Curating a great blog post is like creating recipe for your favorite dish. If you leave something out, intentionally or accidentally, the result will be different. In some incidences you’ll discover an entirely new dish, and in others you’ll just throw it in the bin and start again.
Now, I’m going to share the ingredients to a curated blog post recipe but you’ll add your own variations and seasoning to it and make it all your own, or you’ll use it as a base to create a new and more delicious recipes. What’s not to love about that?
Source the right ingredients:
There are thousands of tools that you can use to curate your blog post ranging from Bundle Post to Scoop.it. When you’re curating your content for the post you need to stick with one tool per post. As you curate more of them you’ll find tools that you come back to again and again.
Ingredients to your best blog post dish:
- Good content – always curate the best content you can find. Don’t settle for second best.
- White space – your content should be able to speak for itself don’t bury it in clutter
- Graphics – a picture says a 1,000 words and a great one will be pinned over a 1,000 times.
- Internal links so that your reader can get the back story (if any) to your curated post, and content that will fill in the knowledge gaps.
- Affiliate links / Your own product links – if these are relevant to reader then you need to include them. Don’t be shy or coy about this, blogging costs time and money and its a business decision. If you link to good quality and relevant products your readers will thank you.
- Benefit rich titles – the reader will know exactly what’s in it for them and they won’t feel cheated or robbed that the article doesn’t deliver on the promise of the headline.
- H2 and H3 headers – These are the guides that make the blog post recipe scannable
- Sources: When curating content you absolutely must state your sources.
As well as sourcing and mixing in the ingredients you also have to present it to your reader, we eat with our eyes as the saying goes so visually appealing content is vital.
Why should you stick to the recipe? It’s not necessarily a bad thing, to deviate from the path, just ask little red riding hood 😉 but leaving something out will mean a different ending and a different response to your curated post. For example if you leave off the source you may find yourself hit with a plagiarism allegation. If you choose a bland graphic you might not get the traffic you want from Pinterest and other visual bookmarking sites. If you tweak your headline you might get a lot more social shares.
But the biggest bonus that comes with curating to a recipe is that you’ll have more time to curate better content. Following a guide means you have more time to put your energy where is really matters instead of wasting time and resources.
Image attribution: http://seobuzzworld.com/best-content-curation-tools/
http://lonelybrand.com/blog/most-marketers-on-board-with-content-curation/
Sarah Arrow
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- Content Curation: Your Blog Post Recipe - May 18, 2014
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