Warrioristic Ways to Curate Great Content Fast
Unique content is the battle call of most SEO fiends, bloggers and content marketers. The truth is, curating great content to your audience is also a way to provide value to them. Some of the hottest names in internet and content marketing today have grown their business and their following through curation; names like Maria Popova at Brain Pickings and Hiten Shah of SaaS Weekly, Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics.
The reason curation works is pretty much, you hand pick cool content your audience wants to eat with a spoon, they decide you are cool yourself since you sourced out all these great pet shaming listicles or real information on a topic related to their business, they feel very warm about any products you might be peddling.
Your audience will draw a line between your taste and your understanding of them and the value of your products. You have to know how to do it right, though. There is a wrong. This isn't like T-ball, where it's all about participation. This is a time consuming practice for warriors only, not those who want to phone in their content marketing strategies.
Curation vs Aggregation
If the world was Facebook, your news feed is aggregated. Your neighbor down the street who happens to be an expert on flamingos whose page is full of flamingo related news that he thinks is tops, is a curator. The feed is full of everyone you know's opinion on everything they know or don't know because they never read past the headline about. It could be bad information, actually stupid, or have nothing to do with things that actually interest you. But when you've got a burning need for flamingo info, Rufus is your guy. You know he'll have the real deal. He saves you time and effort and feels reliable to you.
You want to be a Rufus raft to your audience in a sea of crap, so you have to pick well and to do that you need a method. There are lots of them out there, but this content curation method is recommended by Sean Bestor at SumoMe, and SumoMe is a raft in my crap sea.
Awareness, Distribution, and Refinement
Now that you realize what we're actually doing here, I'm going to talk about some concepts and some mechanics to carry them out in content curation.
Awareness
You must develop your awareness on your topic and keyword. This all about figuring out your niche and the subject you want to focus your curation around. That topic should be something that people are interested in reading about, which you can test through playing with your keyword planner. It should be something that relates to your business values and identity. It should be something you like. You're going to be involved with this topic A LOT, so if you hate it, don't say I didn't warn you.
Once you can answer those questions, pull out your pens and some paper or fire up digital mind mapping tools like Coggle, MindMapple, or NovaMind. Your topic goes in the center, and subtopics shoot off from there. If you're selling craft ice cream, here is what your mind map might look like.
Now it's time for fun with keywords. After looking at my map, I think my topics will fall around the small batch speciality nature of my craft ice cream, and how that appeals to people. I'd search for keywords relating to that. The phrases with the most traffic are my preferred keywords.
Next, pick a content curation tool or two to help you. There is a digital metric ton of them, but Bester recommends Feedly, BuzzSumo, and suggests that you source Reddit and YouTube. Work these tools! Feedly will organize all blog posts on the keywords you plug into it. Add a bunch to your feed that relate to your topic- you can pare them down later. Check your keywords in BuzzSumo, YouTube and Reddit, too, and see if you pick up anything new, great, or full of hits. Finally, don't forget those Top X lists- google for existing articles about viral content creators or curators and check in with them frequently to see what they're posting. If you find blogs, add them to your Feedly.
I don't care that you don't want to do this and want an 'easy fix.' Doing this yourself, or having a living, breathing member of your team do it, is going to be better than any algorithm that can be set up and it's going to make you or said intern an authority on the content about your topic.
Refinement
Refinement is the point where you get to slash away at crap on the internet! Muahahahaha, OUT of the feed with you, swine! Or, you can use a boring word like gatekeeping, either way, that's where we're at in the process now. You have to take a critical eye to what is showing up in your Feedly, etc. Read it every day until you have a good feel for the published content on your keywords. Look for trends, and take some notes on criteria that seem to combine to make a great post. Maybe a vital factor is length, maybe it's photos, maybe there is a subtopic that is very popular. Pickle flavored, chemical free, locally made craft ice cream, for the pregnant ladies.
Blogs that don't post- lose 'em. Blogs with no hits or shares, set them aside unless they publish something so great you can clearly tell they just have a promotion problem. Anything that makes you cringe, just get rid of. That's what Rufus would do. You will have a great pool of content to sort through every day, and now you have to start doing that and saving things you like.
BE ORGANIZED WITH YOUR SAVED LINKS! Use a Google Sheet, Evernote, Pocket, anything you like, but keep some notes about your thoughts when you chose it, or, even better, start framing out your blurb that you're going to use when delivering each post to your audience. When you have a decent looking list together, refine the copy that supports the link and put the whole thing together so it looks like a document. You'll be blogging this, sending it by email, or sharing it all on social media, but you'll want to say at least a little something about each article so your audience knows you have a pulse. It also helps them know what to expect.
Try to force your friends and loved ones who have some interest in your topic to look over your list. Invite them to tell you if they'd grind their teeth if they saw a list like this in their email and actually listen to their feedback. You may or may not find some things you want to tweak.
Distribution
Your distribution method is how you deliver awesome mind nuggets to your audience, ones you hand picked yourself! They'll appreciate all the time you had to spend mining around in mind for the choicest nuggets- that kind of thing can really ruin a good pair of shoes.
I suggest that you blog your list with a moderate level of supportive commentary, share them on social media individually with briefer commentary (HootSuite can help you schedule the posts), and also share the eventual blog on social media. You can pump a daily, weekly or monthly newsletter through your beefy email list if you prefer that. You don't need much commentary at all, if you hate the thought of it. A simple list of clickable links that is arranged to look professional can appeal to an audience, especially if they are busy, business minded folks.
You have to keep all of this up and stick to a schedule. Make it second nature, like a weird spiritual ritual that only you understand the full power of. Start wandering around your house in robes with lots of incense burning. Whatever works for you in terms of checking your feeds daily. This is a perfect cycle of finding, sorting, and sharing information that can bring you hits, backlinking potential, and an audience of people who believe whatever you're selling might just be ok after all.
