Ten Tips to Curating Content As A Small Business

The amount of content being curated on the web is exploding at warp speed. Domo's  infographic below reveals that every minute Buzzfeed readers view 34,130 videos, youtube users upload 300 hours of video. Curating content is what we do all the time. With so much content being curated, the challenge isn’t curating content, but curating good quality content that people will engage with. To help you overcome this challenge, here are my 10 tips on how to curate engaging content for your small business.

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1. Provide Solutions To Your Customers Problems Write down the problems your customers face in your business niche. Start sourcing answers, solutions, templates and tools that you can share. You know better than anyone the problems your customers face. If you can create a list this can serve to help you source content that they will find valuable.

2. Find And Follow Thought Leaders Within Your Niche Look up the thought-leaders in your space and keep on-top of their conversations. Write a commentary about that they are saying. Who are the go to people you listen to, watch or read about. Create a RSS feed of your top thought leaders and then create themes about areas that you think your customers would want to hear about too.

3. Ask For Feedback Ask your customers and employees for feedback about your product or service and share the insights and what you are going to do about the feedback. This is a simple tip and it creates some great testimonials that you can use on your website. Staff comments are useful on your careers and About Us pages.

4. Create A Survey Create a survey for your niche and transform the results into great content and share. Using a form or survey tool like wufoo.com you can create a couple of key questions and then a report that gives the participants the aggregated results. My example: Small Business Marketing Survey Once you fill it in you get the results of everyone. A win-win.

5. Write Book Reviews Read books in your area of expertise and do a review for your customers. Tools like Readitforme, audible and Shelfari are evidence that we want quick ways to digest books. Even my podcast where I interview authors gives a shortcut for people before the invest the time it takes to read a 300-400 book. If you can summarise or recommend key books for your audience this is a great form of curating content.

6. Source Multimedia Insights Look at multimedia insights and have a media library of resources. The form of content has changed. Don’t limit yourself to books or websites. Podcasts, slides, infographics, and webinares are all great resources that you can curate.

7. How to Video Library Create a list of how to videos, some you create and some curated. Any resource that saves time is useful. How to videos are easy to do with screen iphone video recordings. Next time you have to give a complicated response maybe take a video and then send it. (Note: videos are usually large so you will need to host them and then send a link)

8. Make A Podcast Interview the best minds in your field and make a podcast. Podcasts are such a great way to create a resource. Not only do they grow your network but the create audio, and text that you can share with others. Choose your guests carefully and research your questions but today if you have a iphone and some simple software, anyone can podcast.

9. Share Your Presentations Next time you do a presentation share it in slide share or video it for sharing. Sometimes it is as simple as sharing what you have already created.

10. Aggregate Your Insights Use tools to aggregate your insights so you can find key information fast. I like Alltop for blogs and RSS, google alerts, twilert and Flipboard for my ipad (yeah I am a geek).

11. Be Yourself My last bonus point is more about your brand. Protect it. Inject a bit of you when you write. Your humour, your language, your personality. After all we are writing for each other and trying to make a connection. This is a whole lot easier when we are ourselves.