Consider Content Curation For Your Startup

Content curation is an awesome content marketing tool for startups and small businesses alike. It allows you to find and share blog posts, infographics, and videos that you know will be interesting to your customers while simultaneously building up your own site’s content. It helps you turn your website into the kind of awesome resource that customers love.

Of course, there is a right way and a wrong way to use this technique.

The Wrong Way

You can’t simply dig up an article, paste the link in your blog, and say, “look what I found!”

That doesn’t give your customers anything they couldn’t find out on their own. Google is, after all, the ultimate content curator, and you can’t really compete with it if you’re not providing much more than Google does.

The Right Way

If you want to curate content in a way that actually helps your business you have to talk about it after you’ve shared it.

Do you agree with this resource? Disagree? Did the original content make some valid points but miss something vital? Did the original writer neglect to explain how to do something important? Do you have a case study that helps to demonstrate this principle in action?

Curating content this way helps you join the conversation that’s going on all over the Internet in your area of expertise every single day. That’s far more compelling than a simple “share.”

Don’t forget to go social

Each time you curate a piece of content you have the opportunity to increase your audience and your reach. Find the social accounts that belong to the original author.

On Twitter, send a shout-out with a link back to your post, mentioning the author by username.

On Facebook, Like the author’s page and leave a comment mentioning that you linked to one of his or her posts. Include a link back to your post.

On G+, follow their account and do another shout-out, this time using their +username.

You might get a nice mention in return. And you might just attract some attention from that author’s followers, which means more traffic and exposure for you.

Of course, there is the issue of time.

It takes a lot more time to get a curated post right. If you are one of the many startup founders or small business owners out there who wish to expand their content marketing strategy but who feel too strapped for time to do so, check out our membership packages.