Beyond Analytics: The best SEO Tools for Content Marketers
“We all want content marketing results, but they can be hard to get without the right SEO tools. Here is a list containing 27 search optimization essentials.”
SEO changed over the past few years through the Google Search algorithm updates: from being a complex, tech process involving back links and labor – and to be fair not always very “white hat” – it became synonym for “regularly publish great content“.
This means that SEO tools have considerably changed and while analytics tools like Google’s or Moz are still very important, they help you measure but they don’t solve the main problem content marketers have: how to scale the content volume without sacrificing quality.
So we’re not surprised to see content-focused tools in…
Read MoreImportant Stats You Should Know from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report
Last week, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers presented her Internet Trends report for 2014 at the Code Conference in California. Each year since 2001, KPCB has partnered with some of the best data analysts in the country to create a comprehensive report of rising Internet trends across all industries. This year, the presentation resulted in a 164-slide deck that you can read in its entirety here. Since we’re fans of tl;dr analyses & content curation, though, here are some of the most important points from the first half of the report.
Read MoreBrand Stories vs. Product Stories
Read MoreOne of my core beliefs of effective content marketing is to deliver content people actually want. Publish stories they actually will enjoy – to read and to share.
College Students: 4 Tools You Can Use to Boost Your Learning Online
Raise your hand if you have ever sat in a lecture hall. Keep it raised if you have ever felt alone in the lecture hall. If you have ever felt alone while studying for that big exam. Or if you’ve ever missed a class, needed lecture notes, but knew no one in that class. Keep it raised, if by the end of the semester, of the 500 people in that class, you only met 1 or 2 of them, and by ‘met’, I mean gave them a formal head-nod or stared at the back of their head for 16 weeks. Keep it raised if you have ever bombed a test, but you feel like you studied a lot. (You really didn’t have to raise your hand, but if you did, props).
Yes, we’ve all been through these pain points. You probably wouldn’t even be reading this post if you didn’t passionately agree with me that these problems need fixing. They need fixing so badly that, if they don’t get it, they can put a damper on your college experience.
Read MoreEnd of School Roundup: Using Creation & Curation in Education
According to the Content Marketing Institute, original content should be the cornerstone of your content marketing. And curating content can raise your brand awareness and bring more visitors to your website. So how do these two fundamental marketing pieces work together? Very nicely. In terms of content marketing in any industry, how you marry creation and curation could mean your success or failure.
Specifically in education, EdTech consultants, teachers and librarians are doing a great job combining creation and curation to showcase student creativity, school information and thought leadership. We’ve pulled four worthy examples of users in the EdTech space who exemplify using powerful online tools to master creation and curation consistently.
Read More3 Ways to Generate Leads through Content Curation
While content marketing has been all the rage as a buzzword over the past 2 years, more and more people are rightfully asking the question of its ROI: is it effective? Can I afford content marketing as a small business? How do I even measure content marketing ROI?
Read MoreIntroducing Direct Links and Hidden Topics
Scoop.it Pro and Business just got a little more exciting! We’re excited to announce two new features of the premium plans on Scoop.it.
Read MoreThe Most Important Reason to Practice Lead Generation
A common theme at Scoop.it is helping people with important things to say be heard through all of the noise that exists online today. Creating an integrated content strategy that includes a healthy mix of creation and curation is the first step to success in this area, but another very important aspect that’s often overlooked is lead generation.
Read MoreMaking you a media: TL;DR by Scoop.it
Update: TL;DR is now live for everyone at tldr.scoop.it. Enjoy!
The Internet throws at us a full Library of Congress every 5 minutes or so. It’s just way too long to read!
We did not build Scoop.it to make the Internet shorter, though; we built it to help professionals and businesses to exist on the web; to cut through the noise, to demonstrate their thought leadership by becoming publishers on their specific topics.
Read MoreHow to Prepare Your Business for Content Marketing
A few weeks ago, content marketing expert Michael Brenner posted on his blog a list of signs that a business is not ready for content marketing. He brings up an interesting point in that many businesses believe they need to launch a content marketing strategy simply because everyone else is doing it, even though they may not be properly equipped to do so.
Read More5 Questions to Ask When Launching a Content Marketing Strategy
Feeling a little dull about your new content marketing efforts? Don’t worry, because despite what you may think, you’re certainly not alone. Getting started with a new content marketing strategy is no small task. It involves figuring out goals, strategies, tactics, deliverables, and other words that sound way scarier than they are.
