Content is at the core of every imaginable aspect of online marketing – be it blogging, social media sharing, newsletters, or lead nurturing. Most marketers, however, have a problem to publish high-quality content consistently. Unfortunately, a consistent stream of high-quality content is also the most important factor behind a successful content marketing strategy. To solve the issue, we developed a set of features to help our customers to author curated blog posts and effortlessly generate high-quality content.

Why to Curate Content in a Blog?

Posting content consistently is the only way to ensure that your brand can capture a share of voice online. Companies that post content inconsistently have a hard time establishing authority, ranking in Search results, and building reach on social media.

Another aspect that has a big impact on content marketing is content quality. To stand out, companies have to focus on quality or face the limbo of mediocre content. That being said, creating high-quality content is not trivial – it requires expertise, time and substantial budget allocation. For that reason, many companies take long to produce content, which leads right back to the first problem of consistency.

So what does this have to do with content curation? Simple: Aggregating and annotating the best resources is a great way to produce a high-volume of content without compromising quality. The major benefits of such an approach can be summed up in three points:

• Annotating content requires little effort and is an easy skill to learn. Your audience will value good annotations and so will search engines.
• By curating content from experts and industry leaders you ensure that you provide your audience with valuable content resources.
• You aren’t bound to articles. You can curate videos, podcasts, infographics and other resources that might have been too costly to produce in-house.

How to Curate in inboundli?

inboundli offers a simple workflow to author curated blog issues quickly and in an optimized format for people and Search Engines alike. The end result looks like this curated post. This type of curation is called “Quoting” and is one of the most effective ways to use third-party content on your website. Your annotation above the quoted texts is considered unique content by a search engine and when done right, adds value to your readers.

Where to Find This Feature?

The feature is available with our new Pro and Enterprise plans and as a separate feature for existing clients. You can access the "Blogs" page from the top navigation menu on inboundli.

Setting Up Default Behavior

To make sure that you spend as little effort as possible on creating a new blog issue, we implemented default behavior that you can control from the blog settings. Once you are on the "Blogs" page, select the tab labeled “Settings”.

In this menu you can define the default behavior for repetitive tasks on your blog.

• Default issue title: This will create a default headline for each new blog issue that you create. It’s useful if you have a weekly digest and part of the title is reused every time, e.g. “My Weekly Digest #3” (inboundli will add the right issue number by itself).
• Default quote length: This determines how many characters inboundli uses to populate a quoted text. This is used when you add content to your blog issue.
• Default opening paragraph: You can create a template for the opening paragraph so it’s quick to create an introduction to your blog issue.

Creating a New Blog Issue

To create a new blog issue, simply click the “New issue” button on the “Issues” tab.

Adding Content To a Blog Issue

Clicking the “Add to blog” button from anywhere in inboundli will bring up a popup menu where you can customize the title of the article, write a synopsis and select a blog issue from a dropdown menu (you can also create a new blog issue from the same dropdown). The quoted text is already populated by inboundli and the length of the quote is determined by what you defined in the blog settings.

Add and content to a blog issue from the Suggestions, Saved or Stats page:

Edit the title, annotation and quoted text and select a blog issue:

Edit a Blog Issue and Articles

Back on the “Blogs” menu, you can click “Edit issue” to customize the blog issue's title and opening paragraph. This is the first thing that search engines come across when they crawl your blog pages, so it’s advisable to customize this section – search engines analyze content top-to-bottom and prioritize the content at the top. Using the same first paragraph will signal to the search engine that there is little variation (and hence value) between current and previous blog pages. We recommend creating a template text in the blog settings tab and customize it for every new blog issue. Similarly, you can customize each article by clicking on “Edit article”.

You can change the order of content in your blog issue by clicking on the up and down arrows to the right of each article.

What About SEO?

To make sure that you have enough original content, look at the Original words vs. Total word count indicators. 300 original words or 30%-50% of original text is a good bottom limit for SEO purposes.

In addition, inboundli generates the “cite” HTML attribute on each quoted block of text so that search engines don’t consider your post to contain duplicate content. This also eliminates the need to use a rel=canonical attribute in your post (citing is better than canonical because only quoted sections refer to the original publisher rather than the entire article). Apart from citing, inboundli also links to the original article twice: once from the title and once from below the quoted text. We suggest keeping the formatting that inboundli provides to get the most SEO value out of your blog issue.

I Have a Great Blog Issue, What’s Next?

You can preview your blog issue and once you are happy with the result just click on “Get HTML” and paste the copied code it into your CMS (integrations with CMS will be available in the future). From there, it’s off to publishing and sharing with inboundli.

Summary

Quoted blog issues require very little effort to produce, yet they give you all the important benefits of an original piece of content. We recommend starting a digest published periodically, so you are in effect creating a news section in your blog. This way you can cover all the important events in your industry, project authority and rank higher in SERPs (search engine results pages) while freeing time to produce your key content assets.