Tag: content curation

6 Content Curation Tips for Delivering Maximum Value to Your Audience

Do you curate content from other sites on your own blog?

If so, you’re probably doing it one of two ways. Either you’re just posting excerpts (not the whole thing!) of other people’s articles and including a link back to the original source (this is actually called content aggregation).

Or you’re posting excerpts of other people’s articles and adding your own commentary to provide additional insights and context to the article (true content curation).

The first method offers some value to your audience in the sense that you’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting on their behalf thus giving them a quick resource for keeping up to date with relevant content. In exchange they rely on you to point them in the right direction for content on a particular topic(s). See Alltop.com as an example.

The second method offers even more value (to your audience and to you!) because adding your voice and unique perspective to the curated article tells people why the topic is important and also positions you as a trusted thought leader and expert in that area.

If you’re curating content on your website, here are 6 best practices to ensure that you’re delivering maximum value to your audience:

  • Make sure the excerpt from the original source is not too long
  • Include your own commentary to give insight and guidance to your audience
  • Turn off your ‘no-follows’ – the no follow attribute on hyperlinks tells search engines not to give SEO credit to the site you have linked to. Don’t use no-follows on links to the original publisher.
  • Make your commentary longer than the excerpt because it reduces the amount of duplicated content and is thus better for SEO value.
  • Re-title the article so that you’re not competing for the same title on search engines.
  • Share only the thumbnail size of the original image unless you have permission to share the full-size image

For more content curation tips check out Curata’s blog.

10 Easy Content Marketing Tips You Can Apply Today!

Content Marketing is all about engaging a well-targeted audience with valuable, helpful and compelling content that solves their problems and persuades them to do business with you.

There is a strategic approach to creating valuable content, but assuming you’re already doing that, here are 10 easy tips to embellish the content that you are currently producing:

Tweak your Email Signature

Below your email signature line, attach a link to a helpful & relevant blog post from your website to encourage email recipients to explore your site.

Attach a link to a relevant blog post to your email signature

Solve problems

Focus on the core problem that your business solves. Then put out lots of content, enthusiasm, and ideas about how to solve that problem. (Put content on your blog, other people’s blogs i.e. guest blogging, e-books or white papers, webinars, Google Hangouts, audio podcasts etc.)

Do a Competitive Analysis

Analyze your content in light of your competitor’s content then identify opportunities to be different or better. But DO NOT copy your competitor’s content!

Add Comment Luv

Add ‘Commentluv’ plugin to your WordPress website. With this plugin, every time you comment on someone else’s blog, a link to the most recent article that you wrote on your blog is embedded in the comment. It literally spreads your content across other sites!

Comment Luv WP-plugin spreads your content to other sites

Curate!

Curate! Curate! Curate! It’s not lazy – it’s good neighborliness.  In fact there’s business value in collaboration and besides sometimes other people can explain it better than you! 🙂

Tell all

Want your blog to get noticed? Start creating content about those industry ‘secrets’ or how-to tips that none of your competitors will touch!

Do a Content Audit

Review your website and all blog posts often and inspect for ROT. ROT stands for Redundant, Outdated and Trivial content. If you find ROT, weed it out!

Review content for ROT

Be where it matters

You don’t have to be on every single social media network that exists. You just need to ‘be where it matters’. Find out where your customers and prospects are located (online) and focus your content distribution through those channels!

Be a journalist

When you write an article use a journalistic approach – Most important content first [who, what, where, why, when, how]. Next, provide important details, then other supporting background information last. You should end of with an inverted pyramid type of content structure.

Engage, Convert or Die!

Last but not least – every piece of content on your site should be doing either one (or both) of these things: ENGAGING or CONVERTING. If it is not doing that, get rid of it!

How to Find the Best Keywords for Your Content Marketing Strategy

Do you find yourself struggling to figure out what keywords to use on your website content or blog?

Identifying and using targeted key words helps to create synergy between all your content marketing efforts. It’s a great SEO strategy that helps to strengthen your marketing around the keywords you want to rank highly for in search. It also helps to generate coveted back-links to your website or blog. Read full article here.

How to Blog When You Don’t Have Time

Do you wish to blog but find that you have no time to do it?

Did you start a blog with good intentions but quickly realized that you just couldn’t keep up?

If so, then this article is exactly what you need! If you find that you have too much to do and blogging doesn’t seem to fit into your hectic schedule, allow me to share some tips (and yes tricks!) that have worked for other insanely busy people (myself included).

Here are 5 true, tried and tested techniques to get you back onto a consistent blogging lifestyle.

Make a reasonable commitment

Look, if you have a crazy schedule, there’s no point in adding more ‘hectic-ness’ to your life or making unreasonable expectations of yourself. You can’t blog everyday – that’s clearly out of the question.

But can you blog once a week? Of course you can, especially when you consider how you’re missing out by not blogging. Once you make that commitment, then cultivate the mental discipline to do it. Take action don’t make excuses. If something is important enough, then you will make time for it. You know this is true.

Write short, concise articles

Blogging doesn’t have to be a time-consuming, gut-wrenching experience. You can write articles that are short in prose and big in meaning. Seth Godin does this very well. Each week for example, you can share one idea about something significant you learned that will help others solve their problems or do their jobs better.

