Are you struggling to produce consistent, high-quality, and original content? Trends are continually changing and what appeals to your audience is evolving. So ensuring your content is always up-to-date and relevant can be exhausting. But it doesn’t have to be.
As a content creator, you should also be curating. This might seem a little jarring. You’re a creator, so you were taught never to steal other people’s ideas, right? However, curating, believe it or not, isn’t stealing. Instead, it’s a way to connect with brands in your industry and increase your audience and their engagement. For this reason, it should be an essential part of your marketing strategy.
We’re going to analyze our favorite 5 content curation blog examples to show how you can increase your readership, save time, and market your brand as a thought leader in the industry. But first, let’s get to grips with the basics.
What is content curation?
Ever felt jealous of an influencer that manages to somehow share relevant, quirky, and funny content constantly? No need. Next time you see a post of theirs you like, share it on your own blog. Just be sure to credit the source and add your own insight on the subject. This way, you can leverage their audience while keeping your own engaged. This is the crux of content curation. Distributing relevant content that has been created by other brands and businesses to your audience.
Curated content can spruce up every aspect of your digital marketing—from social media platforms like LinkedIn to your company’s blog. It’s important to use curation across all of your channels. However, we’ll be focusing on specific content curation blog examples to spice up your website.
Types of content you can curate
Content curation doesn’t just relate to social media posts. Quite the opposite. You can curate just about any type of content you can imagine. Here’s a list of popular types of content to spark your imagination:
- Podcasts
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Social media posts
- Videos
- Lists
- Statistics
- Case studies
- Webinars
- How-to guides
- White papers, eBooks, and reports
- Email newsletters
Tips for curating content on your blog
Although curating content can be super easy, it’s a good idea to follow some basic tips to make sure you’re on the right track.
- Always incorporate it with original content
Just to reiterate an important point, content curation isn’t stealing from others for your blog’s benefit. To use this strategy effectively, content needs to be accompanied by your own personal take on the topic. Without this, your brand won’t act as an authority. Readers may simply click through to the original source because what else are you offering them?
For example, if you’re using an infographic created by another brand, be sure that it supports and sums up the arguments you have made in the blog post. It should be an informative and helpful addition to the information you’ve already supplied rather than a stand-alone piece.
- Stay relevant
Don’t curate for the sake of it. The best content is relevant. It’ll be obvious if you haven’t properly examined the sources you’re linking to, and the last thing you want is to disappoint your readers.
Part of this means curating content from trustworthy and relevant websites. Even if you’ve found a great image, think about whether you want to be linking your brand to the website it belongs to. If it’s full of advertisements and isn’t operating within your industry, don’t encourage readers to visit a site they may find irrelevant.
- Include sources
It’s incredibly important to source the websites and link to them in your blog posts. This will also benefit you in the long run, as your search engine ranking will improve with the more external links you include. This is important to keep in mind when considering SEO.
It’ll also increase your chances of creating backlinks. If you are regularly mentioning specific brands within your industry, they’ll recognize this and will be more inclined to use your content and link to your website. It’s a mutual respect thing.
- Aggregate content
Lists of relevant content that your readers may find interesting is a great way to add value to your blog posts. You can use this technique alongside your own writing, or your post can be entirely centered around the aggregated content.
Let’s take the blog you’re reading right now as an example. I am acting as a content aggregator by selecting example articles from 5 different blogs to help make my point. However, alongside the 5 pieces of curated content, I’m offering original and informative advice on the topic as a whole. This is all getting a bit meta, isn’t it?
This technique helps market your brand as a thought leader in your industry because of the knowledge and in-depth expertise you showcase about the subject you are focusing on. The image below visualizes how aggregated content organizes internet content, and curated takes it further by manually selecting content to share.
You can also use automated aggregator sites which use RSS feeds to supply your blog posts with links to plenty of relevant content. This prevents the process from being too time-consuming. However, it also takes the power out of your hands. Because of this, you can’t always be sure what will be posted on your blog, so it’s important to be cautious when using this particular curating strategy.
