Once you’ve built a blog, populating it with aggregating content from multiple sources is often the easy part. Now that you’ve created a blog, you may wonder: what are the most effective techniques for curating and presenting your content in a compelling way?
Knowing how to curate content and highlight appealing content can give you a powerful competitive edge and enhance your blog readership. However, that requires a precise strategy and a sound approach to your curation process.
In this piece, we explore what having a strategy and approach means. We discuss nine techniques you can apply to your content today to appeal to your audience in the best way possible.
1. Know Your Audience’s Interests
If you want your content curation strategy to succeed, the first step is understanding what your audience wants. A deep understanding of their needs can be the make-or-break difference that sets your blog apart. It can also distinguish you from generalists and set you apart as a leader in your chosen space.
You can gain meaningful insights into your audience’s needs in several ways. You can start with conventional methods, including conducting interviews, surveys, and polls–– just like this one conducted on LinkedIn.
Additionally, metrics from your blog (pageviews, bounce rate, scroll depth, etc) can also tell you plenty about what your readers love. For instance, you’ll learn the topics your readers love, the types of media they engage with the most, and the most engaging content formats to use.
Once you gather insights about your readers’ interests, the next step is to create and prioritize content that aligns closely with those preferences. For example, if your audience shows a strong interest in golf, you can focus on delivering articles, videos, and other media related to the sport. By tailoring your content to their interests, you ensure that your feed remains highly relevant and engaging, enhancing the overall user experience.
When considering your audience’s interests, look for themes, formats, and topics they engage with most. This approach keeps your content fresh, personalized, and valuable to your readers.
2. Select High-Quality Sources
The internet remains flooded with all types of information, and this can put you at risk of information overload. Additionally, by curating repetitive, duplicate, and low-quality content, you put your blog at risk of losing its glowing reputation as a reliable source of information.
How to resolve this? Opt for reputable and reliable content sources. Often, high-quality and trustworthy content comes from respected institutions, publications, thought leaders, and verified industry experts. For example, using articles from established media like The New York Times for news, or Harvard Business Review for business insights, signals to readers that you prioritize accuracy and depth. You’re always guaranteed success if you derive your content from such sources.
To make your content even more engaging, aim to include voices from diverse perspectives. Adding opinion pieces, interviews, or case studies alongside data-driven reports can deepen your readers’ understanding of a topic. For instance, if you’re covering climate change, you might include scientific data from Nature along with an op-ed from a leading climate activist. This variety enriches the conversation and offers readers a fuller picture.
3. Use Categories and Tags
Think of your blog as a library. In just the same way your local city library has sections and topics, you can use tags and categories to make content more accessible to all your readers. Categories and tags are useful tools, especially if you curate content for multiple topics (or subtopics) in one blog.
In WP RSS Aggregator, you can create a well-organized “library” for your blog by using categories and tags to make content accessible and easily discoverable.
Let’s say your blog covers technology. With WP RSS Aggregator, you can assign categories to your aggregated RSS feeds, helping readers navigate different topics. For example, you could set up categories like Hardware, Software, and AI.
By categorizing feeds this way, you allow readers to browse specific sections of your site and quickly find the information they’re interested in.
Additionally, you can use descriptive tags to make content easily discoverable when readers perform a local search on your website. Tags can help your readers filter out content based on themes and keywords, finding relevant content within short periods.
4. Highlighting Key Items
What if something spectacular or noteworthy happens in the marketplace of ideas? You’d want your readers to know about it. You’ll also want to keep up with the trend until it dies or evolves into something bigger. How do you keep your audience’s attention while at it?
One way to highlight key items is to use featured posts. Featured posts draw your readers’ attention to them, and stay pinned at the top of your blog until you remove them. You can use them as a tool on standout articles or media, ensuring high-quality content doesn’t get buried in a sea of newer but less exciting posts.
You can also use visual cues like bold headings, badges, and icons that draw users’ attention to particular posts. Moreover, you can use images and highlighted sections of top-performing posts to make them stand out further, increasing their click-through rates.
5. Create Engaging Summaries
Not all your readers have the time to read through all your curated content. However, they can often spare a few minutes to scan through top stories and trending topics throughout the day. How do you captivate them and capture their attention while you have it?
Brief and engaging summaries are the key. You can use summaries to snapshot content and draw the attention of a busy reader to a specific piece just like this Eyespy.org as shown below. Engaging summaries often increase the click-through rate of an article, increasing its engagement.
Summaries also create an opportunity for you to present popular and trending items on top of your curated feed. This often piques the interest of your readers, causing them to follow your hot topics and most-read content sections.
6. Use a Recommendation System
You can dial in further by creating a recommendation system. This system uses past user behavior to predict future interests and suggest related content. Let’s say some users on your technology blog focus more on AI topics. As they read more, your blog recommends content with similar topics.
A recommendation system will also keep your feed dynamic, especially if you follow trending topics and emerging stories. You can create hot topic categories and most-read sections to help new and existing readers find recommended content for their consumption.
7. Regular Updates and Maintenance
Keep your curated feed up to date with the most recent content. The easiest way to do this is to use WP RSS Aggregator.
The plugin allows you to automatically refresh and pull in the latest content from your chosen sources regularly. You can configure your feed to update daily, weekly, or even hourly, depending on your strategy, ensuring that your blog always displays the freshest, most relevant content for readers.
Moreover, readers love to know your curated blog only offers fresh and recent content that keeps them updated on their favorite topics.
Additionally, you should conduct frequent audits on your blog to remove or update old content. This includes content from dead sources or content to be archived and replaced.
8. Encourage User Interaction
How do you know your curation strategy works? Simple. Let your audience tell you how they feel about it. Feedback from your audience can help you make your blog better and curate content that’s relevant, engaging, and timely.
You can learn tons from comments, replies, and messages from your audience. Often, creating a feedback system can help you learn what they like, dislike, encourage, and discourage. Moreover, you can interact with them on social media and other methods to learn more.
Surveys, polls, and other internal tools can also help you capture your audience’s sentiments. You can also use engagement metrics to refine your curation strategy, giving more emphasis to the types of content your audience interacts with most.
9. Visual Appeal
A clean and attractive blog layout is the key to creating a visual appeal to your blog. It invites users to scroll further and read more content presented in a pleasing layout. Nothing beats reading a well-curated blog display with a clean layout, readable font, balanced use of white space, and well-organized structure.
With WP RSS Aggregator, you can easily create a visually appealing and well-organized feed that enhances your blog’s layout and readability. The plugin offers flexible display options that allow you to choose from different displays, such as grid, list, or excerpt views. You can tailor the layout to match the overall design of your blog, ensuring that it feels cohesive and inviting for readers.
Maintain a consistent design throughout your feed, using attractive color schemes, formatting, and fonts. Consistent blog appearances can enhance user experience, improving your blog performance. Also, readers view visually appealing blogs as professional and cohesive, which can build trust around your brand.
Final Thoughts
Depending on your use case, you can implement any or all of these strategies at once. But here’s one thing to note: These techniques, when implemented together, create a curated feed that not only captures attention but also provides a valuable, engaging experience for your audience.
Effective feed curation takes advantage of insight into your audience, reputable sources, and good organizational skills to present content. From there, your key tasks involve constant audits, and updates to keep your blog fresh and relevant. Also, encourage your audience to give feedback and use those insights to improve your blog.
Together, these techniques create a well-curated feed that engages, informs, and retains your audience.
Check out WP RSS Aggregator today and explore how it can help you automate your content collection and curation process.
