There are more excellent sources to curate content, but these are good places to start.

More and more businesses today are getting into content marketing, which is the creation and sharing of articles, pictures, videos, and other publishing content with an eye to acquiring customers. Content marketing is arguably one of the most effective tactics out there to develop a stronger presence for your website and blog. It increases traffic, builds links, and creates greater brand awareness for your business. With content marketing so important to online marketing, the quality of that content is key. High quality content makes your information channels more credible to users AND gets you higher rankings from Google and other search engines. That's why curating, or selecting, the right content is the name of the game. You need to keep looking for the best content to share to boost engagement. Here are 7 outstanding sources to tap into. 1. Is there an app for that? You bet. Actually, there are lots of apps for news and content. A few of the useful ones: Flipboard, Google Currents, Pulse News, and Zite. Most apps don't let you post right to a Facebook business page, but you can send articles you like to Evernote or InstaPaper and schedule to post them as needed, now or later. 2. Check all the top stories. The site where you can do that is AllTop. Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki launched this a while ago with tons of channels containing links to a lot of great web content. 3. Join a big forum. Participate in the Quora forum to plug into interesting conversations or get answers to your questions from the community. These comments can often provide you with compelling and unique content. 4. Create Google alerts. Set up Google searches for news about your community, neighborhood, or area of expertise, and have them go straight to your email inbox daily, or more often if you like. You can even filter to get only blog content or videos. 5. Photo search. A picture is worth a thousand words, plus it's the type of content people love to see and share on social networks. Search Flickr and Instagram for photos that relate to your business, community, and interests. Some of the images on these sites are truly amazing. Be sure to credit the source of the image when posting to Facebook. In addition, Flickr has copyright blocks that won't let you Pin a copyrighted photo on Pinterest. 6. Social by subject. Sulia is a new social network that's subject-based, making it a great source for content. You can check into channels on a variety of topics for special content to share with your readers. And Sulia is already fairly large: it's grown to 10 million users this year. 7. Google again. Google News is the third Google mention in this piece, but, hey, they ARE the leader for accessing content. Google News sources content from thousands of news outlets. And Google manually vets all the sources, to keep out questionable players. There are more excellent sources to curate content, but these are good places to start. Just remember, quality is much more important than quantity. Post as often as you can; 5 times a week would be great. But it's better to skip a posting than to share substandard content. Remember, it takes time to build a reputation for great content among your target audience. So start now. Here's to your success in content marketing as you keep putting together your best year ever.... Enjoy a great month! Lisa Ekanger Your Hometown Realtor!