Read More4 ways to integrate Scoop.it with WordPress
Before we even launched our public version, we recognized that a lot of content curators were also occasional or regular bloggers and started to offer ways to integrate with Wordpress – the leading blogging platform. Since then, we’ve seen a lot of our users leverage this integration as well as more and more of our Enterprise clients wanting to combine content curation through Scoop.it and the CMS capabilities of Wordpress for their sites. So we’ve multiplied the ways you could integrate with a Wordpress site or blog and including the recent addition of the Scoop.it plugin for Wordpress for our Enterprise clients.
Read MoreThe benefits of content curation for seo
In a recent survey of 1,550 US professionals on the impact of content curation for their business goals, 65% said content curation helped with regards to SEO. Not only that but data from 65M+ pieces of content curated on the Scoop.it platform show that an average of 40% of traffic comes from Google Search.
Read MoreExplanations and Lessons from the Ddos Attack
This last weekend was a tough one for our team as Scoop.it was sadly added to the growing list of websites that have been recently targeted by Ddos attacks. Following the first attack on Friday and our post on Monday, we’ve been up and running without interruptions but we nevertheless wanted to come back on some of your questions and give you as much clarity as we can.
Read MoreUpdate: Ddos attacks on Scoop.it
(photo: Startup Stock Photos)
Since last Friday, we’ve experienced several Ddos attacks (distributed denial of service) on Scoop.it that sadly are significantly affecting our service’s availability.
Read MoreLivin’ on the Edge: 7 Sites That (Thankfully) Don’t Hold Back
Where do you get your news? Some sources are too concerned about political correctness to give the news the treatment it deserves. The following are some news websites that (thankfully) don’t hold back.
Read MoreLearning to Learn: How To Look Like an Expert From Day One
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Working in the world of entrepreneurs and startups has given me a whole new appreciation for the phrase “fake it ’til you make it.” This isn’t to say that everyone who is just getting started in their companies or careers in general is completely faking it, but just that they are doing the right things to position themselves correctly before they might actually be a full-fledged expert.
In this post on Entrepreneur.com, the extremely smart Dorie Clark tackles a question that almost all of us have tried to figure out at one point or another: how do I make myself seem like I know what I’m doing when I’m just getting started?
Read More5 Midwest Startups to Watch in 2014
The Midwest is more than great BBQ and Tornado Alley. It’s a veritable pool of ingenious startups that are giving their coastal neighbors from New York to Silicon Valley a run for their money. From foodie startups to companies revolutionizing education, it’s crucial for investors and consumers alike to keep an eye on this surprising hot spot of entrepreneurship. Heading into 2014, here are five innovative Midwestern startups to watch.
Read More13 Hidden Benefits of Guest Blogging
Last week, the latest edition of the #leancontent took place in San Francisco with an incredibly smart and inspiring talk from SmartRecruiters’ David Smooke. He enlightened an extremely engaged audience on the importance of guest blogging and how it can be used to build community and authority, especially for startups.
Read MoreReport: 76% of Professionals Using Curation Saw an Impact on Business Goals
During the first quarter of 2014, Scoop.it conducted a survey of over 1,500 professionals who had been using content curation as a part of their content marketing strategy over the previous year. While it’s old news that more marketers are turning to content marketing and curation & making more space in their strategies for both, we wanted to find out what actually happened once these marketers had taken the proverbial leap.
Read More1,000,000 people and businesses are now using Scoop.it!
Interest-based content curation was only a vision 2 years ago when we launched: in a post Web 2.0 world, we felt that more and more we are the content we publish. Whether we liked it or not, we would all need to become media – a problem for busy professionals who don’t have time or inspiration for that and whose primary expertise is often not to be a content publisher.
Since then, publishing-by-curation rapidly turned into an important trend as 1,000,000 freelance professionals, community managers, content marketers, educators, knowledge managers, thought leaders, and more are now using Scoop.it to demonstrate and share their professional expertise, develop visibility for their small or mid-sized businesses or to make the company they work for smarter.
Read MoreHow to Unleash the Power of Employee Advocacy
Every one of your people can become an advocate for your organization and your brand – an employee advocate.
Excellent point made by Mike Bailey that reminds me of an argument also made by Marketo here. And exactly the trend we see happening with more and more of our enterprise clients at Scoop.it: while a lot of companies are still in a command-and-control mode with small marketing teams in charge of every aspect of outbound communication, we see a growing number of organizations realize they need to leverage their employees – and their employees social network – so that their communication becomes much more effective.
