Content Curation Strategies for 2013 – by Tony Evans » Content Curation Software

Content is everywhere online. Type in any word into the Google search box and you’ll get results. But with so much information available online, how can one manage what’s out there and create something that works best for your marketing needs?

The answer lies in good content curation. This is a process of taking in that third party data that you find online – articles, pictures, music – organizing, and sharing them so it works for your content marketing.

Let’s take Alltop.com for example. It’s an online collective of different articles talking about almost anything from work and health, to lifestyle and entertainment. It has so much content, much of it already in the front page. But you won’t get lost in all of it. You log on, take a second to scan the homepage and in that instant, you find what interests you.

What we can see here is how good content curation can effectively market a range of ideas online. Their data are neat, presented in a systematic manner with easy navigation, and you get a good idea what’s in store for you before clicking a link.

This year, why not follow the example of Alltop and be good curators of the data we have? Here are some strategies you can use to effectively curate content.

1. Pick your sources well.

You start your journey through content curation by gathering data from a topic you’ve chosen. And many sources are out there to help by doing some of the work for you.

News websites and even blogs provide you with RSS feeds, which sorts out information from within their own content and provide you with the data specific to your country, time, or topic of choice.You can also use websites like The Huffington Post and Alltop that do initial archiving of information and make it easier to find what you like.

2. Organize your data.

Organizing is at the very core of content curation and this is what makes it effective. Arrange your data into different categories within your topic of interest.

Even put them in bubble diagrams if you like.

From there, you can subdivide your data into the ones that are really important, what tells the story, and the ones that you don’t really need right now, but might want to save for later. After that, make a summary of each category so you remember what you already have when it’s time to use them.

3. Share it.

They say a good idea is only good as its execution. The content curator’s way of doing this is to share the organized data he/she already has where the audience can find it. Use snippets of the pages or small versions of the pictures with the links to the full content so the data can be social media friendly. You want your content list to be easy on the eyes. Twitter, Facebook, and even Youtube have proven that social networks are standing as one of the best (if not the best) ways of sharing information online.

Content curation is there because you don’t want to get lost or even drown in all the data coming in when you’re setting up your marketing plans. You want to keep true to your idea and not give unnecessary pieces of information. And more importantly, you don’t want your audience to get lost.

When swimming in a pool of data, always remember that good content curation keeps you, and the viewers inspired and stay on track of what the conversation is really all about.

Author bio:

+Tony Evans is a freelance web designer, an alumna of Business Management at Upskilled Australia and
a mother of a beautiful daughter, Athena.

She has a passion in Aerobics and cooking healthy recipes.