Understanding the Value of Your Voice in Content Curation

When it comes to writing content, there is no doubt that you want your content to be interesting and memorable. Hopefully, you are publishing a combination of original and curated content. That gives your readers interesting articles to read and a wider, more unique perspective. However, your curated content will not be valuable to your business if you don’t add your personal spin.

Your unique style and voice

Because there is so much content and so many topics out there, it is very important to choose what you want to share carefully. The opportunity (and abundance) that you have in front of you when it comes to content is vast. Curated content alone offers a wide variety of interesting topics and compels readers to digest everything that they can get their hands on. However, curated content should be handled in a specific way if you are to leverage it properly and if you are going to get the most out of it for your audience and for your business.

You don’t want to simply copy someone else’s content with an attribution line. You want to add your voice to it.

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What you should constantly have in mind is the idea that you must consistently add value to the curated content that you have chosen to share with your target audience. Your voice (or your spin) on what is being discussed is critical to your success. If you simply give credit to the person who wrote the content but you don’t really add any value in terms of your own thoughts and knowledge, why are you bothering to share that content at all? The reason that your target audience members are on your website (or are interacting with you on one of the social media channels that you have in common) is that they value your take on whatever you are discussing with them. If that were not the case, they would be interacting with someone else (such as the person who wrote the content that you curated).

When it comes right down to it, your voice is at least as important as the content itself. Unique content and unique value should have an equal impact.

• It should never be as simple as just sharing someone else’s content: Your perspective weighs very heavily for your target audience members. They are looking to you to help them to solve the problems that they are experiencing. You should always be driven by the concept of WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). As you are voicing your opinion about the content, you should not be shy about being controversial, if that is what is required in that particular situation. If you merely present the content, it is sort of like serving a meal of boiled chicken. The basic meal is there but it has no flavor and very little appeal.

  Curated content, when presented appropriately, takes content that is basically sound and relevant, and turns it into so much more. Your voice makes it exciting, educational, and compelling. The last thing that you want to do is to take someone else’s content and duplicate it without anything else to it. If that is the case, your audience member can go to the author’s website or social media channel and read it there without involving you.

• The challenge of finding your voice: As simple as the concept of adding your voice to the content that you have curated is, it is often more challenging than you think to come up with what you actually want to say about that content. Of course, one of the main things that someone else’s content should do (hopefully) is to inspire you to write valuable ideas that will positively impact your audience. Needless to say, you need to be extremely discriminating when it comes to what you are choosing to share that was not originally written by you.

  The truth is that content is often a conglomeration of ideas and concepts from several sources. If you have solid writing skills, you will be able to communicate the information in a way that is extremely valuable to those people who are reading it.

• Finding topics that are a close match to what you represent: If you search for content that is a close match to what you are doing and to what you really want to share with other people, you will probably have a relatively easy time of finding that content. Depending on how obscure it is, you may find as much (or more) as you need. It is important for you to remember at this point that posting some curated content along with your original content will only enhance the contribution that you are making. What you want to do is to promote discussion and get other people to become excited by the topic and engaged.

Conclusion

Adding your voice to curated content is an extremely valuable thing to do. People interact with you and read what you are sharing with them because they recognize the value that it holds. The more information on a focused topic that you give them, the more they will recognize your value as a business owner as well as the value of the content that you are making available to them. Another important thing to remember is that when it comes to using curated content, timing is sensitive. If you don’t act quickly when it comes to sharing other people’s content, someone else will come along and use it first. One other approach that may work for you is taking original content that you wrote over time and piecing it together to create new articles. That is still in the realm of curation but you are taking it from what you have already created. It is an interesting concept that may be worth exploring.

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