts or links into a Flipboard magazine so users reading the stories there can also learn about your business.
Flipboard is free and easy to use. All you need to do is download the app, create an account, and tap "Create Magazine" to create your first piece of curated content. You can also look through the magazines of other users and share their stories in your own mini "publication with a quick tap.
Here's a quick demo that walks you through how to use the app:
Elink.io
Curating content for your email newsletter, website, or social media can be a time-consuming process. Collecting content from various websites and sharing them in a way that is presentable and context is key to successful content curation. elink.io is one tool that takes the pain out of content curation with ease and will save your hours.
This nifty tool allows anyone to save links on the go and turn them into beautiful shareable content. You can convert your links into a web page, embed it on a blog/website or send them off as a beautifully curated newsletter. They have a whopping 30+ responsive templates that are easily interchangeable. With over 80,000 users worldwide, elink is one of the best tools when it comes to fast and beautiful content curation.
Twitter Lists
Twitter can be a streaming mess if you don't organize the accounts you follow. That's where Twitter lists come in handy -- curated groups of Twitter users that you can categorize and follow separately from the rest of your feed. Here's one that I created, which I continually manage and update. Even better, if you create a Pocket account, you can easily save articles from Twitter directly into your account.
Click here to learn how to start your first Twitter list.
Newsletters
Newsletters serve as a fantastic daily reminder to get your content curation done. For example, I follow HubSpot on Twitter, but don’t always get a chance to see its tweets when I’m busy. Fortunately, HubSpot also offers an email subscription. That way, if I don’t catch something notable on social media, I’m likely to catch it on email.
Whatever industry you’re in, stay on the lookout for newsletter subscriptions. And if a good one doesn’t exist in your industry, that’s the perfect opportunity to create one. But before you start your own newsletter, learn from what other outlets are doing. Here are a few that are doing a great job in original content curation:
- Redef: Jason Hirschhorn, one of the pioneers in social media and formerly the co-president of MySpace, has launched a site curating the best in media, sports, fashion, music and technology. Subscribe to one of Reder’s newsletters for a taste of one of the best in content curation.
- Quartz Daily Brief: Quartz has figured out how to make a text-heavy newsletter a stalwart in the news business with its Daily Brief. The beauty of the newsletter, because it’s text-based, is the cross-platform functionality. Without heavy images, the Daily Brief loads quickly on phones, tablets, and desktops, making it easy to read on any device.
- Internet Brunch: Digital agency Big Spaceship created Internet Brunch to help folks "find the best news, GIFs, and trends from across the Internet." From holidays, to current events, to celebrity birthdays, this roundup is sure to cover the important stuff that helps readers stay in the loop.
Quuu is a free software that integrates with most major social media scheduling tools, including HubSpot. The tool analyzes your social posts, platforms, and channels and recommends only content for you to share either in your integrated scheduler's dashboard or on your account on its website.
You can also set Quuu to auto-pilot and have it automatically schedule out Tweets or social posts with recommended content.
Here's a quick video that shows you how to integrate Quuu with your social scheduling tools:
UpContent
Pricing information not available | Demo available by request
With UpContent, which also integrates with HubSpot's marketing tools, you can set up an account and create a dashboard where you'll regularly see recommendations of content you can share from trusted resources. With the dashboard, you can select and interesting piece of content and then click on a dropdown list to mark whether you want to share it on a blog, social site, or other platform.
Scribble Live
Pricing information not available | Demo available by request
Scribbe Live, formerly known as Trapit, may have once been designed purely for content creation, but now, its capabilities have expanded into employee advocacy -- tools that help employees "follow best practices" on social media, as well as helping internal leaders become established thought leaders -- and social selling.
Of course, the content element still remains. Some of the major pillars of Scribble's platform include the ability to discover, organize, personalize, and distribute content. That's where the social selling comes in -- it helps users prospect, network, and build relationships by sharing the information that's going to be most relevant to their targeted audiences.
1. Curate other people’s research
Example: The Ideal Length of Everything Online
Including your own commentary, provide a roundup in the form of an infographic.
Actionable tips:
- Collect relevant research on a key topic for your readers. Become the go-to expert by sharing other people’s research.
