One way to increase the quality and productivity of your blog is to automate content curation. It saves you tons of time and energy while ensuring you still deliver fresh, relevant, and outstanding content to your audience.
As it stands, manually gathering, organizing, and sharing high-quality content from multiple sources can be a tedious task, and can bring your content strategy to a grinding halt. So, how do you solve this problem?
RSS feed aggregators. They simplify the process by automatically collecting and organizing content in one place, allowing you to curate efficiently and focus on enhancing your audience’s experience.
In this piece, let’s explore what RSS feed aggregators are and how you can use them to automate content curation on your website today.
What is an RSS Feed Aggregator?
An RSS feed Aggregator is a software tool that collects and organizes multiple RSS feeds into one place, where readers can easily get updates from different news outlets, blogs, and websites.
Aggregators pull content from the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs and deliver them to a singular location. It also fetches new updates regularly and allows you to group content based on topics, sources, and categories.
Some top aggregators you’ll encounter today include WP RSS Aggregator, Feedly, Inoreader, and Feedzy So, how do you use these tools to automate your blog?
Automate The Content Curation Process
One of the best ways to grow your blog is to automate common processes, including content curation. Here lies the true power of content aggregators. If you choose the right aggregator and develop a reliable content management system, you can elevate your blog to the next level.
Here’s a simple system you can use today to revolutionize your content curation:
Pick the Right RSS Feed Aggregator
Choosing the right content aggregator can have a massive impact on the success of your blog. How do you pick what’s best?
Here are some quick tips to keep in mind:
- Consider the purpose of your content: If your goal is to curate content for a blog or website, choose a tool dedicated to that purpose. Feedly and Inoreader, for instance, can curate content for websites, but they are tailored for individual and team use, and these have different dynamics.
- Ensure the aggregator meets your automation needs: Ideally, choose a tool you can configure to collect, filter, curate, and automate content.
- Choose a customizable and scalable aggregator: A scalable aggregator allows you to scale your blog within short periods while giving you access to advanced features. Some features can enhance content imports from multiple sources, add advanced keyword filtering, and support integration with social media platforms.
Your best bet here would be WP RSS Aggregator because it meets all these three criteria. But there’s more. This aggregator, designed for WordPress, enables you to import feeds and display them directly as posts or custom post types. That includes full-text articles, blogs, images, and videos from multiple sources.
Add Your Content Sources
Regardless of your content aggregator, adding content is usually straightforward. You can do this in two ways. First, you can add the website or blog URL to the aggregator, and it automatically detects its content and generates a feed. This process works for websites that support RSS feeds. Alternatively, you can manually add feeds to your aggregator if the website is non-RSS.
To avoid the obvious risk of information overload, here’s how to find high-quality sources for your feed.
- Opt for reputable industry blogs, thought leaders, and news websites in your chosen niche.
- Diversify your sources and ensure you have diverse perspectives and ideas about specific topics.
- Evaluate content for quality by assessing depth of research, citations, engagement, and influence.
Once you’ve identified and selected the best sources for your blog, you can add them to your aggregator and use its RSS feeds to generate content.
Organize Your Feeds
Creating themes in your blog can be a great way to curate your content. That’s also how to organize your blog for readers. There are two ways to do this:
Create categories and topics, with themes like “Industry News,” “Blog Inspiration,” or “Tech Trends” to streamline your curation process. This way, readers can find content based on topics they’re interested in.
Tags and folders can also be useful organizational tools. Most aggregators can group content using tags or folders allowing you to organize and find specific content later. You can also automate this process as you’ll see later.
Set Up Filters and Automation Rules
One of the key benefits of using an RSS feed aggregator is the ability to set up filters and automation rules to streamline your content curation process. This allows you to organize, prioritize, and filter the influx of content from your various sources.
The first step is to identify the specific keywords, topics, and phrases that you want to include or exclude. These will form the basis of your filters. Inclusion filters allow you to prioritize content that contains your target keywords or matches your specified criteria. Exclusion filters, on the other hand, help you weed out irrelevant or low-quality content that you don’t want appearing on your blog.
