The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

Best Practices

How to write good blog posts for your audience and SEO and make sure they perform

How to write good blog posts for your audience and SEO and make sure they perform

When I try to write good blog posts, it automatically becomes more difficult than it would be to have an interesting debate with someone, even if I had the same discussion and arguments. Ok first, what is a good blog post? It’s – of course – a post that converts. That brings you traffic. Leads. Revenue, you might dare? For that, your content needs to delight your audience. And if you want your audience to find this beautiful piece of content you spent hours writing, it needs to be SEO-proofed.


I was discussing with a friend last week and he asked me if I had a “process” in place that I followed when writing a blog post. No, I didn’t have a checklist with items that I crossed off to make sure I didn’t forget anything. But shouldn’t I?


That got me thinking about the methodology I built over time for my writing purposes (and that I’m sure I did not invent but whatever) and also to promote it accordingly. Unconsciously I use that methodology to try and write good blog posts, curate an existing post, or even re-work an article of a guest blogger. So I tried to lay down a list of these steps for you, hoping you can relate and use it at some point. Let me know if you liked it or if you’d add anything to it!

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How to blog more in 30 minutes a day or less – eBook

how to blog more and blog consistently in 30 min a day or less - ebook by scoop it - download now CTA

The key to content marketing success is to publish good content, but also to publish more content: you need to blog more and to blog consistently if you want to get tangible results. The times where you could publish an occasional epic piece of content such as a quarterly white paper or a yearly survey report and be “good to go” are gone.

Blog more consistently if you want more traffic and leads.

That’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it? You know that you need to have a blog, and a blog that doesn’t suck like many do. But having a blog and publishing a good piece of content every month is not enough. Why? Because for your audience to find your content when they ask Google a question, you need your content to answer the new SEO rules:

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Increase Facebook reach without paying for advertising

Increase Facebook reach without paying for advertising

Ahh, Facebook. We love to hate on them don’t we. It’s no surprise by now that Facebook organic reach is on its way out. We feel it on our pages and I’m sure you feel it on your pages too.
It’s getting harder and harder to avoid paying Facebook for visibility. The idyllic days when you could build a following and engagement on social networks through the shear strength of your community management skills seem like a fading memory.

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5 critical SEO tips to curate content like a king

5 critical SEO tips to curate content like a king

When you curate content the right way, you should never get in trouble with Google or your readers. In fact, it should do just the opposite: improve your search rankings and delight your readers and followers.

One common misconception about content curation is that it’s simply reposting entire pages of other people’s content on your own site. But let me be clear: this is not curation.

So, what is content curation? While there is some variance among definitions, I like how marketing expert Heidi Cohen defines it: “Content curation assembles, selects, categorizes, comments on, and presents the most relevant, highest quality information to meet your audience’s needs on a specific subject.”

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How to find the perfect blog post title: focus on everything else!

How to find the perfect blog post title- focus on everything else!

I find the best titles come to me AFTER I have already written a post. Sometimes you need to have a clear idea of the ‘hook’ you’re using before you can come up with a killer title – and often that hook only comes to you WHILE you are writing the post.

 

Read the full article at kimgarst.com

Kim’s article is great: she gives you 6 easy and highly effective ways to create the perfect blog titles. And just like her, it takes me a while to find the title of my blog post: in fact I often have a title in mind but end up changing it until I publish it.

Why?

Because the title may be the last thing you should worry about when you’re writing a blog post. Not that you shouldn’t think about it and optimize it, that’s not what I said. But if you write a good blog post that adds value to your readers and is SEO-proofed, then the perfect blog post title should almost automatically be revealed to you.

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Publish quality content on your blog: quantity matters too!

Publish good content on your blog - quantity matters too!

Companies tend to struggle to create and publish good content on their blog. If you’re a marketer, you’re most likely not a professional writer. Hence it can be difficult to figure out what your audience is interested in, write good content around those topics, all while running your other marketing tasks. And when your segment has many big actors with content marketing teams dedicated to maintaining an efficient blog, it can be challenging to try and compete with them. So it’s important to understand what matters in terms of content quantity and quality.

Publish good content, yes indeed. Here’s how.

If “Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left” – according to Seth Godin (best selling author, entrepreneur, marketer and public speaker) -, you want to do things right.

If you want to do things right and publish good content, you should…

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Social sharing and psychology: 7 levers you should push if you want more shares

Social sharing and psychology - 7 levers you should push if you want more shares

The success or failure of a piece of content is often measured by how many shares it gets. Hopefully, those shares are also part of a content strategy that’s driven by ROI. But whether they are or not, there’s almost always a push for more shares.

Social sharing and psychology are linked: if you want to get more shares from your content, it helps to take a look at the psychological drivers behind why content gets shared. These are the motivations behind sharing that are deeper than the typical techniques to get more shares. They go beyond tricks like including an image, choosing the right time to share, and crafting a click-worthy headline.

