Content Curation 101: Learn the Basics
Ensuring that your blog or website always has fresh, engaging, and high-quality content doesn’t mean that you have to write new articles constantly. For those times when you can’t spare enough time to write new articles or when you’re running out of topics to write on, you can always rely on content curation.
For a virtual assistant, content curation is a very useful skill. As more and more businesses recognize the value of curated content, more and more of them are also looking for VAs who can help them out with curating content.
What is content curation?
The world wide web is teeming with informative, engaging, and shareable content. Content curation is the process of sifting through the pages and pages of content available in the internet and picking out the best ones that will work for your website.
Curating content doesn’t just involve collecting tons and tons of links on all sorts of topics. An excellent curator uses a thematic approach when choosing content. By cherry picking articles, videos, photos, and other types of media, a content curator can create a solid web of information that can engage your audience and build lasting relationships with other content creators.
Why curate content?
Curating content is not just a last resort for when you don’t have the time to create content. Content curation, in and of itself, is a great way to boost any content marketing strategy. Here are some of the benefits that content curation provides.
-
Content curation saves time.
Once you become adept at curating content, you can definitely publish content and provide fresh information for your audience very quickly.
-
Content curation helps you become established as an authority in the field.
If you can pick out the right sort of content, you can definitely help your client become one of the most trustworthy sources of information in their area.
-
Content curation helps you reach a wider audience.
Good curated content can be shared through social media, so you can definitely connect to more people.
Tools for content curation
Curating content can be challenging at first. Luckily, you have an arsenal of content curation tools on the internet to help you out. Check out the following tools for effective and efficient content curation.
Pocket allows you to save content for later reading. You can use Pocket to save content that looks interesting and save them for later perusal. Once you’ve got a stash of content, you can then sift through all of them and choose the ones that will work for your purpose.
Feedly
With Feedly, you can collect amazing blog articles and either publish them as is or use them to get ideas for your next content strategy.
Pinterest contains a treasure trove of ideas from a variety of users. You can discover all sorts of content from Pinterest that have already been shared by users from other websites, so you’re sure to find interesting stuff through the website.
Flipboard helps you stay on top of the latest trends and news in your field by allowing you to create a personalized magazine from the best sources in your area. Like Feedly, you can also utilize Flipboard for both content curation and content strategy planning.
There are plenty more tools and resources out there that can help make the process of curating content a lot easier and quicker for virtual assistants who are just starting out with curating content for their clients’ website, blog, or social media pages. The above tools can help you get started, but you’ll surely discover more tools as you delve deeper into the world of content curation.
