How to Add Value to Your Web-Writing Business as a Content Curator

Once upon a time curation was something that happened at museums.

Nowadays it seems everyone is curating something.  If you have a Netflix account, you curate movies.  If you have an iTunes playlist on your computer, you curate music.  If you have a Pinterest board, you curate images centered around your passion…

And, if you are a copywriter, you can curate valuable content for your clients.

Creating Content vs. Curating Content

Your clients need original content. The kind you create from scratch that demonstrates their authority, offers value to their audience, and helps build relationships.

But you can help your client build even more connections and offer even more value by leveraging the content created by others in the industry.

This is where content curation fits in.

Simply put, content curation is collecting interesting information like blogs, social media posts, or articles relevant to your client’s followers; adding commentary, images or headlines to make it more valuable; and sharing it with the target audience.

Curating content is its own art form, and if you get good at it, you can add a lot of value to your services. So, let’s take a look at what you need to know.

Define Your Client’s Niche and Get to Know the Audience

Obviously, there’s a lot of content on the internet. You don’t want to go sifting through it at random. So you need to figure out what your client’s target audience is most interested in. What kind of topics are they searching for? What do they want to know more about? Figuring that out allows you to focus your efforts so you find content that is relevant, interesting, and of good quality.

That can make you the single best resource for the group of people in your client’s niche which helps position your client as a thought leader in that space.

Deliver the Content to Your Audience

Once you have defined the target audience, begin creating your curated content marketing plan. One thing you need to decide is how you will deliver the content to your audience.

You could send it once a week via a personalized email newsletter. Or you could create a weekly blog post that highlights interesting online content. You could also share curated content through social media channels. Or you could do all three.

Finding the Content

Once you know what you’re looking for and you have a plan for delivering it, it’s time to start searching out great content to share.

While Google probably immediately comes to mind as the best way to hunt down the good stuff, there are plenty of other content curation tools that make content discovery and curation a lot easier.

In fact, there are so many content curation software options available, it can be a little daunting to find the best-fitting tools for your specific content curation needs. It helps to think of the curation process as three distinct steps. You need to discover content, read and evaluate content, and then share what is relevant and valuable to your audience. You can find software apps that will support you through each of these steps.

Like I said, there are plenty of options. Test a few out and find the ones that align with how you like to work.

Start Consuming Content

As a curator you have to keep up-to-date with everyday news as well as niche specific content. This will provide you with a wider context for the content you curate and can also provide inspiration for your original posts.

Rather than searching for up-to-date content manually every day, try a service like Feedly. Feedly serves as an RSS aggregator, so new stories from sites you like, from social media accounts you follow, and based on keywords or topics of interest will be gathered in a single place.

Get into Site-specific Content

Another popular tool you can use to find niche related content that is relevant and fresh for your audience is Buzzsumo.  This tool allows you to type in any keyword or domain, and then provides an ordered list of the top shared content around that topic.

Organize Your Content

Once you’ve set yourself up to routinely find niche-related content, you can use another online tool like Pocket to save content in one organized location to read later. With a tool like Pocket, you can plan to do your reading review in a single block of time each day. This will get you in the habit of collecting content in one place where you can easily find it for future review.

Share Your Content

After gathering content and sifting through it for the best bits, it’s time to start sharing it with your audience. You can add value by adding editorial comments from your own perspective.  Add a short intro to the curated content that gives it a relevant context for your audience, and shows them what they can get out of it.

Then share the curated content across the most appropriate channel for your target audience.

Why Content Curation?

Offering your clients content curation as part of their content marketing strategy can have valuable benefits for both you and your clients.

Most often, working with limited staffing, content curation saves time and energy while maintaining the quality and diversity of the content. It opens up avenues to create relationships with other curators, build brand awareness, and establish credibility and trust.

It also allows you a way to better understand your audience and increase your knowledge of your client’s industry.

Content curation helps you — and your clients — effectively and efficiently cut through the noise of the Internet so you can build more meaningful and profitable relationships with your audience.