Curating content can be like finding a haystack needle, if not a stem or leaf in a pile. Fortunately, many software tools help content marketers discover good articles and videos to share.
Curation is a type of content marketing. It seeks to attract, engage, and retain customers for your business. It pulls them to your company. And it can work well with your search engine optimization, email marketing, and social media efforts.
Curation works on the same principles as other forms of content marketing. Your business provides content that is useful, informative, and entertaining. Consumers (your audience) read, watch, or listen to that content. In the process, the audience begins to recognize your business as an authority on the topic, and they may feel indebted to your company for all of the content it shares. That sense of owing something (reciprocity) can lead to sales.
The first step in successful content curation is identifying compelling content from third parties — articles, blog posts, videos, or similar. The material should be related to the industry your business serves (and your topic clusters). Strive for rare content not already shared on thousands of social media profiles or in dozens of email newsletters.
This post will address several applications to help you find that content.
Content Discovery
Buzzsumo may be the best-known and most popular content discovery software. Its free plan has two tools that can help.
The first is the content research tool. When you search for a topic, Buzzsumo returns a filterable list of accessible content. Say that you manage an e-commerce shop selling accessories for recreational vehicles. You could use Buzzsumo to search for the topic “RV travel.”
Use a filter in Buzzsumo to look for things published in the past year, exclude list articles and infographics, and exclude items from competitors.
Second, consider Buzzsumo’s trending tool. This shows the most popular content currently trending for a topic.
There are a few alternatives to Buzzsumo, such as ContentGems.
SEO Tools
Several leading SEO platforms, including Ahrefs and SEMrush, offer content discovery. And why not? Those platforms already scour the internet to provide SEO insights. While they are at it, it is pretty easy to help you discover helpful content.
In Ahrefs, the tool is called “Content Explorer.” To understand it, imagine you have an online store selling exercise equipment.
Assume one of your topic clusters is “healthy diet.” You are already creating a “healthy diet” post every other week for your store’s blog, and you include at least one “healthy diet” item in your weekly newsletter. But you want the option to occasionally have curated content in the newsletter and share “healthy diet” posts in a couple of Facebook Groups.
In Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, you can search for “healthy diet,” filtering for publication date, language, word count, and popularity. At the time of writing, the tool returned 26 results for English-language content between 1,000 and 5,000 words and more than 1,000 visits in the past month.
Each of these results could be a good candidate for curation. You can dig further. Ahrefs also offers “details” about each. One of the detailed reports is backlinks. It shows all the sites (articles) linking to a particular result. Often, many of these sites are worth considering, too.
SEMrush’s “Content Marketing Toolkit” aims to discover topics that could attract customers. But it can also be used to find content worth sharing.
For example, using the Content Marketing Toolkit’s topic research tool, we can search for “healthy diet,” filtering for the United States. The results can be viewed in several ways, including an interesting mind map. But for content curation, the “Explorer” view may be best. It lists the most popular content for your topic and its possible subtopics.
Ahrefs, SEMrush, and other SEO tools can be good options for content discovery.
RSS Readers
Feedly is a favorite RSS reader that also helps you find excellent sources for content. As with the other tools described in this article, Feedly allows you to search on a topic. But instead of returning a list of accessible content, it provides a list of sources.
These sources might be popular websites or established expert bloggers. For example, if you had an online store selling photography equipment, you might want to find unknown photography sources. Feedly would suggest following Digital Photography School sites, 500px.com, and The Big Picture blog at The Boston Globe.