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Compelling infographics: 4 tips content marketers should follow

what-is-an-infographic2

As content marketing has grown in popularity, marketers have become more familiar with how customers like to interact with information online. Visual content is a great cure for short attention spans, conveying a message succinctly, and it has the added benefit of presenting information in a shareable format. When a customer can see concepts illustrated in colorful, well-designed and compelling infographics, that customer may be better able to grasp those concepts than if they were outlined in writing. But if you want to make compelling infographics, you have to put some effort into it. Infographics are often driven by content, so it’s important to have a solid background before starting. Marketers should also have several unbiased people review the infographic to make sure it makes sense before publishing it. Here are a few ways infographics are gradually changing content marketing as we know it today.

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A beginner’s guide to promote content on social media

promote content on social media - a beginner guide

If you don’t know how to promote content on social media, putting all the pieces together can feel like quite a challenge. There are so many options, so many technologies, and so many tips and tricks all clamoring for your attention.

To help distill the process down to it’s basic elements, we’ve created two imaginary business owners: Marisa, who owns a retail store, and Ted, who owns a professional services firm. This post will outline their businesses needs and their content promotion goals. Then it will lay out a detailed weekly content promotion plan and schedule for each of them.

Each promotion plan is a little different, because the businesses are different. Your business will be different than these plans too, of course. But after reading this you’ll know The basic elements of a promotion plan, how they should change with different business priorities and how to decide which options are best for you.

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Audience and Content Publishing: 17 Ways to Find Out What Your Audience Wants You to Share

audience and content publishing - 17 Ways to Find Out What Your Audience Wants You to Share

Ever had a piece of content go viral? It’s a heady experience. Maybe it took off immediately and you watched the share count go up like a rocket ship. Or maybe it was a slow burn, but week after week, you kept shaking your head at how unbelievably well that one piece of content did.

Any time this happens the most powerful response (after “That did AWESOME! I rock!”) is to try to do it again. Ad agencies get irked when clients tell them “we want it go viral” because they’ve gotten this request so many times. Everybody wants their stuff to go viral. Who would say, “we’d like this to go largely unnoticed.”

Odds are you don’t know how to make things go viral every time. Hey, neither do I. But I do know how to increase the chances of it happening. I’m about to show you how to increase the chances of going viral for your stuff, too. Not just viral wildfire once – and maybe not every time – but often enough to make your competition jealous and to leave your audience enthralled.

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How to be good at marketing without a CMO (or a good one) – tips for marketers

Tips to marketing professionals who have to live without a (good) CMO

I really liked Dan Stasiewski’s article about the 8 mistakes CMOs make when structuring their marketing teams and I was going to curate it and add a few lines about what to do to be good at marketing without a CMO (or a good one). I got carried away. I’m not reinventing the wheel here, but sharing my own experience on how to manage and thrive as a marketing professional even when you’re not lucky enough to have a CMO or marketing leader – or even a team!- to help you structure things around.

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How to nurture leads with content curation

How to Nurture Leads with Content Curation 2

Want more leads? You’re not alone. According to IDG Enterprise’s 2015 B2B Content Marketing Spotlight Report, lead generation is the #1 priority for content marketers.
But while everybody says they want more leads, in the very next breathe they’ll add that they want better leads, too. That’s why you’ll see lead nurturing come in as priority #4 on this same graph. Lead nurturing is basically lead generation 2.0. First you get the leads, then you warm them up.

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Is content marketing hard? 7 lessons learned +1 (curation)

In this article, Mike Huber rightly says “more is what you need when it comes to content marketing”, and then points out in 6. that “your team needs to be all in”.  And since “the best time to start a content marketing program is 5 years ago and the second best time is today”, you’d better start publishing content regularly now.
Our experience adds one lesson to this post: “curation helps you publish more”. And not just more, also better.

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5 Content Marketing Rules for Google’s New Algorithm

5 Content Marketing Rules for Google ’s New Algorithm

On April 21, 2015, Google made a massive update to their SEO algorithm and was clear that they’d be handing out manual penalties to websites that didn’t abide by mobile best practices. Don’t panic just yet—Google doesn’t expect every website to run out and develop and app or otherwise become their “best” mobile ready self. In order to appease Google’s algorithm and avoid a penalty, consider these your new content marketing rules for a very mobile ready world (and marketing campaign).

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9 Ways for SMBs to Beat Big Corporations on Social Media [With Examples]

9 Ways for SMBs to Beat Big Corporations on Social Media

Everybody loves an underdog. David versus Goliath… Your local bookstore versus Amazon… Marty’s Fish, Milk & Bait versus WalMart. All these battles, famous or not, tug at our heart strings. Trouble is, if you’re a small business owner, you know you need to do more than just tug at heart strings to make your business work. You need to actually get people in the door. You need to get them to buy things. Then you need them to come back.

Social media has long been hailed as a marketing equalizer. In many ways, it is. It’s free to create an account and free to post and to build your following (Facebook changes aside). But it’s time to get more specific about how to use social as a marketing equalizer. So here are 9 techniques SMBs can use to beat big corporations on social media.

