First of all, there is no perfect example of curation. There are different ways to go about it and you’ll know it’s wrong when you see it done poorly! That said, the best way to find out how others do it and whether or not it works well for publicizing your own content is to get out there and take a look at what is ranking in the search engines already.

I recently made this video where I did just that – watch it to see examples of top ranking content that all have some sort of curation aspect:

If you are having trouble watching the video, you can see it at YouTube here: http://youtu.be/fH3roCDBhcE

As I show during the video, there is a lot of different ways to go about using information and previously published content to support your own topics and bolster your information. Top content producers use this to help flesh out their content, add aauthorityto their opinion, and to show people’s opinions – important for engaging readers and providing good content.

The best way for you to get a better grasp of how curated information appears and is done well is to be aware of what you’re seeing as you browse the web. Start to see how people use iinformation data, statistics, and chunks of content in their own published material. Once you get a feel for this you will have a better understanding of how to apply it in your own work.

The post Content Curation Part 2: Examples appeared first on Oasis Optimization.

Content Source Qualifications

• High Quality: Starting with reputable sources will make your job easier and in turn give your readers that best information. Starting with a low quality, or unknown, source is asking for trouble. There’s nothing wrong with monitoring relatively “unknown” sources but don’t rely on them in the beginning.
• Regularly Producing Content: Again, this is important in the beginning – you don’t want to have a feed reader full of sources that haven’t updated in months. When you are finding your sources be sure to see how often they post and when the last time they posted was. If it has been several weeks or months you may want to skip them.

Ok, now that you know how to screen sources for quality, you need to go out and start building your “list”. The best way to go about this is to first choose your favorite RSS feed reader. I recommend Feedly, mostly because it works well, it widely used, and the free version works well for our purposes. You can use any feed reader you want – another one that I like is Minimal Reader (not free). If you are not familiar with finding RSS feeds or using a reader, check out this article.

Building Your Content Source List

Assuming you have an understanding of RSS and how to use a feed reader, the next steps involve seeking out your content. With a keyword(s) in mind, check out the following sources that allow searching:

• Google Alerts
  • Create an RSS based alert from keywords or have it emailed to you

• Quora
  • Able to search via keywords, great for finding pain points of potential customers or markets.
  • Able to create RSS feeds from topics: for example, if you search for “Content creation” and choose the topic, you can just add “/rss” onto the end to create an RSS feed of the topic. So, the feed URL would look like this for the content curation topic: http://www.quora.com/Web-Content-Curation/rss

• Google News
  • Able to search by keywords.
  • Great tool for finding high quality, regular publishing sources. Once you find a good source, look for an RSS feed from the site or author to keep up to date for further news.

• Social Media
  • Able to search by keywords.
  • Think of hashtags: #contentcuration – making RSS feeds is a bit of a hack, but these can be useful for a quick search to see if people are talking about a subject.
  • Use http://www.pagedatapro.com to find out what the “big” pages are in a topic and then go from there for ideas and content.

• LinkedIn
  • Of course, good for business news and technical / marketing talk. Using the search by posts methods you can see if there is any discussion around a topic, from there you can find what people are talking about and any content produced around it.

The list goes on and on – this is not meant to be an exhaustive list of content sources, just a way to get started. A lot of your sources will depend on the industry you are in and what proves to be the most effective over time. In general, finding and using sources will lead you to new sources. Be sure to add any RSS feeds you come across to your feed reader for use at a later date when you start curating.

Watch the video below for a more detailed explanation of these steps and a few extra tips:

Next: Content Curation Part 2: Examples

The post Content Curation Part 1: Finding And Managing Sources appeared first on Oasis Optimization.

However, you can quickly realize some large gains by optimizing the process. In this 2 minute video I’m just going to go over some of the large topics, what there is “out there” already, and some areas of curation that you need to be aware of.

In future video releases I will detailing more areas:

• How to curate
• Where to find reputable sources to curate
• What makes a good source
• How to save time curating
• How to approach content generation and curation from an SEO perspective
• Tools that can help you with sourcing and crediting correctly

Oasis Optimization Content Curation Introduction

If you have any questions or would like more information on certain topics dealing with curation, please let me know via the contact form. Thank you.

The post Introduction To Content Curation – More Coming appeared first on Oasis Optimization.