We all know that original content is the best way to go, but let's be honest; it's overly ambitious, even idealistic, for time-strapped marketers to say that it's the only kind of content they'll produce in their busy production schedule. Original content needs research and time, most of which is spent on checking your facts for credibility, and yourself for bias. That's why we turn to the now typical art of content curation to save the day.

Think about it. What can you say that hasn't already been expressed by someone else, somewhere in the world? B2B marketers are then faced with two choices; either 'repurpose' original content (that's when you display content you already have in a different format, eg. turning a blog post into a slide deck, or a whitepaper into 5 blog posts), or curate someone else's content. In fact, "not only do we have content being curated from various sources, now we are curating the best of curated content" - a valid point by WCG's blog on content curation. 

Posting original content once or twice a week is wonderful in theory, but challenging and impractical in practice, especially in the realm of under-resourced B2B marketing departments. Here's what you should and shouldn't be doing when you curate content, as cited from Blog Bloke's website:

Do...

1. Reference a portion of the article as context for something you add to the conversation.

2. Actually have something intelligent to add to the content you quoted.

3. Respect the original source's intellectual property by linking back to them. 

Don't...

1. Blatantly copy-paste content.
2. Duplicate content in an attempt to steal their readers.
3. Keyword-stuff your title and article body to increase your position on Google's search engine page rank (SERP).

Where To Find Content

The standard practice is to track a set of long-tail, industry-specific keywords using Google Alerts. That way you're sent an email each time your keywords are found in a recent post, anywhere on the internet, as it's indexed by Google's spiders.

Social Media

There are some great (and free) social platforms out there, like:

• Scoop.it which allows you to create a dashboard of articles you find on the internet. They have a "Curate" tab that tracks your keywords. Here's what we see for "b2b marketing" and "content marketing":

• Hootsuite (and other Twitter monitoring tools like it) that allow you to search certain keywords and track them in real time.

Industry Blogs

Of course, you should be subscribing to industry-specific blogs which have thought-provoking material that inspires new blog posts. Here are just some of the the blogs we follow:

• Hubspot: all about inbound marketing.
• Joe Pulizzi: anything to do with content marketing.
• Copyblogger: keeps you on top of your copywriting.
• MarketingSherpa: for awesome statistics and industry research.

If you would like to learn more about content marketing, please download our free eBook, "The Content Marketing Revolution":

Do you curate content? What tools do you use?