Benefits of curating content for your blog posts
As you may have guessed, the benefits of curating content are endless. Here are some of the most valuable we’ve found at Quuu.
Become more knowledgeable
No matter how long you have been in your industry, there is always plenty more to learn. Curating content forces you to research your topic and learn from multiple different perspectives.
Not only does it help you become more knowledgeable in a particular subject area, but it can help you understand the search engine ranking for the topic. You can assess what’s working and what’s not for other pieces of content that discuss a similar subject matter.
For example, maybe you found some great information and statistics from one article, but it’s not ranking highly on Google because it’s missing important keywords and images. You can ensure your blog post ticks all the boxes by curating the great stats you found and formatting it in an easy-to-read and engaging way.
Backlinks
Backlinks are Google gold. The more you generate, the more domain authority you have. To increase your backlinks, you need to be sharing a wealth of valuable content. You want to encourage bloggers around the world to share your posts. By doing this, your website traffic will increase, and you’ll be recognized as a thought leader.
Don’t fall into the trap of buying links or swapping links. Google takes this very seriously and will penalize your website if they suspect you are doing it. And they are the last company you want to make an enemy. Instead, focus on naturally-earned backlinks by producing consistently high-quality content.
You can also use forums like Quora and Reddit to answer questions by linking to your articles. However, be sure to build up a relationship with the community first. This way, people are more likely to trust your brand and click through to your website. Guest blogging is also a great opportunity for sharing content whilst increasing your backlinks. A great site to check out for these opportunities is GrowthHackers.
You can see in the graph above how the more referring domains (websites that are linking back to your content), the more organic search traffic your website will receive. So don’t underestimate their power!
Widen your audience
If your blog continually shares varied, interesting, and informative content, your audience is likely to grow. By exploring lots of different types of content, you’ll attract different types of people.
People are unlikely to bookmark your blog if you share the same kind of articles day in and day out. By curating content, you can make sure you’re following industry trends, staying relevant, and encouraging engagement.
You can also include user-generated content in your content curation strategy. This will encourage your readers to be more interactive and build trust in your brand among your target audience.
5 content curation blog examples
Now you know what it is and why you should do it, let’s look at some successful content curation blog examples from some marketing experts to get you inspired.
Moz
One read of The Moz Blog and you are bombarded with Tweets, stats, and up-to-date research. Its curated posts strike the balance between original insights and additional information from other sources, making it a well-known and respected brand in the digital marketing industry.
A perfect example is their blog post “9 Local Search Developments You Need to Know About from Q3 2022”. Straight away, we are introduced to four pieces of new information from four different sources. The author, Miriam Ellis, takes us through each piece and offers us her opinion, reaction, and a brief explanation.
Further down, we have engaging Tweets related to the points being made to incorporate social media content. This is a great example of using varying types of content to keep your audience engaged.
Moz is a classic example of spot-on content curation, and for that reason, they are an incredibly successful brand. According to Semrush, they have 327.9 million backlinks, an average of 2.6 million visitors per month, and therefore an authority score of 82. That’s pretty impressive.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a great go-to for digital marketers. Its vast amount of blog posts covering everything from influencer marketing to delivering the promise of connection make them an authority in the industry and a source to trust.
HubSpot is known for its statistic curation, which can be super helpful for other brands in the industry. Because of this, HubSpot will naturally generate thousands of backlinks every day. Check out their article “41 Mind-Blowing Creator Economy Stats That Marketers Can Learn From” as a prime example of content curation.
As you can see, each piece of curated content is not padded out with HubSpot’s own content. And this is okay! In fact, it’s preferable in this case. Personally, as a content writer within the content marketing industry, seeing a page like this is a breath of fresh air. I don’t have to scroll through endless paragraphs of small texts to find a gem. Each statistic is laid out for me in plain sight, making the research element of writing a breeze.
This is all about knowing your target audience. Clearly, HubSpot knows its audience wants clear, fact-checked information quickly. And they’ve nailed it.
