You want content curation resources? We’ve got content curation resources. I can preach until my face turns blue about content curation and content marketing best practices, but none of it really matters unless you’re also doing this one very important thing:
Read MoreAdding insight and editorializing your curated content.
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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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.
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.
Read MoreIn a world of constant content, it’s no secret influencers can help you augment your content marketing efforts, rise above the noise and generate results.
It’s important to determine the influencers who can generate the most impact, and build a streamlined process for engagement, relevant to your goals. When I’m planning our content for Traackr, I focus on a few main groups of influencers who I know will help move the needle for our brand. By sharing my model and process, I hope it helps you strengthen your own influencer marketing practice to create really great content!
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Some say content marketing is only for people with deep pockets, and that short of creating Star Wars, you’ll struggle to make an impact. We happen to disagree.
Over the past three years, we’ve been diligently working with SMBs to find success with content marketing via our products, our blog, a Meetup series, and endless conversations with clients as well as subject matter experts. The results of this work have added up the lean content marketing ideology, which is the practice of optimizing content strategies in order to create the highest impact with the least amount of time and resources.
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The absolute need to deploy a serious content marketing strategy has been obvious for quite some time now – at least amongst businesses with a reasonable online ambition. Content is the lifeblood of SEO, engagement, brand awareness, thought leadership and ultimately lead generation. So, while “Content is King” might not be the latest scoop; it doesn’t necessarily mean that every SMB has deployed an effective content strategy.
And by effective, I mean a strategy that delivers a positive, measurable ROI.
Since 2011, we’ve been providing SMBs with an effective way to curate content as part of their overall content strategy. As our user-base has grown, we have fielded several surveys to assess the value of curation, and to understand what the next, major need would be as far as content marketing is concerned.
As we suspected, SMBs who include curation in their content marketing report a positive ROI. We also understand that concrete return on investment is the overarching objective for SMBs. While content is still king, it also needs to fill the treasury! It’s ROI or RIP.
In order to deliver ROI, content marketing for SMBs needs to be lean.
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The key to success in a myriad of web content that may drown us in 2015 is to curate content. The whys and hows are explained in-depth inside this article.
Source: www.searchenginejournal.com
It’s interesting to see that content curation is evolving from an opportunity to a necessity as Julia McCoy from ExpressWriters recently noted in the Search Engine Journal explaining how we must curate content in 2015.
Why is that happening? Why is this accelerating?
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Dear Community Managers,
A few short years ago, the term ‘community manager’ snuck into business world. Companies were rushing to find themselves one, even though they might not have even been sure what exactly he or she would do once she came along. Some of us have been doing it forever (since before the title was even created!), and some of us have just begun. Regardless of which of these categories you fall into, we at Scoop.it have one thing to say: thank you!
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Is it possible to perform well in search rankings by simply producing good content?
Source: moz.com
Just how far SEO evolved? “Good content is the new SEO” has been the new motto for a few years. But is it true to the point where you can ignore link building?
Moz’s Rand Fishkin gives his view on the question in this video.
The short version of his answer is that “yes it’s possible but it’s very tough“. Up to the point where he admits to admiring these sites:
“I find looking at websites that accomplish SEO without active link building fascinating, because they have editorially earned those links through very little intentional effort on their own. I think there’s a tremendous amount that we can take away from that process and optimize around this.“
While I feel it’s a little disappointing that he doesn’t give any numbers or more conclusive arguments, I also think the interesting question is:
What should you focus on first? Good Content or link building?
Read MoreSource: www.slideshare.net
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Two of the most up-and-coming job titles floating around the tech world these days are content marketer and community manager. My professional journey happened to start with one and lead to the a combination of the two, and I’m not alone.
As community managers, our job is to make sure that the community dedicated to the brand or product that we represent feels satisfied, proud, and willing to spread the word. Having a suite of content specifically dedicated to community management efforts can be more useful in this area than you may imagine.
I talked to a few top community managers to explore how they have integrated a content strategy with their community strategy and what they had to say was quite interesting.
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“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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As 2014 comes to a close and we’re all getting ready to ring in 2015 with style, let’s take a look back at what you read on the Scoop.it blog over the last 12 months.
These are ten of our top performing posts from the last year – the ones you liked, shared, commented on, and maybe even learned a little from. Join me on this trip through 2014 via this blog and maybe you’ll find a hidden gem you didn’t even know existed.
Read MoreAs you probably know, a few months ago we launched Scoop.it topic page templates in an effort to encourage personalization and of curated content. You have been experimenting with our first edition templates and making your topic pages look beautiful since then, and we want more!
Today, we’re excited to announce four more templates to be used on Scoop.it topic pages. And, that’s not all. One of them was designed by Scoopiteers Bang2Joom! Without further ado, here is your winning template, Fashion:
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.
With this in mind, I’ve taken an extensive look at Marketo’s Email Lookbook 2014 with the goals of pulling secrets, tips, and email marketing best practices from each section of the report and sharing them in an easily digestible way. (To read the whole report, click here!)
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SEO expert Jayson DeMers nails it with his content marketing predictions for the upcoming year.
In case you were wondering whether or not to take these predictions seriously, check out the post Jayson wrote last year around this time predicting the trends for 2014. Almost all of them proved to be true, with the small exception of the importance of Google+ due to SEO things like Authorship (which was discontinued a few months ago).
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Content is king. You know what it means to your business and to your marketing strategy. Content is your weapon of choice in the attention war.
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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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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.
Read MoreTo rise above the noise, convey a message and mobilize buyers, content marketers are turning to influencers.
