A blog is a great tool for your funeral home. It helps build relationships with your client families and allows you to establish thought leadership in your community. A blog also helps educate families on the importance of different funeral traditions and helps drive traffic to your site.

But, as a funeral director, a blog is just one more thing on your ever-growing to-do list. So how can you post a steady stream of content to your blog without taking up too much time? The answer is to curate your content.

Curating Content

What is content curation? It’s essentially the act of finding existing content that’s relevant to your audience and sharing it with them via your blog and social media channels. Content curation is not, however, simply copying and pasting content from outside sources and claiming it as your own. That’s plagiarism.

Lifewire sums it up nicely. Content curation is when you, “review content from a variety of sources, gather links to those sources, share descriptions of that content, add your own commentary to that content, and publish all of those pieces in a single location…”

The good thing about content creation is that it saves you a lot of time. Instead of having to write out a new blog each week, or shoot and post a video, you can simply share content created by other people — and then add your own thoughts and opinions on the topic.

Not only does it save you time, but curating content gives you the same benefits as blogging would. With curating content, your funeral home will:

• Demonstrate your expertise in the funeral profession and build brand awareness in your community.
• Drive traffic to your website by offering fresh and valuable content.
• Build relationships with other funeral/hospice/grief professionals.
• Provide different viewpoints on topics in the funeral profession and educate families about the importance of funeral service.
• Support lead generation and improve search engine optimization.

Sounds great, right? But before you get started, here are some best practices to keep in mind when sharing other people’s content on your blog.

Best Practices When Curating Content for Your Blog

Focus on topics relevant to your audience. For your funeral home, this means picking out two or three areas where you want to establish expertise. For example, it could be grief resources, new funeral trends, or funeral preplanning topics.

Add value to the content. Don’t just share a headline and link on your blog or social media pages. Add a paragraph or two of your own thoughts, commentary, and insight on the topic. For example, when NFDA releases their 2018 Cremation and Burial Statistics report later this year, your funeral home can cover that in your blog. To do so, you could share a few of the statistics from the report, and maybe even highlight and quote a paragraph or two. Then write your own thoughts on the topic. It would be a great opportunity for you to highlight the different services your funeral home offers, and how you can provide both personalized burial and cremation services to the families in your area.

Always cite your sources and link back to their original content. If you don’t give credit where credit is due, it’s not content curation. It’s simply stealing content. If you are unsure of whether or not you should share something, reach out to the original creator. More often than not, they’ll be happy to have their article or content shared with your audience — provided you link back to the original source in some way.

For more best practices, check out HubSpot’s 11 Best Practices for More Effective Content Curation.

Organizations and Resources to Follow

Below are some resources and organizations that can help you curate content related to the funeral profession.

• Feedly: Feedly is a tool for aggregating content based on certain topics. It works by letting you select feeds based on keywords. For example, let’s say you pick the topic “funerals.” Feedly will then provide a daily list of articles containing the keyword.
• NFDA: NFDA’s news section provides several articles and updates including consumer, supplier, and funeral profession topics.
• Hospice Foundation of America (HFA): HFA has a news section that shares updates on hospice happenings as well as a variety of grief-related topics.
• Endwell Symposium: The Endwell Symposium has a blog that covers a variety of progressive death and dying topics, including future trends, new technology, and death-positive movements.
• Cremation Association of North America (CANA): CANA is a great resource for keeping up-to-date on the latest cremation statistics and news.
• International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association (ICCFA): ICCFA covers a wide range of topics and trends, including cemetery, funeral service, cremation, and memorialization professions.
• Frazer Consultants: Our blog and newsletter also cover the funeral profession in depth, with topics including the latest news in the profession, grief resources, ideas for memorialization and personalization, and much more! You’re more than welcome to curate our content and share it across your blogs and social media channels. Just don’t forget to cite your sources!

For more blogging tips, download our free guide on blogging for your funeral home.