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How to efficiently measure the impact of content marketing on lead generation

How many leads does your content generate

Sooner or later, especially for B2B companies, you’re going to be asked how much of an impact your content marketing efforts had on the #1 metric of all: revenue.

Lead generation is already a key objective for 83% of B2B content marketers and the trend is going up.

So how do you effectively measure the impact of your content marketing on lead generation for your company?

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Don’t Limit Your Content Marketing Team: Grow Your Content Production and Reach with Contributors

You Can’t Do it All on Your Own- Extend Your Content Marketing Team

Despite what my friend Eddie would say, even Messi can’t do it alone. Let’s see if some of these quotes I heard or felt about my content marketing team sound familiar:

“I’m always behind on my publishing goals”.

“I know if I had more content to distribute I would have more traffic on my website, but I don’t have enough resources to write this content”.

“My co-workers who are supposed to write something for me keep pushing back the deadline”.

“I can’t constantly follow up with all my co-workers to make sure they share my content to their social network”.

Rings a bell? Don’t worry there are ways to cope with that.

First of all, if you’re still not sure how content curation can solve some of your content struggles, then have a look at this must-read post by Heidi Cohen on the 3 no-brainer reasons you should start curating content, and then come back here for more tips.

I’ve identified two reasons to expand your content marketing team that can really help you increase your content production and your content reach: extend the party committee so others can write and curate with you, and/or leverage your co-workers’ social audience.

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Influencer Activation – The Key To Content Marketing Amplification

Influencer Activation - The Key To Content Marketing Amplification

We’ve said it before: 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the past 2 years, and content marketing is approaching mass adoption. How can you break through the noise and get your message to the right people at the right time?

Many marketers are turning to influencers for content marketing amplification – in fact, a recent poll of 125 marketers shows 59% plan to increase their influencer marketing budget over the next 12 months. This means more marketing departments are devoting time and resources to creating authentic relationships with the people who matter most to their business – influencers who shape the industry as trusted resources.

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How to Make Old Content Topics More Exciting

How to Make Old Content Topics More Exciting

Obviously, one of the best ways to stay exciting is to look to what’s new—read up on industry news, check out your competitors’ blogs, and listen to what your customers are talking about, and use that information to generate some fresh, new material. However, this isn’t always possible. When it isn’t, you’ll have to look back at some of the older topics you’ve covered and find a way to present them as if they’re new—in a fresh, exciting way.

There are several strategies you can use to accomplish this.

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How to Build a Content Marketing System to Amplify your Blogging Efforts

How to Build a Content Marketing System to Amplify your Blogging Efforts

Content marketing has been the most successful method of acquiring users for our startup Process Street. A number of people ask me about my process (no pun) for creating and marketing content that drives users to our product, so I wanted to give the Scoop.it readers the inside scoop.

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How to convince your boss you need content marketing software

How To Convince Your Boss You Need a Content Marketing Software

Most of us who practice content marketing rely on at least some kind of content marketing software. We’re software people by nature, so it’s only natural we’ve got a thing for digital tools. Of course, it is possible to stay on top of your content marketing work with just Excel and Google calendar. But at a certain point you’ll want to graduate to something more robust.

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15 Proven Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Blog

15 proven ways to grow traffic on your blog

Who doesn’t want more website traffic? Like money or good looks, it seems like it’s just not possible to have too much traffic to your blog.

Trouble is, traffic is tricky. You can buy it, sure. But if you don’t convert that traffic into dollars, you’re losing money. And to actually see ROI, you have to not just make back the money you’ve spent on advertising. You’ll also have to cover the overhead for your business and the time you spent managing it all.

If you go the other way and build up free traffic, you’ll have to get enough results to justify your time. Anybody can spend an afternoon building traffic to their blog. But did they get enough traffic from those efforts to justify the time spent and the opportunity lost?

It is, of course, possible to get an ROI on your blog traffic work. I’m about to give you specific ideas for exactly how to do that.

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3 Easy Steps to Measure The Success Of Social Media Campaigns

3 Easy Steps to Measure The Success Of Any Social Media Campaign

As a marketer, you’re probably already familiar with the importance of conducting regular content audits on your site. This tool is hugely important when it comes to measuring the success of your marketing campaigns and making sure the content you’ve created is helping you meet your goals.

That said, it can be harder to apply these same principles to your social media campaigns measure the impact they’re having on your business’s bottom line. Sure, you can track the number of “likes” your Facebook posts receive or the number of followers you have on Twitter. But the thing is, surface-level metrics like these don’t have a direct impact on your revenue or profits.

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How to do all your social media chores in 30 minutes or less

How to Do All Your Social Media Chores in 30 Minutes or Less

Is social media the biggest business opportunity of our generation – or a complex scheme devised to take up all your time?

I’ll admit it can feel like the latter, but productive, efficient social media activity is possible. It happens every day. You can cover all your bases on the major social networks in just minutes.

I’ll give you the play-by-play tips to manage social media in 30 minutes below.

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