How to get started with content curation for your blog

When it comes to running a blog, one of the biggest challenges is creating a large amount of content that is also of high quality. It often seems like you either have a lot of posts written quickly and poorly, or well-crafted posts that take days or weeks to create. However, content curation offers an alternative.

Deciding to curate some or all of your blog’s content can very quickly result in a large number of excellent posts. By focusing on quality sources and drawing material from existing articles, you can fill your blog while producing work you’re proud to share on your website.

Understand content curation and its benefits

The definition of content curation can be lost in translation. It is important to note that this is the case Not Taking content from another blog and publishing it yourself – that’s just plagiarism. Instead, curation is a process of collecting, organizing, and providing new insights into existing articles.

The most immediate benefit of content curation is that it’s typically much faster than creating traditional blog posts, without sacrificing quality. However, by helping you develop a backlink network, it can also help improve your blog’s search engine optimization (SEO) and visibility, increasing your traffic and possibly sales.

How to Curate Content for Your Blog (In 5 Steps)

While it’s usually a fairly streamlined process, curating content still requires careful planning if you want to do it right. Trying to cut corners could lead to copyright disputes and negatively impact your blog’s SEO. So make sure all your bases are covered by following the steps below.

1. Choose your sources

A strong source of curated content needs to be reliable, recognizable, and relevant to your audience. Choosing reliable sources affects your own credibility and the quality of your blog. When considering a source, make sure their claims are factual and research based.

You also want your sources to consistently produce quality content. Avoid sources with a lot of grammatical or spelling mistakes, as well as those with poor web design. Sources that regularly post new material are preferable as you can count on them to provide content.

A source that is recognizable to your target audience is also always useful. Sourcing content from other blogs with small followers probably won’t help you grow your traffic unless you’re both lucky enough for a post to go viral. Name recognition also contributes significantly to creating credibility.

Relevance is necessary for the success of almost any website, including your blog. If you pull articles about topics your target readers aren’t interested in, you’ll have a hard time reeling them in and getting them to become loyal followers.

One of the best ways to get all three is to source content from the best blogs, websites, and other publications in your niche. A quick Google search will likely point you in the right direction, but if you’re already immersed in your niche’s online community, consider asking for recommendations or using sites you already follow.

2. Extract and annotate your content

As we mentioned earlier in this post, content curation Not Taking content from a website and putting it on your own page. It’s important to add some of your own thoughts and comments to each curated post. This step is crucial for several reasons.

First of all, copying someone else’s content and passing it off as your own is copyright infringement and illegal. Also, plagiarism is unlikely to earn you respect in the blogging community. It will almost certainly damage your reputation and greatly reduce the chances that you can build a solid following.

You should also annotate your curated content for SEO purposes. Duplicate content will have a hard time ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) as it has to compete with its copy. Differentiating your post gives you a better chance of ranking higher.

A common and successful strategy for dealing with this is to excerpt and comment on your sources. The most important information is taken from an article in the form of block quotations and then provided with your own thoughts, ideas, explanations or reactions to it.

The popular site Brain picking is a prime example of this method. Writer Maria Popova covers topics related to literature, art, philosophy and science, often sharing lengthy quotes from other articles or books and explaining them:

Your posts don’t necessarily have to be as deep and intellectual as Popova’s. However, their site provides a good look at curation best practices and how to structure your excerpts and annotations.

3. Aggregate additional content

Another technique used to responsibly curate content is known as “aggregation”. This consists of compiling a list of articles or other resources that you think your readers will be interested in and sharing them with them. It’s a popular strategy with news aggregator sites such as the skimm.

Aggregated content can make up the bulk of your blog posts if you choose. However, for the same reasons mentioned in the previous steps, it’s a good idea to write a synopsis for your own site, highlighting the key points and then linking to the original article.

That said, aggregated articles can also be a nice addition to your main posts. You can provide your readers with a list of the latest niche community news, popular resources for further research, or some of your own favorite reading.

Whichever method you prefer, aggregation is an extremely easy way to generate content because you can automate it. Plugins like our Feedzy RSS feeds can create lists of aggregated content and automatically add them to a post, page or sidebar on your site:

Your feeds are updated automatically, so they require minimal maintenance. Feedzy even uses artificial intelligence (AI) to restate and update aggregated posts to avoid duplicate content concerns.

4. Cite your sources

Even if you’ve either excerpted and annotated your curated content, provided an original synopsis, or used AI to restate your curated content, it’s still necessary to cite your sources. You must give some credit to the original creators of your posts.

For one, this practice is polite. It’s always best to give credit where it’s due – after all, someone else worked hard to create the material that is now providing your blog with a great deal of quality content. Readers and other bloggers will usually respect you more if you cite your sources.

Additionally, citing sources can be useful for your blog’s SEO. Some online writers will appreciate you giving backlinks to their site and reciprocating. Others can become readers and recommend your blog to their own followers.

Today, linking to the original source is the standard way to give credit to another content creator. However, there’s nothing wrong with using good old fashion Bracket citations or footnotes also.

5. Leverage best practices for content curation SEO

Some of the previous steps have already covered important considerations for SEO when curating content. Specifically, we’ve mentioned the possible negative effects of using duplicate content on your website and how to avoid it.

However, there are also ways to improve your SEO through content curation. In particular, there is an opportunity to build a well-rounded backlink profile that can bring traffic from other websites and improve your organic search rankings.

By citing your sources, you should start building a network between your blog and other websites. Hopefully they start linking back to you too. Additionally, because your site contains informative content on relevant topics backed by your own unique insights, other blogs may link to you as a resource.

It is also important that the websites that link to yours are of high quality. Google’s penguin algorithm evaluates your website’s backlink profile for both quality and quantity. This means you get better signal boost from the reliable sources you get your content from than small, low-quality sites.

Conclusion

When blogging, it’s important to have a large number of quality posts. The traditional method of brainstorming and writing content sometimes makes it difficult to achieve this goal. However, content curation can help speed up the process without sacrificing the quality of your blog.

In this post, we’ve explored five steps that can help you successfully curate content for your blog:

Do you have questions about using Content Curation? Let us know in the comments section below!