Matt Cutts Giving A Thumbs Up
When it comes to content marketing you often feel under pressure to produce something original. With so much content out there this can sometimes be difficult to do.
It’s the fact that there is a lot of content already available that creates a unique opportunity for you. One of the most valuable services you can provide for your clients or audience is one of keeping them informed. That is supplying them with everything they need to know related to your area of expertise.
By doing this you save them the task of sifting through countless websites, blogs or even social platforms to find the answers to their questions.
This is called Curating Content, I have written about content curation before and how it can help to build your reputation as an authority. But it will only do this, if you use it in the right way.
Curate Don’t Automate
When you are busy it is easy to tick off tasks on your list, especially if they are time consuming. When it comes to online tasks we tend to look for ways we can automate things, making processes more efficient.
If you try to automate content curation you run into a problem, without your personal selection that curated feed just becomes like any other feed out there. It provides no value as no effort has gone into creating it. Your feed could easily be duplicated by anyone else that wanted to create automated output based on a keyword or tag through a system like IFTTT or Paper.li.
Please, don’t be tempted to do this.
In fact I have a personal dislike for Paper.li, in that part of its process is to notify those that have been featured in a particular edition as though it was something special. What’s so great about the fact that an article I wrote got picked up by some bot and it automatically Tweeted at me to let me know?
Adding Value through Curation
If you have curated your content manually, and as part of that featured one of my articles, now that is special and I am truly grateful!
I know I am not alone in seeing the value in this method either. Watch this short video from Google’s Head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, to hear Google’s view on content curation and what they consider the most valuable way you should do it.
[Photo credit: Paul Altobelli]
Start curating content the right way sign up for the Kurasie: Content Curation Engine beta.