The reason curation works is pretty much, you hand pick cool content your audience wants to eat with a spoon, they decide you are cool yourself since you sourced out all these great pet shaming listicles or real information on a topic related to their business, they feel very warm about any products you might be peddling.
Your audience will draw a line between your taste and your understanding of them and the value of your products. You have to know how to do it right, though. There is a wrong. This isn't like T-ball, where it's all about participation. This is a time consuming practice for warriors only, not those who want to phone in their content marketing strategies.
Curation vs Aggregation
If the world was Facebook, your news feed is aggregated. Your neighbor down the street who happens to be an expert on flamingos whose page is full of flamingo related news that he thinks is tops, is a curator. The feed is full of everyone you know's opinion on everything they know or don't know because they never read past the headline about. It could be bad information, actually stupid, or have nothing to do with things that actually interest you. But when you've got a burning need for flamingo info, Rufus is your guy. You know he'll have the real deal. He saves you time and effort and feels reliable to you.
You want to be a Rufus raft to your audience in a sea of crap, so you have to pick well and to do that you need a method. There are lots of them out there, but this content curation method is recommended by Sean Bestor at SumoMe, and SumoMe is a raft in my crap sea.
Awareness, Distribution, and Refinement
Now that you realize what we're actually doing here, I'm going to talk about some concepts and some mechanics to carry them out in content curation.
Awareness
You must develop your awareness on your topic and keyword. This all about figuring out your niche and the subject you want to focus your curation around. That topic should be something that people are interested in reading about, which you can test through playing with your keyword planner. It should be something that relates to your business values and identity. It should be something you like. You're going to be involved with this topic A LOT, so if you hate it, don't say I didn't warn you.
Once you can answer those questions, pull out your pens and some paper or fire up digital mind mapping tools like Coggle, MindMapple, or NovaMind. Your topic goes in the center, and subtopics shoot off from there. If you're selling craft ice cream, here is what your mind map might look like.
Now it's time for fun with keywords. After looking at my map, I think my topics will fall around the small batch speciality nature of my craft ice cream, and how that appeals to people. I'd search for keywords relating to that. The phrases with the most traffic are my preferred keywords.
Next, pick a content curation tool or two to help you. There is a digital metric ton of them, but Bester recommends Feedly, BuzzSumo, and suggests that you source Reddit and YouTube. Work these tools! Feedly will organize all blog posts on the keywords you plug into it. Add a bunch to your feed that relate to your topic- you can pare them down later. Check your keywords in BuzzSumo, YouTube and Reddit, too, and see if you pick up anything new, great, or full of hits. Finally, don't forget those Top X lists- google for existing articles about viral content creators or curators and check in with them frequently to see what they're posting. If you find blogs, add them to your Feedly.
I don't care that you don't want to do this and want an 'easy fix.' Doing this yourself, or having a living, breathing member of your team do it, is going to be better than any algorithm that can be set up and it's going to make you or said intern an authority on the content about your topic.
Refinement
Refinement is the point where you get to slash away at crap on the internet! Muahahahaha, OUT of the feed with you, swine! Or, you can use a boring word like gatekeeping, either way, that's where we're at in the process now. You have to take a critical eye to what is showing up in your Feedly, etc. Read it every day until you have a good feel for the published content on your keywords. Look for trends, and take some notes on criteria that seem to combine to make a great post. Maybe a vital factor is length, maybe it's photos, maybe there is a subtopic that is very popular. Pickle flavored, chemical free, locally made craft ice cream, for the pregnant ladies.
Blogs that don't post- lose 'em. Blogs with no hits or shares, set them aside unless they publish something so great you can clearly tell they just have a promotion problem. Anything that makes you cringe, just get rid of. That's what Rufus would do. You will have a great pool of content to sort through every day, and now you have to start doing that and saving things you like.
BE ORGANIZED WITH YOUR SAVED LINKS! Use a Google Sheet, Evernote, Pocket, anything you like, but keep some notes about your thoughts when you chose it, or, even better, start framing out your blurb that you're going to use when delivering each post to your audience. When you have a decent looking list together, refine the copy that supports the link and put the whole thing together so it looks like a document. You'll be blogging this, sending it by email, or sharing it all on social media, but you'll want to say at least a little something about each article so your audience knows you have a pulse. It also helps them know what to expect.
Try to force your friends and loved ones who have some interest in your topic to look over your list. Invite them to tell you if they'd grind their teeth if they saw a list like this in their email and actually listen to their feedback. You may or may not find some things you want to tweak.
Distribution
Your distribution method is how you deliver awesome mind nuggets to your audience, ones you hand picked yourself! They'll appreciate all the time you had to spend mining around in mind for the choicest nuggets- that kind of thing can really ruin a good pair of shoes.
I suggest that you blog your list with a moderate level of supportive commentary, share them on social media individually with briefer commentary (HootSuite can help you schedule the posts), and also share the eventual blog on social media. You can pump a daily, weekly or monthly newsletter through your beefy email list if you prefer that. You don't need much commentary at all, if you hate the thought of it. A simple list of clickable links that is arranged to look professional can appeal to an audience, especially if they are busy, business minded folks.
You have to keep all of this up and stick to a schedule. Make it second nature, like a weird spiritual ritual that only you understand the full power of. Start wandering around your house in robes with lots of incense burning. Whatever works for you in terms of checking your feeds daily. This is a perfect cycle of finding, sorting, and sharing information that can bring you hits, backlinking potential, and an audience of people who believe whatever you're selling might just be ok after all.