Is your blogging bad? Maybe you should try content curation…

Your blog, no matter how good it is, will never beat the internet.  It just can’t.

For an agency, seeking to engage with an audience by adding value to their lives with meaningful content, here’s one stat to consider.  According to WordPress, their users produce 64.3 million new posts a month!

64.3M with a capital M.  That single kind-of-weekly post you’ve coaxed your intern into writing during their lunch breaks amounts to less than a drop in the bucket.  Heck, it’s not landing anywhere near the bucket.

Don’t take this to mean that we think blogging and creating other content is futile.  We blog, we video, we webinar.  It’s a lot of work, but we love it.  And the bottom line is that it helps our business.

Creating content is important because your agency has insight to share about its industry.  (That’s not a question, it’s a statement.  Trust us – your agency has insight to share about its industry.)  If you have the time and resources to create good content then do it – write blog posts, film videos, host webinars.  Wade into the internet and make your mark.

But, what if you don’t have the time and resources to sustain a consistent and high quality content creation effort?  That shouldn’t stop you from providing your audience something of value that can help deepen your relationship with them. Consider content curation.

 

What is content curation?

In much the same way a museum curates a collection, a content curator aims to sort through the massive amounts of content available on the web in order to present an audience with the most relevant and meaningful information possible.

At its most basic level, content curation involves selecting a topic, gathering content from around the web about that topic, evaluating the material you’ve found based on relevance, providing your own insight to give the piece some context, and then publishing your findings.  There are various free tools online that can help with each step of the process, or you can get out the credit card and pay for a platform that automates many of these processes.

This curated content can live on your site and drive inbound traffic.  Or, it could be formatted into a weekly newsletter digest to send to your prospects.  Or both.

What’s in it for me?

Some of you may be asking, “Aren’t people already finding their own content? Haven’t they ever heard of a Google search? Why would they want us to curate content for them? What does my agency get out of it? I’m hungry…what’s for lunch? Has the intern finished my post yet?”

The answer to all, or most, of these questions is, “Time.”

Your prospects have limited time.  You have limited time.  Remember the 64.3 million posts a month on WordPress?  Not all of that information is going to be content gold and much of it won’t address the needs of your prospects.

By finding the best content on topics your audience cares about, evaluating it, and contextualizing it you’re providing a service that will help your readers cut through the noise.  If your agency has staked out a differentiated position and you’ve selected a topic that is focused on their needs, your content curation will eventually begin to lend you authority as a thought leader in your sector, even though the content you’re curating isn’t your own.

How do you curate content?

Well…come back next week for more on that.  We’ll talk about the entry level version – how to get started if you all you can do is read, write, and access the internet – and the deluxe version – forking over some cash to access the power of automation and artificial intelligence.

Yeah…that’s right. A.I. like the hit 2001 movie starring Haley Joel Osment, but way better.