Content curation on WordPress: how to do it right.

One of the main ways to to leverage content curation for business is to add curated content to your website or blog. By selecting the most interesting content for your target audience and adding some context to it, you will naturally show your expertise to your visitors – a good objective in itself. But, if you do it right, you should also enjoy the following benefits:

• Audience engagement as readers can now discover more interesting content than just your own stories or product news: loyal visitors will stay longer, hopping between related curated pieces, and have reasons for coming back or even subscribe to receive your email newsletters.

• SEO as your Website now contains more quality content on your niche topic which can be indexed by Google. Not only will that content be well targeted and relevant but it will also be organized and contextualized which is what Google is looking for (more on seo benefits of content curation here).

• Social Traffic as your readers can share content they like while directing traffic to your site (more on why you should use a content hub for your social media publishing here).

• Conversions as readers of your curated content are not just clicking on links in your tweets or Facebook posts to end up on third-party websites, but are instead being directed to your own website that now acts as a content hub. You can incorporate call-to-actions in your hub to either contact you, subscribe to your newsletter or request a demo of your product (more on how to use content curation for inbound marketing and lead generation here).

So how do you integrate curated content to WordPress in the right way, to reach these objectives?

Not all integrations are created equal, and some integrations will not deliver the above benefits in an optimal way. Here are the pros and cons of key integration options that you should be aware of:

1. Embed a sidebar widget

A quick and easy way to add curated content to WordPress is to add an RSS-widget to the sidebar of your blog. Simply adding the RSS feed of your curated stream to the WordPress RSS widget will do the trick:

Of course the basic RSS widget of WordPress is very minimal in terms of design and lacks a visual experience.  If you’re using Scoop.it for your content curation, you can make things look much more dynamic by using the Scoop.it widget:

But regardless of the design and while this type of integration is really quick, it has the following limitations:

• No content is displayed beyond a title and a visual: your insights are not showing which is a lost opportunity to engage your audience and this makes your content less attractive from an SEO standpoint.

• No new web pages are created as a result: from an SEO standpoint, this will impact your existing pages (with the restriction above) but will not help having more pages indexed by Google.

• Readers can not share any of the content from your site.

2. Embed curated content pages

Another layout you might consider is to have one page of all of your curated content (or one page per topic if you’ve curated several topics).  If you’re using Scoop.it, the embed code will let you do that with a simple cut and paste. Here’s an example of how it can look.

Compared to the previous solution, this implementation lets you achieve a lot more: it incorporates visuals, your insights are now clearly showing and this page can have conversion hooks as well as the full navigation of your site to let your readers go back and forth. But again, with the above-listed objectives in mind, it has the following limitations:

• You’re adding only 1 page (or 1 page per topic) to your site which is better than none but doesn’t optimize your content curation efforts.

• Readers can still not share any of the content from your site because even though you could have sharing buttons on these posts, there are no URLs on your website for this content. You could create tweets and Facebook posts redirecting to the original content but you would then lose the benefits of having a content hub for your social media publishing.

3. Enable a CMS integration with WordPress to turn your curated content into WordPress posts

This solution solves the above limitation as each piece of content you curate is now turned into a WordPress post, with its own permalink URL that can be indexed by search engines as well as re-shared by your readers individually.

The problem that could arise now is how to differentiate your curated content from your created content?

This might not be a problem if you don’t create much original content or if you consider both to be equally important and interesting to your readers. There is no right or wrong answer to this: on the Scoop.it blog, we mix them both because our curated pieces always including a fair amount of original content from us as a Scoop.it “insight.” Plus the Scoop.it integration we use makes it clear it’s curated by prominently displaying the source of the original content and links back to it.

However, you might feel they should be separated for editorial reasons, or you may want to simply organize your content in a certain way if you have multiple topics.

• Mapping posts by WordPress category:

One way to do this is by mapping your curated topics within WordPress categories. If you have only one topic, you can assign all of your curated posts to a category called “Curated content” for instance. If you have say 3 topics, you could have 1 topic in the “Industry News” category, another one in “Market trends” and a third one in “Best practices”.

Then by using Menus from the Appearance settings of your WordPress dashboard, you can organize how you want to display content from your various categories:

An example of how this can be seen at http://acme-insurance.com/ where the Blog main menu shows both curated and created content mixed, but the corresponding submenus are showing only original posts  (http://acme-insurance.com/category/news/) or only curated posts (http://acme-insurance.com/category/curated-content/).

• Create a dynamic home template:

If you’re using your own WordPress template or are able to modify your existing one, you can even go further and make your home page a lot more dynamic by showing the latest posts by category. WordPress is a very powerful platform and lets you do pretty much what you want so the possibilities are limitless.

Of course, regardless of the type of integration you choose, there are general best practices to follow around content curation that you can read in detail here and that are compiled in that slideshare. Addinig your own insights to your curated pieces in particular is a powerful way to drive more SEO and engagement while positioning yourself as a thought leader with expertise.

You may think of your website as primarily your home page and then, further down, some content pages that visitors can navigate to. It’s not. In today’s reality where social media and SEO drives the most traffic, most of your readers will come from content pages first to THEN discover your website’s home page. So while it is important to give access to your curated content on your home page for audience engagement, it will not drive more traffic if you simply do that. The good news is you can address that easily through a proper integration of your curated content into WordPress at the CMS level such as the one we offer as part of our premium plans.

And we love feedback so let us know what you think: what other best practices have you found useful when integrating curated content to WordPress?

Ready to add curated content to WordPress? Get a demo of the Scoop.it Content Director CMS integration with WordPress:

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