Being a thought leader in your niche can only happen by having a focused strategy and knowing who your audience is. Those things don’t happen very quickly. It takes a large time investment to gain an understanding of who the right people to view your content are and how to best create content that they would be interested in. Creating this content can be expensive and your content may not be successful every time. Hitting a content homerun happens even less when you are a smaller brand with a more niche audience. Content curation can help to fill in the gaps of when you are creating original content and still keep your audience interested.

What is Content Curation & Why Do You Need It

It is, in a nutshell, gathering the latest content produced around an interest, providing a commentary about the content and sharing it for your readers to consume. As mentioned above, curated content is a great way to fill in the gaps either on your blog or even across your social channels. With so much content being produced everyday making sure your audience gets the information that is important to them is harder than ever.

Curating content helps by:

• Keeping your audience informed and engaged
• Keeping you and your readers up to date with trends
• Allowing you to have your finger on the pulse of the industry
• Positioning you as an industry leader
• Allowing you to produce content without starting from scratch

Now that you know why you need to curate content, here are the best practices to get started.

Gather Content

Going out there is the right idea. Look at your Twitter and see if the people who  inspire you in your niche have created anything. Grab that. Go to content aggregate sites  such as Alltop, Popurls and Original Signal. These text link lists are a great place to go to find stories around a certain topic or from a specific publisher. See something good? Grab that too. Look where you know your audience hangs out and see what is new and interesting and yes, grab that too.

Provide Some Commentary

This is the most important value-add part of content curation. Yes, maybe you are providing the service of gathering and regurgitating something that people very well could have missed, but there are a slew of places that people could look for that. Giving your opinions on the topics that you have gathered helps people to understand better. Maybe you could have a new point of view that will gain you some new readers. This is where you can make your mark on the content that is out there and in a way make it your own.

You can add your commentary in a blog post (like this), or via social media as a post, or even across other content curation sites (think Reddit). Either way, personalize it and add your own spin to it to make it unique and valuable to your audience.

Share that Content

Now that your piece of content is complete, you have to make sure that it gets in front of the right readers. Here are a few ways you can share these (let’s assume you curated a blog post) curated posts to your readers.

• Your social media accounts
• Tweet out to the people that wrote the content and see if they agree/disagree with what you thought
• Use promotional avenues like StumbleUpon, Outbrain, and Reddit.
• Find conversations around the content you found where you can add some relevant insight

The easiest way to understand why content curation is important would be to think about FOMO or the Fear of Missing Out. When news happens, it gets reported on and gets consumed as fast as possible. With social media sites, email, well-known aggregate sites like Alltop, it’s hard to catch everything that is going on.

Providing commentary on up-to-date news or trends can be a real value-add to your audience. In addition to consuming your original content, they’ll look for your opinion and view on the latest trends in the industry, ultimately making you a thought-leader. Have I missed anything, let me know in the comments below and let’s get the conversation started.