“Write about what you know.” It’s the golden rule of writing and it seems to have made a comeback. Pinnacled by Focus.com, using what you know to create “remarkable content” has taken content marketers by storm.

The scalable content marketing platform lets you create, curate, publish and distribute content intelligently. This doesn’t just mean the standard, “write about something, throw it out there and hope it sticks.” It means generate smart and relevant content that matters to your target audience – and do it more easily. It’s what refined content writers and marketers have already been doing, but what the rest of the group has yet to learn. So think of it as an elite content marketer’s secret arsenal made public for everyone to gain from.

Here’s how:

Creating original content becomes easier when you rely on your target group to help generate it. Use the platform to get contributors to answer questions, take a survey, post videos or write blog posts. The exchange can take place on either the client’s site or it can be hosted by Focus.com.

But the idea is brilliantly simple. If you’ve ever had a successful blog, you’ll know that content ends up flowing quite easily as your readers engage you and rely upon you as an authority. If you’re smart, you’ll have been using your own readership as a source of inspiration for future blog posts. Focus brings the same idea, collectively and creatively, to a single platform that does that and more. It’s essentially crowdsourced idea generation for content marketing.

The other bigwig in the content world has been curation, and Focus has that covered too. If you’ve been dabbling with content curating, you’ll realize that media is completely saturated with information. No matter what your industry, if it’s anything from small business tips and tricks to rural organic farming, there’s no shortage of content out there to choose from. The dilemma becomes, “How do you choose the best content?” How do you differentiate between OK content, good content, great content and relevant content?

Focus’ community based system of contributors has also become a source for curating. Moreover, each contributor is ranked through a voting system that helps marketers target their curated stories. That said, there’s still the process of managing it all – and Focus has that covered too. Their content marketing platform offers a content management system that lets you check off on approved content…in real time. This makes it easier and faster to publish relevant content in a real-time driven world. Content marketers, and especially curators, know that if you’re not publishing in real-time you might as well just go home.

So how does this apply to the small business that doesn’t delve into content marketing or curating? It matters if you have a blog. If you have a blog, you need content to write on. And even if you’re producing original content, you know the goal is to produce consistently (and ideally daily). Publishing content daily requires that you curate content based on your target audience or industry, and remain current to the trends and happenings in your chosen field.

However, if you have more ambitious content needs, like producing a helpful white paper or e-book for your clients, Focus.com can help you with that too through their support team. And every bit of content is easily shared via inbound marketing, social sharing and demand generation.