Curated Content for Blog Posts in 2014

Curated content is one very good way to ensure that your blog keeps fresh content rolling out and at the same time, offers engaging and relevant info to visitors. One of the best ways to get a loyal and engaged following is to offer quality curated content. If you have your own methods for delivering quality curated content to your readers, leave a comment below and let us know what your favourite curation tools are.   At the moment, I’m trying out the free WordPress plugin called ExpressCuration and Zemanta. Zemanta is good for adding relevant images and sharing relevant posts that are available throughout the Zemanta blog network. I like to share interesting posts from other bloggers on my site. It’s amazing how much really good info is out there for us to use.
Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AContent-marketing-cycle.jpg

 

Though our link shares may not be artistic contributions, the idea of curation is at least the same at museums and online: We’re all seeking only the best material to pass along to our patrons, customers, fans, or followers. Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way.”

 

” There are some great features for finding and sharing content.  For example, you can arrive in, in the morning, select pieces of content relevant to your business and automatically create and publish a blog posts which includes a summary of each of the content pieces found… You can search for trending content within your niche… ” Read more about Curata.

Content Curation Tools

There are both premium and free WordPress plugins. Obviously there are differences between what you get for the free plugins. Usually they offer a smaller range of choices for content to be curated from. The free plugins often have less options and are less user friendly than some of the premium plugins out there.

Content Curation tools fall into a range of categories and few boast the full list.

Content aggregators provide a dashboards where many feeds can be found in the one place:

NetVibes offers both freemium and premium versions and has a very easy to use dashboard that aggregates many feeds and widgets.

Feedly: is an easy to use content aggregator that offers both freemium and premium levels. Add content by topic, url or title. The only downside to Feedly is that it doesn’t pull in images but you can use other sites like the flickr.com Creative Commons images or use the licencing search facility on Google or Bing Search. Wikipedia is often a great source of Creative Commons licensed images.

Content discovery tools that use keywords or url’s to search for content are another type of tool that can be very useful for niche curation:

Zite app: is free and mobile and is a very efficient way to search for and aggregate content based on popularity and topic.

Content Gems: Monitors 200,000 RSS feeds and social media accounts and searches for content that correlates with your keywords. Apparently Content Gems scans the web regularly for fresh content and provides both freemium and premium versions.

Content planning is the process where you take the original, source content and put it together in an organised and planned way. It helps you to plan out the entire process from curation to publication. Two well known, Enterprise solutions, are:

Kapost.com: Provides a great calendar template for organizing your content curation.

Compendium: Creates original content in a branded hub and can be distributed to any marketing channel.

The only tool that says that it offers most of these tools, is Curata. However, this is an enterprise level tool and may be far too costly for most amateur or semi professional bloggers.

There are also the content discovery and delivery tools like: PostPlanner has both free and enterprise levels, however, you don’t get the content engine feature unless you upgrade.  Trap.it is an enterprise solution that claims to increase in intelligence as you work with it. It will both discover and post content to your blog.

Source: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/15_topnotch_content_curation_tools_15378.aspx

Here are some that I have found both free and paid:

 

Curation Fire Plugin: I like how the plugin only pulls a very small portion of the content related to your keyword and is very clear about where that content is from. It clearly links the content back to the author’s website and only adds a thumbnail image (from the original article but clearly attributed). The plugin allows you to embed both Slideshares and Youtube videos.

The owner of Curation Fire plugin is also giving away a deal that includes bonus content with training videos. The Bonus Content includes: 5 Day Outsource Backlink Plan, The Little Wordtracker Trick No One is Talking About as well as others that are very useful for finding high quality backlinks and traffic methods.

 

Curation Traffic: they have 3 offers. There is the basic plugin for $47; the theme files for the CurationHue Theme for WordPress also $47 or you can buy both the plugin and theme files for only $77 (I’m not an affiliate). They provide a ton of training and information for curating content and using their plugin. The theme files include their top theme: CurationHue as well as a news theme and a Pinterest type theme.

 

Tess Robinson is the founder of Sydney web design and SEO company, Go Viral Now. Tess spent many years in financial and policy research positions before spending time learning about web design, development and SEO.
As Go Viral Now has grown, Tess often collaborates on larger projects with a wide range of experts. As project manager, Tess is able to ensure that the best people for the job are brought together for an outstanding outcome for all our clients.