We live in a world of information overload. The Washington Post publishes 1,200 articles a day. Google has already indexed over 30 trillion articles. With so much content out there, content curation is key. Having access to the best quality content, whether it’s a blog post, news article, or photo, amongst the abundance of content out there, is really valuable. It is valuable to you, and it is a value you can provide your audience.
Best part is, if you are a content curator yourself, you don’t necessarily have spend an entire afternoon finding the best content.
In this blog post we cover some of the amazing tools available to quickly source interesting content for your audience.
There are two different types of content curation tools, those that help you use content that you find yourself, and those that actually help you find content yourself.
Easily manage your curated content
As you go about your week, you accumulate content from difference sources. This can lead to you emailing yourself links, bookmarking items, and saving article URLs in separate apps. It’s a mess. Many platforms recognize the benefit of aggregating your content from all over. Pinterest and Pocket are probably the most well known of this type of repository. Pinterest is the well known platform for saving photos.The Pocket app and browser extension is extremely useful for saving articles and videos.
Revue, Goodbits, and Publicate are email newsletter platforms that make it easy to pull in content that you have saved elsewhere. These platforms allow for integration with all sorts of accounts, ranging from social media & messaging accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Slack) to blogging platforms (Medium), RSS feeds (Feedly), and Pocket.
However, these tools are very passive, and depend on you to find all content yourself. What about those 30 trillion articles? You’ve only scratched the surface.
Easily source your own content
With all the content curation tools out there, it’s important to have focus on your end goal. Are you publishing a blog post? Are you looking to systematically share content to social media? Or, are you looking to streamline your email newsletter process?
In this section we highlight email marketing platforms that have built-in content curation tools to help you send content-rich emails.
Scoop.it has a ‘smart engine’ where you can put in keywords, and it will source relevant articles. Scoop.it’s content suggestion tool is just one piece of its larger marketing platform. They recommend using these sourced articles to share in email campaigns, or as inspiration for writing your own blog post.
Crate also sources articles via keywords, but also suggested websites and Twitter handles. All suggested articles enter your ‘Crate’ which you can then share to social media. There are many, many more platforms that provide similar content curation tools, such as DrumUp, Quuu, and PublishThis.
Use Ludlow, to curate audience content
And last, but not least, Ludlow.io! Ludlow is reminiscent of Scoop.it, Crate, etc. in that it also puts takes off the pressure from sourcing content, but is instead completely tailored to creating email newsletters.
Ludlow users add topics relevant to their email subscribers, and voilà, quality content is sourced to be shared with email subscribers. Ludlow’s newsletter-centric approach means that it automatically pulls the sourced content into a pre-formatted newsletter that can be sent minutes later. No need to drag-and-drop articles, style your newsletter with photos, determine font header sizes, or hyperlink articles. And, that’s one of many reasons, we believe email newsletters should take minutes, not hours (need to add hyperlink).
