“Content is king.” This is the buzz phrase we’ve all heard for years. Content creation for blogs, newsletters, and social media has become essential for business success – helping professionals illustrate knowledge, competency, and thought leadership. The questions facing many companies include what to write about and where to find the time. The content team at Pinstripe Marketing has developed a way to streamline content creation that will improve search engine optimization, and show clients and prospects that you are keeping up-to-date with the latest in your industry. This abbreviated version of content creation is called “content curation.”
Creating original content can take several hours and a lot of research, in addition to good writing skills. This is one of the primary challenges of content creation – not everyone is blessed with excellent writing skills and hours to write, but we are all expected to generate content to feed to our audience.
Content curation is the answer.
- Make a list of the top publications in your industry and subscribe to receive their emails.
- Scan the headlines for stories relevant to your business and set them aside for in-depth reading.
- Pull out the important, stand-out keywords from the article.
- While reading each article, make note of a quote or two that will spark interest.
- Create a short summary, and ensure you use the keywords that you noted as you were reading, and relate the main points in your summary to your business; personalize the article to your company.
- Link back to other articles on your own blog that have related content.
- Find a photo from any of the inexpensive or free stock photo websites to include on your blog. Imagery is important because it captures people’s attention, so don’t skip this step.
Once you have these pieces (article link, quotes, keywords, your observations, home website links, photo), you have a complete blog post. Use your observation or the quote as the opening paragraph, add the photo, then encourage the reader to follow a link to finish reading the article. You can take it a step further and include links to other resources for more information on the topic; be sure you have at least one internal link to a story or case study on your own website. Make sure all of the information you curate is of the highest quality, from a reputable source, and doesn’t send your audience to a competitor.
Creating blog posts like this is a great way to circulate content from your favorite publications, give credit to the original author, and make some friends. If you link to another company’s website, not only are you acknowledging their expertise, you are improving their search engine optimization. Perhaps in the future they will return the favor.
For more information on content and blogging, check out the following resources:
Top Do’s and Don’ts for Your Content Strategy
Content Marketing Deconstructed: Legal Considerations For Agencies at Every Stage of the Process
HubSpot: The Ultimate List of Free Content Creation Tools & Resources
