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Curation is Critical to Your Marketing Strategy [Best Practices 2018]

Successful people curate knowledge and use it to improve their own performance.

As Issac Newton once said:

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

By carefully selecting, commenting and sharing valuable content, you are demonstrating your own thought leadership.
You are also participating in a trend that by now is well established.

In a post on “15 facts about Content Curation“, Tatiana Liubarets writes;

Research by Curata has found that curating isn’t a new or innovative practice any longer, it’s become the norm. Only 5% of the marketers worldwide surveyed in their annual report never share other organization’s content, while nearly ⅓ share blogs, industry publications, or other resources on a daily basis:

In this post, I will show you how to boost your content marketing with content curation, and solve some of the challenges in measuring your success with curation on social media.

Curators are Thought Leaders!

Curator’s are by definition thought leaders.

This post on “Advertising and Marketing” published by eMarketer explains it this way:

Creating, finding and sharing compelling content can prove to consumers that a company knows its territory, is a thought leader in its industry and wants to help customers keep up-to-date on important developments.

As a curator, you research, organize and share content to target your markets interest graph.

Some of the leadership is implied in your activities. Since being a good curator requires that you develop and demonstrate certain common traits.

Robing Good in his article on “General traits of a content curator.” breaks it down into the following characteristics.

  • Subject Matter Expertise: A good curator, reads and selects articles based on the information in that article. So the act of curation requires that you learn and develop expertise on the topics you are curating.
  • Personal Voice: A curator doesn’t just select and share, but adds comments, and tags to add value to the articles they are sharing.
  • Organization: The curated article’s form a body of work that are enhanced through tagging and organization. The tagging represents your knowledge and insight into the subject matter.
  • Attention to Detail: Your selection, organization and tagging of the curated content demonstrate your attention to detail
  • Longevity: Curating and sharing content over a long period of time demonstrate your commitment and longevity

In general these are traits we expect to find in our thought leaders, don’t you agree?

We have designed our curation solution, so you can showcase your research, and add your own value.

Your contribution will be in the form of comments, organization, and tagging of the content, to help visitors index and discover new related topics easily.

Moreover, your curated research will continuously fuel your own discovery and insight, and help you grow your knowledge and insight into your own field of inquiry.

Curation will drive your Content Marketing

Every blog post requires research. The research may be a study, analytics, or how-to articles that inform your post.

Making curation part of your daily process means anytime you are ready to blog, you have hundreds of articles at your fingertip as a reference!

Moreover, curation will help you generate new blog ideas when you look at your research in the context of what influencers are talking about.

Lets take a look at a few proven blogging methods, and show you how your curated research improves your process.

The Skyscraper Method

The Skyscraper method is one described by Brian Dean as an effective method for Link Building in his post “Link Building Case Study“.
The idea is simple. You find great content that is already ranking with search engines and you make it better.

Let me quickly summarize the main points in this article

Step 1: Find link-worthy content

Step 2: Make something even better

Step 3: Reach out to the right people

To find link worthy content, you select your topic and then use one or more discovery engines to find articles that rank and have been shared.

Here are three of the more popular discovery sites that I have used and recommend.

 

Buzzsumo Degreed Right Relevance

 

After you find informative and popular articles that inform, you need to make it better. But how?

This is when your curated library can help you both speed up your content development time, and add additional insights to the post you are trying to improve on.

As an example let me take the topic “Link Building“. If you follow the link you will find quite a few articles on this topic on our KBucket page.

From here you can easily and quickly combine concepts from different posts and build a new post that improves on whats already there.

You can also apply this skyscraper method to video content.

Take excerpts from different posts and build it into video content that informs, like the video below.

To boost your exposure to your video content follow the following tips

  • Tag the authors you are quoting in your video content
  • Make sure you add your own brand and message at the end of the video
  • Promote the video on your social channels (Paid Advertising to reach more people

Video content is more effective than other forms of content. These statistics from HubSpot show why video content is imperative to your success.

  • Marketers who use video grew revenue 49% faster than non-video users
  • Nearly two-thirds of consumers prefer video under 60 seconds
  • 51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.
  • 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter.

Gael Breton at Authority hacker has an excellent post on “Outreach Link Building“, that walks you through your promotion phase.

Let me be clear. This is not a magic link building formula. This is a link earning formula. That means that the people that you will outreach to and that will potentially link to you will go and review your site and judge you based on what they see.

As a curator, you are demonstrating your willingness to research and inform yourself on whats going on in your field of interest.

This will differentiate you from the crowd and legacy link building methods.