Source: www.slideshare.net
Scaling Content Marketing is the key area of focus for many marketers these days. A number of strategies are being offered by experts, social networks or distribution platforms including the most natural one to them: pay for play. As Mark Schaefer wrote earlier this year, Content Marketing could be the victim of its own success if content strategists don’t put in place strategies to overcome the content abundance that results in diminishing returns. Earlier this year, Facebook for instance admitted to de-prioritize the organic reach of content from Facebook pages as users are more and more publishing content to more and more friends. The solution, they say? Buy ads to boost your post. And as LinkedIn and Twitter are also massively dependent on advertising revenue, this trend is here for good.
As mentioned in my reply to Mark, I believe there are ways to overcome content shock and scale Content Marketing through Lean Content. Interest-based content curation is an answer in the broad sense as it’s about leveraging existing content rather than adding to it but the team at Traackr puts it in a more specific context: influencer amplification.
Their point is a clear one: rather than paying for distribution, getting influencers to amplify your reach is a much more efficient approach.
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Every business’s marketing objectives require awesome content. Whether you’re focused on building thought leadership, increasing brand awareness, boosting SEO, engaging with an audience, or generating leads, it’s no longer a question that content marketing is the answer.
You create content, you outsource content, you curate content. Content curation has indeed proven its efficiency as a potent element of your editorial line, especially in terms of inbound marketing.
Now, the question remains: how do we turn this into a simple, scalable process?
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One of the main ways to to leverage content curation for business is to add curated content to your website or blog. By selecting the most interesting content for your target audience and adding some context to it, you will naturally show your expertise to your visitors – a good objective in itself. But, if you do it right, you should also enjoy the following benefits:
Audience engagement as readers can now discover more interesting content than just your own stories or product news: loyal visitors will stay longer, hopping between related curated pieces, and have reasons for coming back or even subscribe to receive your email newsletters.
SEO as your Website now contains more quality content on your niche topic which can be indexed by Google. Not only will that content be well targeted and relevant but it will also be organized and contextualized which is what Google is looking for (more on seo benefits of content curation here).
Social Traffic as your readers can share content they like while directing traffic to your site (more on why you should use a content hub for your social media publishing here).
Conversions as readers of your curated content are not just clicking on links in your tweets or Facebook posts to end up on third-party websites, but are instead being directed to your own website that now acts as a content hub. You can incorporate call-to-actions in your hub to either contact you, subscribe to your newsletter or request a demo of your product (more on how to use content curation for inbound marketing and lead generation here).
So how do you integrate curated content to Wordpress in the right way, to reach these objectives?
Not all integrations are created equal, and some integrations will not deliver the above benefits in an optimal way. Here are the pros and cons of key integration options that you should be aware of:
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With Panda, Penguin and all the other Google updates, SEO has changed over the years. What used to work doesn’t anymore.
Source: www.quicksprout.com
As many have observed for some time now, SEO has completely changed over the past few years. From being machine-centric, it became people-centric. But what does it mean concretely to content marketers?
This infographic by Neil Patel gives a number of interesting points, a couple of which I want to comment:
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Three and half years ago, my friend Steve Rosenbaum came out with a book that had a huge impact: Curation Nation. He described perhaps better than anyone else how much content curation was needed and how important a trend it will be. His latest book Curate This! just got published and it’s a fantastic read: not only is it a curation jewel in itself but he also introduces a new concept that paints the future of what the Web could eventually become: the desert island.
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Here’s one of the most significant tenets of content marketing: People like to do business with other people. They don’t like to do business with faceless, anonymous, inhuman brands or big corporations.
Source: www.business2community.com
Occasionally people ask us how they could fully automate their content publishing. They’d like to not only get content suggestions automatically but also that this content be published automatically. They’d want to set up once and then forget their content marketing while just reaping the benefits of it. I don’t blame them and I even understand them. But content simply doesn’t work that way for the precise reason Amanda Clark from Grammar Chic introduces this post we’ve curated.
Communication is fundamentally human.
It’s not just an ethical question but it’s also a matter of efficiency
Read MoreSource: www.slideshare.net
This Slideshare is from a talk @Marc Rougier recently gave on how content curation helps to solve inbound marketing #1 pain point: scaling the content you publish to feed your landing pages and conversion loops.
Content curation has played an important role in content marketing for some time now. And as content Marketing and inbound marketing are converging – especially for B2B marketers who are looking for ROI – we wanted to look specifically at what it brought to inbound marketers specifically.
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Creating original content on an ongoing basis can be a challenge, so most marketers practice the fine art of content repurposing.
Source: www.toprankblog.com
As a kid my favorite game was to play Lego and build, deconstruct and rebuild stuff (spaceships mostly: I’m a geek…). As a father, I’ve been fascinated to see that construction game becoming my kids’ favorite too and see what they came out with in terms of new ideas to build. This is what this post by Leed Odden made me think about so here’s a good question for all content marketers:
Are you thinking of your content as modular lego-type building blocks?
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“Content is king!”
“Content is the new SEO!”
“Content is the new PR!”
What isn’t content these days? You hear about it all the time, you know you have to do it, you might even be doing it. But, are you doing it right? Just because you’ve started a blog, doesn’t mean you’re a content marketer. Don’t worry, though, I’m here with a few reasons why your blog might suck and some tips to change that
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“What can content curation do for you? Who is it for? What are interesting case studies? How does content curation help SEO? What’s the ROI of content marketing in general and how does content curation help improve it? What features does Scoop.it have? How do they work?”
These are just some of the questions you’ll find answers for in our newly revamped resource center as well as in our brand new product tour page
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This infographic does a good job at describing 5 basic types of landing pages you might consider for your content strategy.
Why should you use landing pages for content marketing anyway?
Landing pages are a powerful way to generate leads because:
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