Not only do they produce excellent blog posts, but they offer a newsletter with a roundup of all the latest and most interesting tech news. Weekly newsletters are a great addition to a content marketing strategy because they’ll increase traffic to your website by reminding your subscribers what you can offer them.
Inc
Inc is an online magazine that shares articles celebrating small businesses and entrepreneurship. Each post is a mix of original and new content padded out with curated content from relevant names in the industry.
A perfect example of this is their recent blog that compiles Tweets about entrepreneurship.
Apart from a snappy, well-written intro, Inc doesn’t offer any original content alongside this particular article. The Tweets are formatted in an easy-to-read and easy-to-share infographic. And why not? Here are the benefits of this format:
- Quick reading time: Depending on the subject matter, a quick reading time can be super helpful. The title of this article tells you exactly what you’re going to get. This isn’t a thought leadership piece, it’s a fun and engaging piece of curated content that gets straight to the point.
- Easily shareable: As we know, we love backlinks. And creating infographics is a great way to generate them because they are easily shareable, informative, and summarize lots of information in a simple format.
- Diverse forms of content: By incorporating social media posts like Tweets and Retweets, your blog posts immediately become more interesting and appeal to a wider audience.
For this reason, Inc’s total monthly audience has increased drastically, now reaching about 25,000 people. It began as a small startup, so what’s to say you can’t have the same success?
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media marketing and management tool that dedicates their blog to tips, tricks, and insights into social networks. If you search for a question about social media strategy, it’s almost guaranteed a Hootsuite blog post will pop up with the answer.
Take a look at the article “The 11 Most Important Trends for 2023”. It has a perfect example of how you can incorporate other businesses’ research within your blog. Let’s look at this in more detail in the example below.
There are multiple aspects of this single piece of curation that makes it a perfect example to learn from:
- The source: This graph belongs to Google Trends. Anything Google related obviously has huge credibility. By incorporating a brand with such high authority in the industry, your readers will feel that they can trust the information you share.
- Type of content: Rather than just stating the statistic, Hootsuite made sure they included the graph. Visual content is super important in keeping readers engaged. We’re not all built the same. Some people love to learn from reading, while others rely on visual stimulation. So, appeal to the widest audience by varying the types of content you curate.
- Relevance: It’s on topic, and it’s up-to-date. If you are curating statistics, you want to find the most recent figure possible. Otherwise, the information is made redundant. We know how quickly the industry changes, so why would we trust figures from two years ago?
Quuu
Okay, you may have guessed we’d be on the list somewhere, but who can blame us? Content curation is what we do. We pride ourselves on our blog because we know just how important it is to get right. I mean, we even dedicate a whole section of our blog to it.
You’ll notice every single one of our blog posts features curated content. From infographics and graphs to Tweets and YouTube videos. We don’t just do this to tick boxes. We do it because it makes our blog enjoyable to read. The worst thing when you’re trying to find an answer to something is having to slog through one big block of text. And there’s no need!
Let’s take a look at our current most recent blog post, “What is Content Distribution? A Guide to Kickstart Your Strategy”. Just a quick scroll through, and you can see for every couple of paragraphs of text, there is a visual piece of curated content.
Above is an example of how helpful infographics can be in your blog. If I was to try and explain that infographic in a block of text, it would soon get very confusing. So there’s no point. Not only did it save time to curate Outbrain’s content, but it increased our post’s readability. Alongside this, I learned more about how each type of media can overlap. This wouldn’t have been clear without the Ven diagram format.
Conclusion
So, now you know what makes great content curation. If you’re a small business, then kickstart your blog posts by incorporating this strategy into your marketing plan. If you’re already an established company, continue your growth by curating. Keep an eye on your metrics after you’ve started to use content curation and watch the traffic to your website flow in.
It may sound like a lot of work, and it is. But there are plenty of content curation tools that can help you out, like Quuu, ContentGems, and Pocket. You can also create a content calendar to help organize your efforts.
Have you recently started curating alongside your content creation? Let us know in the comments how it’s going and what you’ve learned!
