There’s no sugar-coating it: audience-building is a lot of work, and true success requires commitment. But smart authors and experts have a secret weapon to help them on their way—augmenting their essential original content creation with content curation.

Content curation refers to the practice of sharing existing material that you find relevant, interesting, or helpful with your audience. This strategy is related to the practice of “Newsjacking,” and it takes advantage of the oversaturated media environment that we’re all challenged to navigate every waking hour. Whether you add your own thoughts to a post or article you share or not, curating content lets you serve your audience by bringing valuable perspectives to their attention.

Best of all, you can tap into this powerful strategy simply by adding a few steps to your normal routine. Here’s how:

1. Consider your current content consumption. Before you start serving up a sampling of the information you come across on a regular basis, you should evaluate the information you’re exposed to. You may already have a balanced and healthy media consumption diet, but you should ensure that you’re paying attention to people at all levels and from a diverse set of viewpoints in and around your industry.
2. Build a process for flagging material that you find interesting or connects with your message and target audience. There is a whole cottage industry of software and tools you could consider, but you can start with a simple Word document, a spreadsheet, or even the notes app on your phone to collect links.
3. Evaluate the level of content required to deliver appropriate value to your audience. A simple news story you want your audience to be aware of may be best shared directly, but a landmark new research finding could be best shared in a more in-depth way, like in a blog post or even a white paper.
4. Craft your framing. You want to deliver your thoughts or takeaways from most of what you share. Everyone is stretched for time, and you can simplify things for your audience and inject your perspective and personality into the equation by including your response (which can be in support or opposition) or by writing a short sentence that summarizes what you think was most important.
5. Determine when to post. You can build a bank of material in the course of your daily media consumption but choosing when to deploy it can feel fraught. Timely news is best shared immediately, or with just a short amount of time to reflect upon it, but you can often save articles for a rainy day when you may not have fresh content of your own to fill your timeline.
6. Engage with responses to your post! As with anything shared on social media, one of the primary goals is to get your followers to react to your message. If your post supported a specific stance and someone challenges it respectfully with new and trustworthy information, take that response in earnest and try to reach a shared conclusion. It is an incredible opportunity for you and your audience to learn about different perspectives. If you asked a question of your audience in your post, make sure you respond to followers who answer.

This approach works particularly well on social media platforms that are link-oriented and are built to host discussions around posts, so Facebook and Twitter are both fertile grounds to build content curation into your strategy.

As you gain proficiency in the process of curating content, you should also monitor the ratio of original material to curated content, and balance it with an appropriate amount of self-promotional material (linking to your book or website). There is no magic proportion that will guarantee organic growth for every brand, but you can start with aiming for a mix where 80% of your social media posts inform, educate, and entertain your audience, and just 20% directly promote your business. You can and should monitor this balance over time and adjust it to what’s working best for your audience and helping drive at your unique goals.

Content curation isn’t just for social media, either. In the course of collecting material to share on social channels, you may discover a story or piece of research that you want to dive deeper into with more than 280 characters. In this case, you could write a blog post that adds your own experience and expertise to the discourse.

You could also launch a dedicated and curated regular blog post or newsletter (or section of a newsletter). Once people trust you to curate content on their behalf, it's a great way to build subscribers and website traffic. You'll find lots of blogs with “Friday Finds” blog posts for good reason—they help your audience while effectively building up trust in and authority for your perspective.