The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

5 critical SEO tips to curate content like a king

Posted on
July 20, 2015
by
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!

Posted on
July 16, 2015
by
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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Scoop.it ranks best content marketing software app by GetApp

Posted on
July 13, 2015
by
Scoop.it ranked best content marketing software app by GetApp

We’re proud to be ranked best content marketing software app in GetApp’s Q2 2015 GetRank of the t​op 25 content marketing solutions.

GetApp is the largest cloud­-based business apps marketplace. In the four different categories evaluated, Infusionsoft took the top spot in Marketing Automation, Mailchimp in Email Marketing, Scoop.it in Content Marketing and Hootsuite in Social Media Marketing.

The goal of the ranking is to provide valuable data to businesses looking to make a first assessment when looking for the best content marketing software. GetApp’s ranking was determined using data collected from GetApp and other third­-party sources. Factors used to calculate an app’s ranking include User Generated Reviews, Integrations, Mobile Platforms, Media Presence, and Security. The ranking will be updated every quarter to reflect newly available data.

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Is your content marketing strategy paying off?

Posted on
July 9, 2015
by
Is your content marketing strategy paying off?

Content marketing strategy is one of the most popular online strategies nowadays, and for good reason. It’s generally hailed as a cost-effective strategy that generates compounding returns over time, as the longer you remain consistent with your approach, the more growth you’ll inevitably see. However, because content marketing affects many different areas of your business’s online visibility—from search engine ranks to far less quantifiable metrics like brand awareness—it can be difficult to tell whether all your efforts are actually paying off.

Some benefits of content marketing are simply unquantifiable—they’re qualitative and often subjective, and because of that it’s hard to reach an objective value. Still, with the knowledge and tools you do have, it’s possible to calculate whether or not your current content marketing efforts are adding value to your online marketing campaign.

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Content curation should be a daily habit for all marketers

Posted on
July 7, 2015
by

It is possible to build daily habits that guarantee to give you higher ranking and greater marketing success. Here are the habits you should cultivate.
Read the full article at: www.searchenginejournal.com

In his article, Neil Patel lists 5 daily habits you can (and should) start doing if you want your rankings to go up and get more results out of your content marketing efforts:

1. Write and publish one article – 1 hour per day for 1 to 2 articles per week.

2. Update one old article – 10 min per day.

3. Post a link to an article on every social media platform – 5 min per day.

4. Interact on one forum – 10 min per day.

5. Reply to one Tweet, Google+ update, Facebook post, and LinkedIn discussion, etc. – 10 min per day.

He explains exactly why you should get these 5 habits to ensure you greater results in your content marketing strategy and then gives you practical insights on how to master those habits.

This list is great and I try my best to spend about an hour doing them every day, simply because they do work. Given our experience, I’d like to talk about a sixth practice that has had a real impact on our content marketing ROI, and that I’m sure Neil would like. Let me know Neil! 🙂

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How to make your content ridiculously easy to share

Posted on
July 6, 2015
by
How to make your content ridiculously easy to share

Sharing is caring. It’s cliché, but oh so true. While share counts may not be directly tied to your social media and content marketing ROI, many brand publishers measure the success of a piece of content by how many shares it gets.

In earlier posts we’ve talked about the psychological motivations behind what makes people want to share. We’ve also covered how to get in your audience’s head to find out what they want you to share (in other words – what they’re most interested in). For this installment of the sharing series, we’re focused on helping you make content easy to share by formatting it. These are all the tips and tricks of formatting and timing that have been shown to make a difference.

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Posted in
Social Media

Why no one is sharing your content [and 3 strategies to fix it]

Posted on
June 29, 2015
by
Why No One is Sharing Your Content [and 3 Strategies to Fix It]

Are you embarrassed by the social sharing counts on your blog posts? Do you hit publish… only to hear crickets?

If you’re not getting many – or any – shares for your content, there is one bright spot: You’re not alone. I’ve seen hundreds of good, even great blog posts with single digit share counts. On any given day, thousands of unshared updates stream through my social media accounts.

As you know, there’s a tremendous amount of content getting published. If you’re not getting any sharing love, consider what you’re up against. This infographic from Domo  outlines the situation well. It shows how much content is published every minute. And it doesn’t even count the 2 million blog posts published every day.

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Posted in
Social Media

Publish quality content on your blog: quantity matters too!