Next let’s take a look at another technique that benefits from your curated content.

Generate backlinks from your syndicated content

Here I want to expand on a technique described by Gennaro Cuofano in his post titled “Framework to hack the growth of your blog

The idea in this post is that you should amplify your content by posting the same content you published on your blog on other major publishing platforms.

In essence, you are syndicating your content on other popular blogging channels.

The key recommendation is that you first publish on your own site and wait till Google indexes your site.

The first step is all about letting Google’s crawlers index your page so that your content is tied to your blog. Once drafted the coolest article in the blogosphere all you have to do is to hit the publish button!

As soon as you do so, billions of crawlers that are indexing the web will also walk on your page and understand where it belongs to.

After you publish the post and associate it with your blog, its time to amplify your post by syndicating it on other popular publishing platforms.

Beyond the traditional sharing, you must do (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and StumbleUpon to mention the main ones). You want to syndicate your content on four major publishing outlets: Quora, LinkedIn Publishing, Medium, and beBee.

Sites like Medium and Tumbler are blogging platforms.

Other sites like LinkedIn, Quora, Product Hunt offer provisions for posting your own content on their platform.

Our focus here is to show you how you can improve your backlink profile when syndicating your content.

Basically, every quote, and article I point to in my blog posts, including articles in this post, come from my own curated research.

In other words, if the post is good enough to use as a reference, then its good enough to be added to my curated library.

When I link to articles as a reference from my own blog site, I point directly to that post.

But when I syndicate my posts on other blogs, I switch the links to the cards on my KBucket page.

As an example, the backlink to Gennaro Cuofano post above will be changed to this backlink.

In this way, you can now generate additional backlinks from authority sites, without compromising your post and message.

Generate backlinks when you engage in social media

Your curated library will exponentially increase the value of your social media engagement, by driving more traffic to your website.

By curating content that targets the interest of your targeted customers, you will build answers to every question asked.

If there are questions you don’t have answers for, research, curate and add it to your library.

In the example below, I am using links from my curated library to answer a question on Quora.

Over the past 3 months, I have generated over 10.3K views.

You can boost your engagement by answering questions every day.

Get more than one person in your organization tasked with commenting to get even better results.

You get more views when you are active every day. The spikes are from the days I actually posted the answers.

However, your answers will continue to pay dividends even when you are not engaged.

The links to my curated research have so far resulted in a 0.8% Click through to my site, with a 2:55 minute average engagement, and 21% of the users have added the page to their favorites.

You can use the same technique to engage people on all of your social media platforms.

A curated KBucket library provides you with hundreds of links you can draw from to engage on social media.

Generate traffic when you share your curated content

Content Curation is a great source of inbound traffic when you use our KBucket solution.

One of the greatest challenges for content marketers is to measure ROI for their social activity.

According to a study published by HubSpot on Marketing Statistics:

88% of marketers want to know how to measure their return on investment for social media activities. (Social Media Examiner, 2015)
 
Only 42% of marketers say they are able to measure their social activities. (Social Media Examiner, 2015)
 
92% of marketers say that social media is important to their business. (Social Media Examiner, 2015)
 
More than half of marketers who’ve been using social media for at least two years report it helped them improve sales. (Social Media Examiner, 2015)

With KBucket, every link you share drives traffic back to your own site. This means you can measure your success. No more aimless posting!

A six-month study on our own account shows that we drove 2 links for every link we shared.  This translated into hundreds of inbound links per month.

More shares more traffic

The challenge with social media engagement is fresh content!

Most prolific bloggers and content creators may create 10 to 15 original posts per month. Most do much less.

Yet we know that to engage you need to post fresh content regularly.

Most people today share content from third-party sources that drives traffic to someone else’s web page.

If your curated content sends traffic to the destination site, you will lose much of the benefits.

Moreover, it will be difficult for you to measure the success of your social media activity.

Yet if the traffic drove leads to your site first you could put your inbound marketing on steroids.

To understand the potential for engagement with frequent posting on social media look at these stats published by HubSpot on “Social Shares in 15 Niche Industries

With KBucket, you can curate hundreds of evergreen articles in a fraction of the time it takes you to create original content.

Your curated content will be a constant source of inbound traffic, ideas for new posts and fuel for engagement on social media channels.

Conclusion

Content curation is a great discipline that will help you throughout your career.

Search is broken, in the sense that we have so much information coming at us every day, that if we don’t organize access to the information we need, we will waste a couple of hours every day looking for it.

If you are not convinced take a look at this post on productivity.

To get started, add Kurator to your chrome extension and start curating today.