If had the right content curation tools, could you string together awesome, relevant, and engaging content for the benefit of your readers, would you be able to make an an impact with your audience? Your customer avatar? Would you be able to get traffic? Does it hold the promise of making your content marketing a little easier? For all this effort, will you be able to generate leads?
You would.
It’s called content curation.
Do content curation well and you can possibly bake a lifetime’s worth of content marketing goodness into your content marketing strategy.
Curating content doesn’t even have to be hard. All you need is any of the following content curation tools or a combination of one or more tools to get you going.
Good content curation begins with due diligence and research. Simply put, you can’t share content that you don’t even find in the first place. Research is a critical element of content curation that helps you search, find, and organize content. You’d research, collect, organize, create, distribute, and even use content curation to generate traffic, audiences, or generate leads.
Here are different sources & tools to help you begin looking out for content:
Curately
Now, we wouldn’t start a list of content curation tools without including our very own, do we?
Curately helps make your content marketing very simple. You can research, collect, and organize content using Curately by just specifying your source RSS feeds or by searching and adding source websites. You can also add Youtube videos right to your indexes.
If you want to build a curated blog post, you can also pick and select the content you want to include from the sources above, and assemble your content.
Publish it, and you are good to go with your first blog post, a full-blown resource page, or a content hub.
Buzzsumo
If Google helps you find anything, Buzzsumo is a more focused tool that tries to find high-performing, popular, and much shared content based off your search parameters (usually keywords).
No, Pocket isn’t just for reading (although it can be). You can also use Pocket to stay connected all the new content that Pocket pushes your way (to the app, or to your Inbox). You can then collect all the content that you think is worth sharing. Using Pocket almost makes all the good content come to you.
Twitter lists
Chances are that you login to Twitter almost everyday. As you go about using twitter, make it a habit to create lists of people who share content almost everyday (in your niche). While you make lists, those lists themselves become a great source to collect information.
But if you want, you can also follow other lists, others’ lists of lists, and so on.
Quora
Quora is almost always teeming with questions and answers. At the time of writing this, it’s one of the most popular, general, and highly-active community on enthusiasts on practically every topic.
Some users go to great lengths to post their answers (for their own reasons).
An entire collection of answers for a single question can be true wealth of an information.
You thought Pinterest was just about images of home decor ideas or cooking recipes?
Pinterest boards can be a treasure trove of information if you know where to look (or train yourself to). Plus, all that information is visually-aided.
Feedly
Google RSS feeds are dead, but Feedly isn’t. Feedly allows you to track, follow, collect, and organize all your favourite content.
You can start following blogs, online publications, and possible anything on the Internet with an RSS feed. Makes for a great content curation tool, eh?
Flocker
Flocker allows you to bring all the content into one social hub (includes comments and other social Interactions).
With all the content shared on social media, you can easily automate content collection using hashtags or handles.
With flocker, you can build a content hub which you can also make a starting point for any kind of content curation.
Flip
Flip works just like Feedly does, and you can use the web-based version or other versions for tablets and phones.
Flip is a great way (also visual) to get a constant feed of content (sorted and organized according to your niche or interests) so that you don’t have to keep looking for new content.
While you can add your own RSS feeds or add publications or blogs directly, you can also discover new content.
Scoop.It
Scoop.it allows you to discover, sort, organize, and arrange content (like any of the tools here).
However, scoop.it is also a content discovery focused social network and it has its own network of users. This gives your curated content a platform for others to discover, share, and to engage with.
With your own Scoop.it profiles, all the content you curate also works much like a standalone resource hub that you can get more traffic from, grow your authority, or just generate leads (paid plan).
Elink
eLink allows you to create, manage, and distribute content pages or curated newsletters quickly and easily. Here’s an example of how eLink curated pages might look like.
Using eLink, you can send out industry news, news about your company, embed content resources, curate research, or organize marketing assets. Anything you create can also be shared on social, embedded on your website, etc.
Your first step in writing engaging content is picking a content curation tool to get started with… Which will you choose?