Become a content curator

Some have argued that the world doesn’t need more content creators but rather content curators. There’s already an overwhelming amount of information on the internet.

There is a growing need for people who organize and present information in a relevant, and orderly system so that consumers with specific interests can find what they need in one platform. The Business Communication Blog does this very well. By writing a short (two or three sentence) introduction to an article and then linking to the original source of content, they’ve become expert content curators in business communication.

Enlist the help of others

There comes a time when we recognize that we cannot do it alone – that we need others to help us if we’re going to succeed.

Blogging isn’t different. If you have employees, find out which of them enjoy blogging and encourage them by offering meaningful incentives (e.g. ‘blogger of the month’ gets a day off). Southwest Airlines does a fantastic job with this and their employees are literally nuts about them. However if you’re a freelancer, a consultant or just short on human resources, check out Blogger LinkUp, a free service where bloggers help each other out with guest blogging opportunities.

Outsource your blogging efforts

Last but not least consider hiring an outsider to blog for you. Let me say this though. I really think that the content creation process should start with YOU. That is because YOU are the voice of your organization. You understand the vision of your blog and how you want to build a community around your content.

But if you’re not able to be a part of this process then it is certainly better to outsource than to do nothing. But be careful. Make sure that you read and approve each article before it is posted to your blog (you want to ensure that articles posted represent your organization in a positive light).

Consistent blogging is not easy. It requires courage, character and workmanship. It is not for the faint of heart. But there are many people just like you who have experienced unimaginable blogging success and proceeded to enjoy amazing professional opportunities. Here are five of my favorite ones. I’m not saying that you’ll have overnight success or become an internet sensation. But you’ll certainly find more professional opportunities in your niche if you make time to blog.

Over to you: Have you tried any of these suggestions? Do you have other blogging tips to share with us?

**If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or share it with your friends 🙂

Why You Should Publish ‘Other People’s Content’ (part 2 of 2)

As I pointed out in the previous article, curation is about blending your original content with carefully selected third-party content and presenting it in a way that is meaningful and appealing to your audience.

It is a much needed service in a world where readers are drowning in information. As Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics points out, curators are distribution agents for creators helping them to put relevant content in front of the right audience.

But don’t get me wrong. At some point you must create and publish original content if you want people to take you seriously. That’s how thought-leadership is established.

In the meantime however, there are real business benefits associated with content curation:

  • Brand visibility: Organizations that are new in the publishing arena may use curated content to quickly ‘catch up’ and stock  their own digital assets. This helps to improve organic search rankings as well as elevating industry awareness of their brand.
  • Reputation building as a destination point for specific subject-matter content.
  • Lead nurturing is facilitated when organizations use content to maintain engagement with prospects throughout the sales-cycle
  • SEO and increased traffic: B2B readership is increased through skillfully curated content residing in corporate blogs.
  • Achieve consistent relevance: In order to stay relevant organizations need to produce valuable content on a regular basis. Yet one of the major challenges they face is producing enough content. Curation helps organizations to stay relevant by providing an inexhaustible resource of valuable information.

Brands that want to win over consumers understand that there is a need to present well-organized information on the web. Consumers are struggling with short attention spans. They don’t have time to sift through mountains of content.

It is clear that the role of content curator is more important than ever before. Someone must restore order on the internet. Organizations that do so most effectively will command the largest audience.

Do you think content curation might help to achieve significant businesses benefits?

Why You Should Publish ‘Other People’s Content’ (part 1 of 2)

Thriving businesses understand that the success of their brand depends as much on the creation of valuable content,  as it does on creating products or services that solve problems.

That’s because more consumers are relying on additional information or content from trusted sources to make their purchasing decisions. ‘Trusted source’ content includes opinions of friends, family and peers (as seen on their social media channels), expert blogs, preferred business blogs etc.

By taking advantage of the opportunity to create engaging content, winning brands are able to sway consumers in their favor. These brands have taken on the role of ‘publisher’ – a challenging but necessary enterprise.

The problem is that publishing – consistent creation and distribution of content –  is a formidable task. Few brands have the time or the resources to keep up with the pace.

And that’s where ‘Other People’s Content’ or content curation comes in.

Content curation is the blending of relevant information from different sources within the industry (i.e. original content AND filtered third party content) and presenting it in a way that is meaningful and appealing to a specific audience.

The goal of curation is therefore to filter and organize an overwhelming amount of digital content on the internet, and to present consumers with consistent, relevant and valuable information about a particular subject.

Alltop.com –  “the online magazine rack” of the web – does a great job filtering, organizing and publishing other people’s content. They collect headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs around the world. The stories are then grouped together by subject into individual web pages. What this does is to make search easier. Rather than dealing with a mountain of information from Google search results, Alltop presents an organized, easy-to-read resource for relevant content.

I think that skillfully curated content is an important digital asset that progressive brands can use to raise their social visibility. Businesses in general should be taking notes and trying to figure out what part they will play in the grand scheme of things.

What are your thoughts on using other people’s content?

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The second part of this article will discuss the business benefits of content curation.