The courage to curate: Share others’ articles for content marketing boost

The benefits will give you the courage to curate content!

At the heart of our content marketing strategies, we all strive to create remarkable content that will be useful to our audiences and worthy of sharing.

But we all have to face the fact that – under pressure to create a continuous flow of new material — not all of the content we create meets that standard.

Better Content, Less Noise

As consumers of content, more often than not we find ourselves digging through a lot of unhelpful posts to get to a few golden nuggets of info.

As Mitch Joel says, there is way too much noise out there, and mediocre brand content just gets lost.

Before we publish, we should step back and ask:

• What’s the real takeaway for our audience?
• Did we add value?  Help people?  Tell a great story?

We may strive to be original and hit a home run every time, but the bar for great original content is high.

Instead of rushing to publish half-baked, me-too content, just for the sake of publishing something, consider that content curation using a republishing tool is another way to add value to your audience.

• Content curation using a republishing tool gives you publishing options to supplement creating high quality original content.
• It lets your brand shine, and is also a tactic you can leverage when you don’t have time to create content from scratch.

A lack of confidence?

We know what you may be thinking:  Won’t content curation and republishing someone else’s content on my site just dilute the impact of my own branded content?

Sales consultant Rick Roberge (@rainmakermaker) said recently in a LinkedIn group that when it comes to sharing other people’s posts, we content creators suffer from a lack of confidence.

Maybe that comes from fear of not being original. We can’t really say.

But according to Rick, next time we read someone’s meaty article, instead of writing our own ‘me-too’ post, we’d be better served by having the courage to share the original and say, “Please read this great post I found. Boy, I wish I had written it. Let’s discuss it.”

We agree. You may think you are losing your own brand’s standing when you do this, but paradoxically, you actually reinforce it.

But it takes confidence, and the right tools, to execute.

 The New Content Curation

Note that we’re not talking about the typical ‘curation round-up’ type of post that offers links to articles and blogs that the author presumes will be of interest to his/her readers.

We’re talking about providing unique perspective on an article relevant to your audience’s interests. For content marketers, the idea is to create new content that uses republished content as a springboard.

This brand of content curation is highly credible. You’re not just passing along a link, you’re giving your point of view and furthering a discussion.

And as Joe Pulizzi shared in a recent #CMWorld chat, curation can be a great relationship building strategy, too.

The fact is, you’re not expected to have every good idea. That’s totally unrealistic. But as a professional in your industry, you are expected to be well-informed and have opinions about what others are saying in your space.

Your unique take on trends, issues and events is what sets you apart from your competitors.

Benefits of republishing:  Thought Leadership, and Time

To recap the benefits of this approach:

• Your confidence in sharing others’ content along with your commentary goes beyond thought leadership. It demonstrates strength.
• Sharing something excellent, or something that goes against the grain, and explaining why it furthers your audience’s knowledge and decision-making makes your curated content extra valuable.
• Having the courage to curate offers one other big fringe benefit for content marketers … you’ll save time.  It takes less time to comment and create context than to create from scratch … and the result for your community can be just as valuable.

Try repubHub:  a new republishing tool for content curators

Our new content portal, repubHub, offers you access to continuous feeds of relevant articles and blog posts by authoritative sources from which you can choose the best for commentary.