Content marketing improves brand awareness. It costs 62 percent less and generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing. There’s no doubt that every business owner should be using this form of promotion.

Once you have your website live, it’s time to start content marketing. Don’t become overwhelmed. You don’t have to produce multiple blog posts a day to get your content marketing off to a great start. Content curation can help you get going with content marketing as you publish blog posts to your site. In fact, many marketers recommend using curation 80% of the time and original content 20%.In this blog post you will learn about content curation and idea generation tools for journalists and news publishers.

What Is Content Curation?

Curation is taking articles, blog posts, images, and videos and sharing them with your followers. Before you think this doesn’t do you any good, it does. You are providing your followers with the information they need and want. The authors of the content you share are also happy because you just promoted their content. Everyone wins. For more information, review this content curation guide for beginners.

Since you should share more curated content, you’ll need to use some tools to find the best articles, videos, and images. The following are some of the most popular ones marketers use.

Triberr

Triberr is a content and social media marketing suite that has several powerful features packed into its core. It’s based on the concept of Tribes in which members leverage each others’ audience to get more shares and exposure for their content. However, one of the most powerful features is their content curation engine which allows you to retrieve the latest news, articles, and social posts from sources such as:

• RSS Feeds – Follow your must-read sources by adding any valid RSS feed. We’ll crawl them daily to make it easier to curate and share content to your social accounts.
• Social Sources – Create content streams from various social sources such as:
  • Twitter – track sources by @username, #hashtags, or keyword
  • Facebook Pages – unfortunately, we’re limited to Pages per the Facebook API
  • Pinterest -track sources by Profiles or Boards
  • YouTube -track sources by @username, channel, or keyword
  • Reddit -track sources by @username
• Tribe Category – An easy method to view all content within a specific category of Tribes.

In short, users can aggregate from multiple content sources (RSS, social, and/or keyword search across the web), organize that content into folders, and one-click scheduling to your social accounts. And best of all, Triberr’s community of bloggers and marketers get access to most of the platform for FREE.

Symbaloo

This tool is a great one. Choose topics your followers will enjoy, select the types of content you want collected such as blog posts, images, videos, etc., and then sit back. You’ll soon have a lot of information to share on your social networks.

Feedly

This is a lot like Symbaloo.com, but it allows you to add your own sites to it. That way you can stay up to date on what your favorite blogs are posting and share the posts with your audience. People can start to turn to you for news in your industry because you have the latest information posting to your social network.

Scoop.it

Scoop.it users can input keywords and the tool will find content related to them. It uses Twitter and Google blogs to find articles. You can review them and then share the ones you think others will enjoy.

Idea Generation Tools

While curating is a good idea, you still need to publish original content. The following tools will help you think of ideas for content.

Google Keyword Planner

Your consumers are using Google’s search engine. Find out what they are searching for by typing some keywords in the Google Keyword Planner. It will give you suggestions for topics, and then you can start writing.

Quora

People want answers when they turn to the Internet. Quora invites those people to ask their questions, so others can answer them. You can research what your audience is asking, so you can answer the questions on your blog.

Google Trends

Find out what people are searching for today by using Google Trends. The site will give you a list of all the popular search terms. You can use those terms as topics and write about them.

Portent

Portent has a content idea generator that goes above and beyond. You type in keywords, and it provides titles and tips on how to write the content.

With these tools, you’ll be a pro at content marketing. Try out a few of them to find out which ones you like best. Before you know it, you’ll have tons of content to market, which will make improving your brand awareness and bringing in more leads much easier.