As the graph above explains, an employee sharing content to their networks has up to 20x more impact than when the brand does it (when you normalize their number of followers/friends).
Content curation plays a key role here: you not only need to create relevant and engaging content hubs for employees but they need to be easy for them to curate, share and publish from. As often, adoption is key and you need systems where employees can easily take ownership through a rewarding experience which seems to be what’s driving more and more demand to use Scoop.it internally within the enterprise.
See on socialmediatoday.com
Read More3 Tips For Breaking into the Blogosphere
It seems today that everyone wants to start a blog, given that there are more than 150 million blogs on the Internet. Despite the competition, it’s still a great idea. A blog can help you market your business or improve your hobby, but with so much competition, how can you break into the blogosphere with a bang?
Paid Facebook Reach: Does it really matter?
To continue sharing some of the learning-by-doing lessons I’ve come across over the past two years as a community and social media manager, I looked into the world of Facebook Insights to learn a little more about the often debated Facebook Reach and see what it’s actually done to help me.
Read MoreHow Blogging Accelerates Startup Growth
I write and publish guest blog posts because writing – like your startup – is for other people. It’s reaching new audiences. It’s sharing new experiences, practices and revelations with old friends and new friends… and even brands. It’s communication for the modern reader. Blogging is increasingly how many startups reach their next customer. In fact, 76% of professionals who used content curation saw an impact on reported business goals.
Read MoreCan SMB’s afford the impressive ROI of Content Marketing?
Is content marketing worth it? Can your company achieve a positive ROI by investing in blogging, social media, and marketing automation?
A great compilation of studies on the ROI of content marketing from Eloqua and Hubspot. There are lots of interesting numbers which show how valuable content marketing can be in the long run: unlike advertising which costs increase with success, content marketing scales up by delivering economies of scale with lower and lower costs per lead or visitor.
Now, the caveat is that these studies focus on sizeable organizations who can afford the following investments: “According to Eloqua’s findings, a mid-sized organization should expect to spend approximately $12,000 a month and a larger-sized company could expect about $33,000 a month.”
This raises the question of the accessibility of content marketing to small and mid-size businesses. To really be the new advertising, Content Marketing needs to become accessible to all – hence the growing interest for leancontent solutions and tools.
See on www.business2community.com
Read More5 lessons we learned experimenting SlideShare as a visual blog
SlideShare is a great platform for visual content and an amazing company: in just a few years, it has become the YouTube of presentations, one of the Top 150 sites in the world with an impressive 3 Billion views per month from 60 million unique visitors. Perhaps like many others, I originally thought of SlideShare as a platform to use only on specific occasions: when I had talked at a conference, when we had produced great slides worth sharing or when we had something specifically visual to communicate. I had had great experience and results but I don’t talk to conferences every day and so I sometimes felt I was missing out. And then, one night of September last year, I heard Jason Miller present at one of our #leancontent events and it became all clear: the team and I realized we could use SlideShare in a very different way – not just as a tool to recycle and share what you already created for other purposes but as a media channel that we would update on a regular basis. In a word, as a visual blog.
We decided to try it: over the next few months, we tried to publish at least every other week to SlideShare, integrating it in our content calendar alongside our blog and our Scoop.it content curations.
These are the first results after 4 months running this experiment.
Read MoreHow Martin Smith Uses Scoop.it To Find Content Marketing’s Over / Under
Visual Marketing Over/Under or How I Use Scoop.it
Friends like Phil Buckley and Mark Traphagen are curious about how and why I use Scoop.it. This G+ post shares a detailed analysis of how Scoop.it helps reduce #contentmarketing risks, provides fast feedback to influence social media marketing and creates a safe envrionment to test assumptions, create validated learning and learn fast.
6 ways to rethink corporate knowledge sharing
The quest to effectively share knowledge within a company is one that still appears elusive. How do you keep on top of your competitors’ developments? How do you monitor articles that mention your brand? How do you make sure your teams get the information they need to make decisions and to learn?
Learnings From Two Years as a Community Manager: Just Ask
If it wasn’t extremely obvious from the majority of my writing, I’m obsessed with learning. When I started out my career as a community manager, I didn’t even know what that meant. Two years later, I’m still not quite sure there is a single definition, but I certainly have learned a lot about what it means to build community, run social media strategies, and bring value to the crowded web with a group of brilliant content curators who I’ve been lucky enough to meet through the journey.
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