The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

Best Practices

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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11 Effective Lean Content Marketing Practices To Generate ROI

11 Effective Lean Content Marketing Practices To Generate ROI

According to the Content Marketing Institute’s and MarketingProfs yearly survey on the state of content marketing, lack of time and lack of budget are among the top challenges B2B content marketers face. The other 2 challenges in the Top 4 are “producing enough content” and “producing the type of content that engages”.

In short: most B2B content marketers don’t have enough resources to both scale their content volume and maintain the required quality to generate ROI.

For the past 3 years, we’ve worked with top marketers, influencers, marketing software founders as well as our customers and users to define Lean Content Marketing as a set of best practices that make it possible for SMB marketers to generate positive ROI with limited resources and budgets. We’ve compiled our findings, experiment results, advice and best practices in the Lean Content Marketing Handbook for SMBs and today, I’d like to focus on the most effective practices that generate ROI.

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6 SEO Content Strategies That Still Work

6 SEO Content Strategies That Still Work in 2015

It’s the start of a new year and that means a re-evaluation of the viability of your SEO strategy. And, all good Internet marketers know that their SEO content strategy needs to be evaluated every so often in order to retain its functionality.

There are a lot of SEO changes that have happened over the last couple months and in order to stay on top of your game, you need to be aware of what still works and what doesn’t. Your SEO strategy is usually based around a handful of reliable methods that work for you.

Let’s see if yours makes the list of SEO content strategies that are still relevant in 2015: keep reading!

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How To Develop a Winning Social Media Management Strategy

It’s 2015: you’ve probably sent a Tweet in your lifetime. You know all about Snapchat, and you’ve even lost a few hours to Instagram. But does that make you a social media guru? Of course not—unless you consider your 13-year-old niece a guru.

So how are you expected to out social-media half the U.S. teen population, and create a winning strategy you can be really proud of?

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Content is the fuel of email marketing: here’s how to ignite it

This post contains excerpts of our recently published ebook: “ROI or RIP: the lean content marketing handbook for SMBs” that you can download for free here.

According to research performed earlier in 2014 by Gigaom and reported by eMarketer, email marketing is still the most commonly used method of digital marketing, with a whopping 86% of respondents claiming to use it. If that’s not enough, though, over half (59%) of B2B marketers surveyed by HubSpot say that email marketing is the most effective channel for generating revenue.

Email marketing needs content and content marketing needs email

Why are email marketing and content marketing such a great match? And what does it mean for your marketing strategy?

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7 Actionable blogging tips for content marketers that are proven to get results

Blogging remains the pillar of content marketing, particularly for SMBs. But when you browse many company’s websites, you realize their blog is under optimized.

 

So why is blogging for content marketing so difficult?

1. It’s hard to maintain the discipline: even when you have an in-house team of content writers, creating content is time consuming and it takes a lot of efforts to maintain the rhythm. Publishing great content on a consistent basis costs a lot.

2. It’s easy to get demotivated by the lack of impact. Initially a blog doesn’t get much traffic so for ROI-driven management team, it’s tempting to dismiss it into the “tried this; didn’t work” category.

Fortunately, getting results out of your content marketing in general and out of your blogging efforts in particular is accessible to anyone. Sure, it requires some particular techniques but the good news is they’re not particularly hard to implement.

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Using WordPress as an alternative to HubSpot?

“Recently we migrated our website so this time In this article we take a look at how to migrate a website from Hubspot to Wordpress.”

Source: blog.idrsolutions.com

Hesitating to pay the full price for HubSpot when Wordpress is essentially free? This article gives an interesting perspective on how you can actually migrate to Wordpress from HubSpot.

Should you migrate from HubSpot to Wordpress?

A few things are interesting to note:

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Winning content marketing strategies for SMBs

Content marketing continues to grow in importance for both B2B and B2C organizations, and as more and more businesses come to realize the importance of establishing thought leadership in their fields, those same businesses are finding that a disciplined, intelligent, and focused content marketing strategy is one of the best mechanisms by which to achieve their objectives.

But while we’ve all marveled at the publicity stunts of RedBull and other major brands with huge marketing budgets, we wanted to recap why and how content marketing applied to SMBs which, by definition, dont’ have as deep pockets.

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5 Signs you highly need a content curation diet in your marketing mix

Feeling hungover after the holiday? You’ll get over it. But how about your content strategy? Just like eating healthy largely depends on mixing diverse types of food, content marketing experts such as Heidi Cohen say you won’t achieve optimal results if you’re relying 100% on your own content for your marketing efforts. Don’t believe it? Read our own survey results on the ROI of content curation in the marketing mix.

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