How Can You Add Value
In our last section we talked about being careful about buying into "hypey" software that promises to free up your time and grow your business by automatically writing content for your site that your visitors will love to read.
We also ended our last section by asking you to make a decision that whatever your content strategy is (do it yourself, use software or employ others to write it for you), you should always aim to provide content with information that adds real VALUE to your readers and site visitors.
So ... how can you add value to web users simply by rewriting existing content already found on the web?
You can add value to your visitors if you rewrite existing content where the end result achieves one or more of the following objectives:
- The content adds a unique new perspective on the topic you are writing about.
- You make the content better than the original.
- You inject your expert knowledge or experience into the content in order to help people get a better understanding of the topic
- You save people time searching online by filtering, condensing, reorganizing and presenting information in a more convenient and easily digestible format.
Let's take a brief look at these options.
*** Add Your Unique Perspective ***
Sometimes, all you need to do is rewrite existing content for an opening or closing section for an article, blog post or tutorial that you are planning to write about where you already have an original idea for content that will help your readers gain a unique new perspective on the topic.
This is not that hard to do, especially if you are writing about your business, area of interest or something that you are truly passionate about. Just remember that you are a unique individual and that you have a unique individual perspective on things. Once you accept this you will find lots of ways to present existing information from a new angle or perspective ... yours!
*** Make It Better Than The Original ***
Sometimes you will come across an expertly-written, comprehensive article on the web that has been very well researched, is well-written and extensively covers the topic you were planning to write about. When you come across these sites, don't despair (and certainly don't try to copy and paste sections of the article into your website and claim it as your own!) Go through the content and copy the URL of the page. You can boost your own authority and save time simply by quoting one or two sections from the page in your article and giving the source credit. The content might even inspire you to write about a different angle ("add a unique perspective").
More often than not, however, you will find lots of poorly-written articles on a great topic idea. This is because many people outsource their content writing to cheap freelance writers who write generic, "fluffy" content for SEO purposes.
Better still, often you will find that your competitors have paid good money for SEO services, and what they get back from the SEO expert is a list of keywords, search phrases and topics to write content about. Most SEO experts will tell you what content to write to improve your search results, but they won't actually do the content writing for you, so the business owner just hands the list of keywords to a freelance article writer and publishes what they get back.
This leaves you with a lot of room for improving the content.
If you remember in an earlier training section (Part #14 of this training series), we said that small or solo business owners and skilled technicians who write their own content generally have a greater level of expert knowledge about their business, products, services, industry or area of expertise than most of the people they outsource the work to.
Now you have a situation where many small business owners and skilled technicians are given a list of topics and keyword phrases they paid SEO experts to create, and because they are too busy to write the content themselves, they outsource the work to freelance writers who don't have the same level of expertise and aren't getting paid to do spend time creating a comprehensive piece on the subject.
You can take the idea and easily improve on the content simply by expanding on the topics and points touched on in the original article, add a unique perspective to it, or add your knowledge and expertise and turn it into the kind of content that others will want to reference and link to from their sites.
*** Add Your Knowledge, Experience Or Expertise ***
If you have been doing something for a while, chances are that you have now become a specialist on the subject and have unique, specialized or even expert knowledge about many aspects within that specific area.
Consider, for example, someone who works in a retail travel agency. They would be able to take something as simple as a special deal sent in an industry newsletter (e.g. "Special Deal - 7 Nights In Europe") and write an almost infinite number of articles around that topic, simply by injecting their knowledge and expertise of things like travel destinations, transport options, travel accommodation, tourist landmarks, great places to eat, things to avoid when travelling in Europe, etc. into the content and even mixing things up with their own personal interests, hobbies and passions.
For example, if they like to travel, have been to Europe, enjoy fine dining, know how to travel on a budget and love to ride a bike, they could write a number of articles about "7 Unforgettable European Destinations For Lovers Of Fine Cuisine", or "How To Spend 7 Romantic Nights Cruising Around Europe's Famous Rivers" or "Places To Bike Around Europe For Less Than $100 A Day," etc ...
*** Save Users Time ***
As mentioned earlier, you can save people time searching online for topics they are interested in by doing the work of filtering, condensing, reorganizing and presenting information to readers in a more convenient and easily digestible format.
This is called "Content Curation".
What Is Content Curation?
According to Beth Kanter, an expert on content curation,
"Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information."
If you want to learn more about what content curation is and how it works, then visit Beth's blog here: http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101
Once you understand how content curation works, you will want to know what some of the best tools available for curating content are. To save you time searching for these online, we did the work for you and found this great list of content curation tools (the "Ultimate" list, actually, according to the website) with an accompanying map showing business grade content curation tools that can support organizations' content marketing strategies, as well as personal curation tools that can be used by individuals for hobbyist or organizational purposes: http://www.curata.com/blog/content-curation-tools-the-ultimate-list/
Now ... seeing that our focus is to help WordPress users discover more efficient methods of creating unique content with the least amount of effort, time and cost involved, we also looked into what content curation tools are available for WordPress users, and found these great plugins and software tools that will help you save time, and allow you to curate content directly from your WordPress dashboard:
Here are some great content curation tools and resources for WordPress users:
Curation Fire WP Plugin
CurationFire is a content curation plugin for WordPress that helps you create content and add it to your site from your WP dashboard. You can also grab .doc files, presentations or even videos from YouTube to enhance your content in just a few clicks.
Learn more here: [INSERT-URL-CUF]
ContentCurationPlugin
This WordPress plugin helps turn your website into the Huffington Post or BuzzFeed of your niche, collecting all the most up-to-date articles from around the web and curating them into regular, value-rich posts.
Learn more here: [INSERT-URL-CCP]
Interestingly enough, content curation isn't just limited to collecting, organizing and compiling content into new articles. You can also curate content and publish these as videos. Here's a software tool that will let you do this:
VideoCurationPro
VideoCurationPro lets you enter a few keywords into the software and it then sources and compiles content and automatically creates and uploads uniquely spun videos to your YouTube account.
Learn more here: [INSERT-URL-VCP]
Finally, there are things you should be aware of if you try to automate the whole process of curating content. Here's an interesting article that explains some of the drawbacks of completely automating the content curation process and describes a unique method to curate quality content for your site: https://managewp.com/wordpress-content-curation
See what I've just done above? I've just saved you time by "curating" some useful content and resources about the topic of "content curation" and adding some of my own words to connect different areas of the content together (i.e. definition, tools and resources, tips, etc.). In doing so, I was able to create a unique 450+ word blog post in less than 20 minutes work ... can you do something similar in your niche or industry to help your readers and potential customers find information online faster and more easily?
IN SUMMARY
There are many ways to rewrite existing content into something new that adds value to your site visitors.
ACTION STEP
Pick a topic that is relevant to your niche and your audience and create a unique 300-500 word article for your site using the methods discussed in this section. Once you have created this content, schedule it for publishing on your site.
Note: If you need help scheduling posts in WordPress, see this tutorial: How To Schedule Posts In WordPress (<<
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