- Add your own commentary. Don’t just leave the information dangling for your audience to understand.
- Augment curated content with useful visuals. Lee added an infographic to attract more attention. Consider the array of vehicles you can use such as photographs, videos, and presentations.
2. Spotlight the best images in your niche
Example: World’s Coolest Offices from Inc. curated via Huffington Post
Selected by: Jennifer Ristic of Point To Point
World’s Coolest Offices is a great example of how to curate images and make them your own. Use vibrant and engaging photos to draw in readers. In this case, the images are put together so that readers must keep clicking.
Of further value from a curation point of view is that this article was curated on Huffington Post where it gave full credit for the piece and linked to the original.
In Ristic’s words, “The Huffington Post has mastered the art of content curation as an integral part of providing newsworthy and appealing content at an incredibly fast rate every day. While Huffington Post’s editorial staff generates a large volume of unique content, it curates existing content aligned to human-interest topics.”
Actionable tips:
- Leverage the power of images. Draw in your audience with images to encourage further engagement.
- Add a curation section to your ongoing content. Think like a publisher and choose some of the best stuff on the web for your readers.
Example: Simon Dumenco’s Six More Media and Marketing Buzzwords That Must Die from Ad Age
Selected by: Kim Adams, Vitamix
Dumenco curates commentary from a previous column of his that received a ton of social shares and comments. He drives new traffic to his older column by referencing and linking to it. He utilizes user-generated content and gives credit where credit is due. It’s an easy-to-read, shareable piece of great content.
Actionable tips:
- Mine your highly shared and commented posts, talks, and other social media activity for high-quality information in which your target audience is interested.
- Cross-link to older content. Don’t forget to go back and link to the new column in the original post. This helps your search optimization and keeps your content fresh.
Example: How 10 Winning Salespeople Spend 15 Minutes Before a Sales Call on the Salesforce blog
Selected by: Jennifer Tribe, Auvik Networks Inc.
This is a classic list post that collects input from 10 sales influencers. It’s great content that makes the readers feel like they’re getting the inside scoop from a bunch of pros.
The words “winning salespeople” in the headline add a juicy appeal to the target readership while giving these influencers extra incentive to share the post with their followers.
This is an example of original curated content. Further, apart from the brief introduction and conclusion, this post is 100% contributor written.
Actionable tips:
- Get the influencers in your niche to help you create curated content. Take a page from Lee Odden’s Epic Curated Content playbook. Set up a theme and ask influencers.
- Sweat writing an amazing title. Titles count. Make sure your curated content pulls in readers.
Example: You may not realize how important trucking is to our daily lives
Selected by: Alison Turner, Ryder System Inc.
This example should be in every content marketing playbook. Heck – it’s on BuzzFeed. It shows how to connect a boring business, namely trucking and transportation, to the average reader.
In Turner’s words, BuzzFeed tells how the trucking and transportation industry impacts the average person’s life in many ways every single day in a digestible, easy-to-understand format. While transportation may not be sexy, it’s a component to nearly every other industry.
Actionable tips:
- Draw product connections for readers. Don’t assume that your readers have your wealth of knowledge. Make connections simple and obvious.
- Get your readers to have fun. Not everyone is a stand-up comic. Take a page from BuzzFeed and find amusing GIFs that connect to your products and company. It even uses Tim Gunn from Project Runway.
Example: 20 Amazing Examples of Brand Content Marketing Hubs from B2B Marketing Insider
Selected by: Erin Winker, Aetna
B2B Insider Michael Brenner encouraged members of his audience to share their favorite brand content marketing hubs. It’s a useful example of content curation. You don’t have to do all of the work yourself. The objective is to extend your relationship with your target audience.
Actionable tip:
- Ask your audience directly for input. Brenner made it easy for members of his audience to participate. They just needed to supply the names. Basically, he outsourced the research phase of his content.
- Make it easy for people to participate. Understand that under 10% of your audience will contribute to your efforts. Streamline the work involved to increase involvement.
