Small and large businesses alike have integrated blogs into their marketing strategy and many have found great success. For a small business blogging is a way to become recognized as an expert in your field. The challenge however is providing interesting and relevant content on a consistent basis. Put simply, it can be hard to find the time to compose quality content to share with your readers.
The current trend of content aggregating is a way that bloggers are ensuring that their content cup runneth over without spending an unbalanced amount of time blogging. Content aggregation is when an individual or organization gathers content found on the web from various online sources and reuses them for their own purpose.
Four examples of common ways small businesses are repurposing the content of others are:
- List Posts: These posts amalgamate like items into a single list for the reader. Getapp.com created a list post earlier this year highlighting the “Ten Best Twitter Apps for Small Businesses”
- Opinion Post: Quite often bloggers will read an article or blog post and have a strong enough opinion about it that they want to offer further support or a rebuttal so they will post a link to the original material and offer brief commentary of their own.
- Review Posts: When bloggers and business owners find that “thing” they can’t live without or can’t stand they often share their product/service reviews on their own blog. I see this often on food and technology blogs where the content offered is simply their opinion or a recap of their experience.
- Re-Post: Made popular (in my opinion) by Twitter’s Re-tweet feature bloggers often just repost content they have found with a few lines on why you should read the content yourself.
The amount of information available on the web is limitless and some blogs have become 100% aggregated content. This practice has some small business owners concerned about seeming inauthentic. They instead spend hours per week writing original content to share with their readers, offering thought leadership pieces, how to instructions, advice, and serving as an all-around resource to their followers. So which is the best approach?
Like most business decisions there is no right or wrong answer. For some businesses strictly aggregating content achieves their business goals and meets their reader’s needs. For others they prefer to be aggregated rather than be the aggregator. In my opinion, for the majority of small businesses (especially soloprenuers) a combination of both is the most effective approach.
Benefits of a Combined Approach to Generating Blog Content
- Original posts demonstrate your breath of knowledge and can help drive leads for your business.
- Original posts that are well written may be aggregated by other sources increasing the back-links to your site.
- Aggregating content requires less writing time per post and therefore allows you to have more content available to your readers.
- Aggregated posts can show up in search results when someone searches for terms related to the original article.
- Aggregated posts show that as an expert in your field you are always reading and researching what is relevant to your clients.
What are your thoughts on the authenticity of content aggregation? Which approach are you using to generate blog content? Are you planning your content in advance or just writing as the ideas hit?
