I don’t think for a second that you’re struggling to come up with ideas for your next book or what to write about on your author blog and website. If you weren’t a writer, that would be one thing, but since you are, coming up with content for your audience comes more easily to you than to others. Quite the contrary: many writers suffer from writing too much.
There are, however, days when you feel like you have nothing of value to say, nothing to contribute to the Great Conversation that’s taking place in cyberspace.
In the Authors Academy, we drill into members the importance of regularly publishing quality content on your blog, so that your target audience (with ample help from search engines and social media shares) could find your message more easily.
As you build your digital author platform this way, by writing on your blog about your passion and your expertise, and sharing your blog content to social media connections and followers, you run the risk of appearing to talk only about yourself. Your own Twitter feed may be just a list of links to your own blog posts. That does sound a bit like the uncle at the dinner party who only talks about himself.
The cure to both having nothing to say and sharing only your own content with your audience is called content curation. “Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing and displaying information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Services or people that implement content curation are called curators” (Wikipedia).
Don’t just be a source of information about your expertise, be also the source of information about information. Be the source where people hear about other people’s expertise in your niche as well. This means reading and sharing what other authors, experts, and authority figures have to say.
Instead of appearing only to share your own content, share other people’s articles, books, videos, or blog posts with your followers. Instead of only posting what you think about healthcare, share with your followers what you yourself just read about healthcare. They presumably follow you because of your expertise. Why don’t you become a source of all useful information about healthcare, not just your own? Quote someone else’s blog post and link to the original post. Share or reshare someone else’s blog post on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus, and add your brief commentary to it. Prove to your audience that you don’t just talk about what you yourself think, but that you’re a virtual library of thoughts on healthcare, taxes, basketball, history, westerns, or fantasy fiction writing.
I admit it’s overwhelming to think about where to look for quality content to curate for your audience. I recommend starting with feedly.com. Type in your topic and see the latest thoughts on it. Build your library of blogs to keep up with, and when you feel you’ve got nothing to share, or if you catch yourself talking too much about yourself, visit your Feedly library for new inspiration. Scan the headlines, read the ones that interest you, and share with the rest of the world the absolute best! That’s the kind of content curator your audience will trust!
