As a Shopify store owner, your time is precious. Between coordinating your social and email marketing, staying on top of customer queries and complaints, and all the other responsibilities of being an entrepreneur, cutting corners is basically essential.
Enter content curation.
For some, content curation is seen as ‘cheating’. But it’s actually a perfectly legitimate (and incredibly common) practice for brands and marketers that can save you valuable time. If you’ve yet to embrace the power of curated content for your Shopify store, read on for some handy hacks you can start using today.
Repurpose your existing content
If you’ve been around the Shopify block for a while, you’ve probably already got a wealth of great content under your belt. Seasonal gift guides, industry opinion, fun listicles — it’s all there.
But you don’t have to strive to create new content every single time. It’s perfectly acceptable to go back to your existing content to recycle and revamp it.
Find the highest-performing posts in your existing content strategy. If you don’t already, create custom URLs for your posts to track their popularity, or use your Shopify Analytics to quickly locate your most popular pieces of content.
Now look at these pieces and simply update them. For example, your seasonal gift guide for last year could easily be revamped for this one. Or you could turn a general blog post into an essential guide with actionable takeaways.
As long as there’s no duplicate content in your new piece, your new piece will be a perfectly suitable addition to your editorial calendar.
Use tools to speed up your process
Struggling to curate your content? Spending too much time finding useful sources for your blog?
There’s an app for that.
Or rather, there’s a staggering range of free or affordable tools online that can help streamline your content curation process. As the ecommerce industry grows, more and more online tools become available that can help your store grow with it. Consequently, there is also a growing number of content curation tools that can help you identify sources, find niches, and learn what’s popular with your customers.
One of the hardest parts of content curation is simply ideation: finding that perfect title that’ll hook your readers. BuzzSumo is an online research tool that lets you quickly and easily find popular content (and its creators) based on a keyword or phrase.
Each result returned comes with key stats about its engagement, shares, and links across social and online. Armed with this information, you can easily come up with an idea that you will know for certain your audience will love.
And if you find yourself returning to the same sources over and over again, Headslinger is a must. It lets you collate useful articles into folders online for easy access at a later date, saving you time further down the line.
For more useful content curation tools, click here.
Get visual with your copy
As you well know, content isn’t just about the written word. Visual content is just as valuable when it comes to your store’s content strategy. Indeed, 32% of marketers point to visuals as the most important type of content in their strategy, compared with 27% for blogs.
And it’s not just effective — it’s also very easy to curate. How? By simply turning text into something visual. Let’s say you’re a tech and gadgets site that wants to push a new range of time-saving kitchen gadgets. You could spend a few hours writing an 800-word blog post extolling the virtues of your gadgets and how important they are. Or.. you could quickly collate some handy statistics about how much time people spend in the kitchen and turn them into a beautiful infographic. This helps visually highlight your customer’s pain point, which you can then use to push your products.
With a range of free infographic makers available online, it’s easy to create a piece of content in minutes that will effectively engage your audience. It’s visual, useful, and serves as a great springboard to push your products by highlighting your consumers’ pain points.
Offer a critical eye
Another easy way to save you time with your content curation is by providing an evaluation of an existing piece of third-party content. Find an in-depth analysis of an article, news story, or opinion piece that’s related to your niche, then offer your own personal views on it.
For example, let’s say an influencer in your niche publishes an article on a new product. You could curate select snippets of that piece (all credited, of course), and offer an alternative opinion on that product instead.
This hack doesn’t just help you quickly fill up your editorial calendar. It also comes with the added bonus of enhancing your brand’s authority in your customers’ eyes.
This is a technique commonly employed by many Shopify dropshipping sites to help distinguish their online store from their competitors. By offering expert opinion on current events and issues relevant to their customers, they position themselves as a source of knowledge (even if they offer the same products as their competitors).
By employing this yourself, you can create a consumer base that will return to you time and again for more of the same useful and erudite content.
Your content strategy is a vital part of your ecommerce business, and it’s one you need to constantly work on. Naturally this will require a lot of your time, so cutting corners wherever you can is essential. Do yourself a favor and follow the simple hacks above. You’ll save yourself valuable time and energy so you can focus on the other parts of your ecommerce business.
Patrick Foster writes for Ecommerce Tips, where he regularly shares his own experience in the ecommerce industry. With more than one Shopify store under his belt, he knows a thing or two about growing an online business. To find his latest insight and knowledge, head to Twitter @myecommercetips.
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