For example, you may set up an inclusion filter for keywords like “content marketing trends” to surface the most relevant industry news and insights. Conversely, you could use an exclusion filter to avoid aggregating content with keywords like “personal finance” if that’s not directly relevant to your blog’s focus.
After that, set automation rules for content categorization in folders, tagging, and priority from specific sources.
Enable Automatic Updates to Your Curated Content
One of the biggest advantages of RSS Feed aggregators is their ability to automatically pull in new content as soon as a curated source publishes it. And that’s the beauty of automation. Your blog stays updated with little effort on your part.
When you have this feature enabled, your aggregator will continuously monitor the RSS feeds you’ve added and automatically import any new posts, articles, or updates as soon as they are published by your source websites. This means your blog can stay consistently fresh and up-to-date with the latest industry news, insights, and content – without you having to manually check each source and import new items one by one.
The end result is an “evergreen” blog that always has the most current and relevant content available for your readers. They can visit your site confident that they’ll find the latest information, rather than stumbling upon outdated or stale content.
This automatic update functionality is a huge time-saver, allowing you to focus your efforts on curating high-quality sources, refining your filters and rules, and adding your own unique commentary and analysis. Rather than constantly checking for new content to publish, your aggregator handles that heavy lifting in the background.
Automate Content Sharing
Additionally, you can automate content sharing across social media where your family, friends, and audience can find your content after it has been published. Aggregators like Inoreader integrate with tools like Zapier for this purpose. You can use it to post curated content to LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and other social media platforms.
Best Practices for Effective Content Curation Automation
When automating content curation, a good aggregator does all the heavy lifting. However, as a blog owner, your job is to balance efficiency with quality. You’ll have to maintain oversight over blog integrity, and content relevance, to ensure you deliver the best possible experience for your customers.
Here are some best practices to help you balance effective content curation and quality control:
Maintain Control and Quality Even With Automation In Place
Although you can use an aggregator and automate the entire content curation process, there is no substitute for sound human judgment. You’re ultimately responsible for anything posted on your blog, even by a robot.
To ensure you keep your blog in excellent condition:
- Use precise keywords to include only relevant content and exclude loosely related material.
- Adjust your filters regularly to ensure curated content still meets your stringent quality needs.
- Track engagement metrics and incorporate your audience feedback in your decision-making processes.
Curate With Intention
Curation is a hands-on experience, and you should only curate content that serves a unique purpose for your blog and audience. It should be intentional, as that’s the only way to ensure high quality and relevance.
To curate with intention, ensure you review all content before publishing. This way, you can catch and cut redundant content and blind sharing. Additionally, match curated content to your goals, and ensure time-sensitive content gets to your audience in good time.
Add a Personal Touch
Automation, although efficient, is often mechanical. Although content may “look” right, it won’t “sound” right without a personal touch. You can avoid this in several ways.
Edit headlines and provide informative summaries that explain the importance of an article to your readers. You can also add commentary or curator’s notes to share a personal perspective.
Regularly Update Your Sources
Even the most well-tuned automation systems often require maintenance, including content sources. As industries evolve and new information emerges, your trusted sources should reflect those changes.
To guarantee this, ensure you audit your sources, remove outdated voices, and replace them with new ones. Also, diversify, expanding sources beyond mainstream options and incorporating local and global perspectives.
Simplify Your Content Curation with WP RSS Aggregator
Although content curation appears intricate, it can be made easy and efficient with the right tools. By automating the process, you can save time and effortlessly pull in high-quality, relevant content from multiple sources directly to your site.
That’s where the WP RSS Aggregator steps in. With its easy-to-use features for filtering, organizing, and updating feeds in real-time, WP RSS Aggregator allows you to focus on delivering valuable content to your audience without manual effort.
By handling the heavy lifting of content curation, WP RSS Aggregator allows you to focus your energy on what matters most – delivering a consistently engaging experience for your readers. No more scouring the web for the latest industry insights or struggling to keep your blog updated. Just streamlined, automated content curation that elevates your site and delights your audience.
Try out WP RSS Aggregator today and use it to automate your blog and grow your audience.