Example: Unverified Voracity Says Let’s Win Football on MGoBlog
Selected by: T.J. Basalla, HP
MGoBlog, one of the most successful and funniest college football blogs, posts a regular feature called Unverified Voracity. Curated content makes for a useful way to build your thought leadership in a specific niche.
Like any good piece of curated content, Unverified Voracity is more than just a collection of links on college football. MGoBlog proprietor Brian Cook adds strong doses of his unique humor and commentary.
Actionable tip:
- Be the tastemaker in your niche. Comment on the news in your category. Take a tip from Cook: Add some humor and personality.
- Gather and organize the information. Curation is more than just a dump of links. Add value for your audience.
Example: 5 Amazing Things I Learned at #CMWorld That You Can Use in Your Content Marketing Efforts on The Connecticut Innovations Blog
Selected by: Brandon Gearing, Connecticut Innovations
This curated roundup should be a staple of every conference producer and attendee. It’s a great way to show your love for the people who presented.
Where possible, get a photo of the presenter or some special commentary that everyone else isn’t already sharing on Twitter.
Actionable tip:
- Extend the reach of live events with post-event wrap-ups. Curate the highlights or data from a conference or presentation. Of course, it’s critical to add your own commentary so that you’re not just copying other people’s content.
- Add context for your target audience. This is a key aspect of content curation that many marketers miss. You must answer: “Why is this content important for me?”
Keyword Tools: Generating Content Ideas
Answer the Public
Except the “seeker” is animated. It’s weird. Don’t get distracted. As with any other keyword tool, you just plug in a topic and go. It’s a UK-based tool, but you can select a different country from the dropdown:
Here’s the cool part – the results come back in visual form. First, you’ll see a “wheel” of question keywords related to your topic. I entered “AdWords,” and here’s what I got:
They’re organized into questions that begin with where, which, who, what, when, why, how, and are. I love answering question keywords with content; it’s a really effective way to demonstrate expertise and generate leads, and they can drive a ton of organic traffic (especially if you manage to rank in the featured snippet box, AKA position zero). We’ve already targeted a bunch of these keywords, but I also see a lot of questions that we haven’t tackled yet:
- how adwords billing works
- what adwords are my competitors using
- when to use adwords
- why use adwords editor
Answer the Public also returns a visualization of keyword phrases containing prepositions, like for, with, without, and versus:
Some keyword ideas I got from this visual include:
- adwords for photographers
- adwords without a website
- using adwords to make money
FAQ Fox
Speaking of question keywords! FAQ Fox specializes in them. This isn’t quite like any other keyword tool I’ve seen. It scrapes Q&A sites like Reddit and Quora to find questions related to your topic of choice.
If you click the “marketing” category, the tool will automatically search relevant marketing subreddits as well as a few popular marketing forums like Wicked Fire and Warrior Forum.
You can also enter your own sites. I searched for “adwords” on Reddit and Quora.com and got a great list of questions:
The questions are linked to the actual threads so you can go check out the full question as well as any answers it already has.
These questions tend to be much more specific and complex than the kinds of terms that people enter into Google, so if you decide to use one in your content marketing, you’ll probably have to use another keyword tool to find a phrase with search volume that you can map to the question. For example, if I wanted to create content to answer the question “Why are branded keywords costing me more in AdWords?” I could go into Keyword Planner to see that my best bet for this topic is the keyword “branded keywords”:
KWFinder
When figuring out which keywords to target, it’s always a good idea to take competition into consideration. This will help you prioritize your keyword research – you don’t want to go for the super-competitive keywords first, but you also don’t want to only go after keywords that have very low volume, and that aren’t going to have great return even if you do rank on them.
KWFinder is a cool free keyword tool that shows you search volume, average CPC and both PPC and SEO competition. As with the above tools, I entered “adwords,” then clicked on the magnifying glass icon next to “adwords training.” This gives me a ton of data:
Higher scores are more competitive, so you can see that while “adwords training” is a highly competitive term in paid search (with a score of 91 and an average CPC over $12), the organic competition is pretty low (26). On the right-hand side of the screen you can see a snapshot of the search volume for this keyword over time, as well as some data on the pages that are currently ranking on the Google SERP for this keyword search.