Posted on
June 25, 2015
by
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

Posted on
June 23, 2015
by
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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Mobile content curation: save (even more) time publishing content with the new Scoop.it iPhone App

Posted on
June 22, 2015
by
Save time publishing content with the new Scoop.it iPhone App

No matter how good blogging Apps like the beautiful Wordpress App can be, writing 800 words on your iPhone will never be easy. But just like pictures, curated posts are a natural fit for mobile users. Why? First, reading news on smartphones has become common and second, the creation effort involved in curation is more limited: adding a 150-200 word insights to something you’ve read and selected is easy.

So today, we’re glad to give you a tour of the new Scoop.it App for iPhone that, according to MarketingHits founder Brian Yanish who was among the firsts to spot it on the App store, is “making it easier than ever to curate“.

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Posted in
Product News

Compelling infographics: 4 tips content marketers should follow

Posted on
June 18, 2015
by
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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How to improve SEO – the power of content curation

Posted on
June 16, 2015
by

90% of all the data in the world has been generated over the last two years? Faced with this huge, ever-increasing amount of data, threatened by social networks such as Facebook, search engines had to adapt or die. They found a better way of identifying quality and relevant content that genuinely addressed users’ needs. How can companies improve SEO to comply with secret algorithms that are constantly being revised by search engines?
Improve SEO by not doing SEO
That’s right! The old SEO is dead. Backlinks-only strategies are not only inefficient but condoned by search engines. As Neil Patel says, “you can’t just pop up an ugly website, throw up mediocre content, build a few links and expect to rank well”.
The only way to improve SEO now is to understand the new SEO: content marketing. Don’t do SEO, Search Engine Optimization like we meant it when the acronym was invented. Do content. Content that you audience cares about. Content that brings them added value. That’s how search engines feed their first page.

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A beginner’s guide to promote content on social media

Posted on
June 15, 2015
by
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

Posted on
June 9, 2015
by
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 we built a resource center without resources (and doubled our traffic)

Posted on
June 8, 2015
by
The new Scoop.it resource center: useful content for content marketers

Content Marketing is about sharing and education. It’s about being useful to your audience. As Carlton Hoyt was pointing out on the Content Marketing Institute’s blog: “Stop Thinking Content, Start Thinking Resources”

At Scoop.it, we’ve always been eager to learn. We do that by curating great content from influencers, by deriving our own conclusions from our own experiments and by sharing with the Scoop.it community on this blog and on our social channels to spread the results and collect feedback.

We’ve been doing that for some time now and even though we never had more than one full-time employee in charge of content, we now have a pretty big collection of content published including:

While we’re certainly happy with this ramp-up and while this content helps on a daily or weekly basis, we’ve been progressively wondering about the following questions:
  • How should we structure this wide variety of content so that it’s useful for our audience not just today but over time?
  • How do we do that in such a way that is the least time-consuming and the most efficient?

So as we’ve seen many marketers go through the same questions, we felt it would be interesting to share what we learned on this question, what mistakes we made and what successes we had.

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

Posted on
June 4, 2015
by
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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A simple SEO guide in 2015 (Infographic)

Posted on
June 2, 2015
by

“Penguin. Panda. Pigeon. Phantom. Navigating the constant pace of Google algorithm updates makes SEO in 2015 a much harder game to play. But companies and individuals who are producing high-quality branded content on a consistent basis are the ones that have the edge in terms of search visibility.”
Is SEO really a harder game to play as KunoCreative’s Dan Stasiewski put it in this excellent SEO guide infographic?

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Posted in
Content Marketing, SEO

How to nurture leads with content curation

Posted on
June 1, 2015
by
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)

Posted on
May 28, 2015
by

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

Posted on
May 27, 2015
by
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]

Posted on
May 26, 2015
by
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

Posted on
May 21, 2015
by
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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How to adapt your content marketing to the rise of big content

Posted on
May 19, 2015
by
Are you ready to adapt to the Rise of Big Content

“According to Gartner surveys, content is the most important thing marketers can do and yet they’re unequipped to take it on from a skills and sourcing level.”

Source: www.gartner.com

Last week, Gartner released the results of their study around the 5 top emerging trends in digital marketing, and one of the big 5 is around the “rise of big content”.

Most marketers understand how important content is for their audience and their overall marketing strategy, but they critically lack resources/skills to either create good content or source good content to curate.

The choice of words Gartner used was very wise: we all know “marketers understanding that” does not mean “CEOs understanding that”. So just like most marketers, you might be facing a situation where you and anyone within your company who can and would write has millions of other things to do with deadlines that can’t be pushed.  

In my opinion there are three answers you can bring to scale your content marketing and address the challenges created by the rise of big content:

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

Posted on
May 14, 2015
by
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

Posted on
May 12, 2015
by
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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