Posts Tagged: Content Marketing

Neil Patel Discusses the SEO Benefits of Curation

by in Content Marketing.

Neil Patel, co-founder of CrazyEgg and KISSMetrics, obviously understands a thing or two about how people interact online and what gets a site noticed. Which is why I really appreciated his article on Quicksprout called How Content Curation Can Improve Your Search Engine Rankings.

Rather than relying on the trite-and-true “quality and quantity” reasoning (more interesting content = more interested readers), Patel expands logically into a discussion of what kinds of curated posts we can try: distill, mashup, chronology and elevate, with examples of each.

Then, he provides six solid reasons why posting curated content in any or all of these forms will improve your search engine rankings organically while simultaneously satisfying your current readers with solid information they can consume and use. One I often overlook is:

Discover great content – Just the simple act of looking for content will expose you to a tremendous amount of great ideas that can lead to really cool posts. I can’t tell you how many times I was just researching for a particular topic and found dozens of great posts, videos and photos to use for a current project…as well as to save for future projects. In a lot of ways discovery is replacing search.

Finally, he lists various tools that make the different kinds of curation easier and more appealing. Although I’d humbly add Intigi to that list, it really rounds out a very effective and useful post I’d recommend you dive into.

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This is a guest post by Justin P Lambert. Justin is a content marketing specialist and freelance copywriter. He is also a ghostwriter, speech writer and consultant.

Lessons Learned From Top Curating Sites: Adobe’s CMO and Intel’s IQ

by in Content Marketing.

In the first article in this series on top curating sites, we discussed tech giants Techmeme and Daring Fireball. Then, in the second article, we looked at sites that focus on politics and news with The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report. This time, we’ll round out the series with a look at two offerings from the corporate world: CMO from Adobe and IQ from Intel.

CMO

This is one of my personal favorites, CMO.com, run by Adobe. What I really appreciate about this site is that Adobe did what few other large corporations have managed: they saw the value of strategic content curation as a means of establishing thought leadership and drawing their target audience to them, and they went forward, investing significant time, effort and resources into creating a trusted online destination.

The folks at Adobe targeted their audience with laser-precision: Chief Marketing Officers and similarly titled marketing executives. And they chose to curate, rather than create, at the outset. Here’s how CMO describes their thought process when curating:

There are thousands of digital marketing blogs out there that cover blog marketing—that is, the marketing of blogs—and blogs about Web marketing strategy using blogs. CMO.com has trimmed this number of online blogs down to the 40 or so most interesting, useful, and influential Web blogs and we bring the best of the best to you. — Read more

The clean and comfortable site is packed with information, navigable through several focus-narrowing sections and subtopics.

CMO.com's Home Page

Following suit with Techmeme and The Huffington Post, CMO offers several methods of narrowing down the vast amount of content they provide. Here’s how the breakdown is explained on their About page:

CMO.com has four major sections, shown on the top navigation bar:

  • News: Headlines, trends, announcements, and other information about digital marketing and key players in the digital marketing space
  • Insight: Articles, reports, surveys, statistics, and commentary from industry experts that have a relatively long “shelf life”
  • Blogs: Selected posts from influential bloggers, other CMOs, and industry publications
  • CMO Perspectives: Interviews with leading CMOs, findings from surveys of marketing executives, and a listing of industry events for CMOs and their staff

Selected articles from these sections are shown on the CMO.com Home page. Additionally, each section has an “index page” that lists all articles belonging to each section. Drop-down menus allow you to browse articles that deal individually with over 70 specific digital marketing topics. – Read more

While aggregating “the best of the best” worked very well, and still comprises the majority of what we find on CMO.com, this note shows that Adobe saw additional benefit in including content creation in the mix beginning last year:

In addition to aggregating the best and most meaningful news and insights from around the Web, in early 2011 CMO.com began creating our own content—mostly thought leadership articles, feature articles, and slide shows. – Read more

Clearly labeled as CMO Exclusives, CMO’s original content is placed at the top of the home page and the individual category pages as well, so there’s no mistaking the value they place on the content they’re creating. But, the curated content is available just below and this is one of the main reasons loyal readers keep coming back.

While the Alexa rank of this site is only #45,239 (which is actually excellent, but pales in comparison to some others we’ve discussed), the real value here is that CMO.com isn’t designed to appeal to a mass market audience. And, it’s not really designed to appeal to the end users of their products (designers, primarily). Rather, it’s designed to appeal to the economic buyer of many of Adobe’s products: marketing executives who are generally in a position to make a buying decision. Which is why all those discreetly placed ads for Adobe products probably generate significant income in the long term.

CMO’s continued efforts to provide high-quality curation of valuable content from a hand-picked group of quality sources combine to make it one of the best examples of successful curation available in the corporate world.

IQ

Silicon giant, Intel, has been focusing extensively on content marketing efforts over the last few years. And, as highlighted in this interesting blog poast by Lee Odden, referencing a presentation Intel did at Content Marketing World 2011, it’s a complex task to coordinate a content strategy throughout such a huge, global organization.

The latest example of that effort is “a new social publishing model” called iQ. iQ’s Mission Statement is impressive:

We created the iQ platform to spotlight how people are using technology in inspiring ways. It’s a discovery tool that narrates technology’s impact on “Media”, “Life” and our “Planet”. iQ is here to remind us on how fast we’re moving as a global culture, to be cognizant of how far we’ve come and to reflect on where our planet is headed.

The iQ page is designed as a destination to be bookmarked and returned to repeatedly.  The page is constantly changing based on the audience’s reaction to various stories that appear there, since social media shares comprise a significant portion of the algorithm Intel uses to automagically populate the page and highlight various stories.  Here’s how they describe the process:

The experience is comprised around social algorithms that curate content shared by Intel employees, blended with original and industry content, all surfaced through a touch optimized design.  It’s our next step in our social media journey, and represents a new model for branded social publishing.

IQ is initially populated primarily through an automated content aggregation algorithm. Basically, Intel has set up software behind the scenes that goes out to find stories that fit their chosen parameters.

Social Algorithm – iQ sources content from across the web. We’ve developed several layers of curation that filters content based on freshness, relevancy, shares, clicks, employee interaction and deviance from the norm… just for starters.

Next, iQ utilizes a layer of employee curation to further filter the stories.

iQ crowd-sources what our employees share publically online. We hope this offers a unique glimpse into what is grabbing our attention and leverages a valuable filter for insight and knowledge sharing.

Intel has taken notice of the fact that their own employees are already active on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and are knowledgeable about the kinds of topics iQ is designed to cover. So, using a unique crowd-sharing method, the company is leveraging that qualified team of “curators” to provide variety and relevance to an otherwise automated process. To some extent, this bridges the gap between aggregation and curation for the iQ project.

There’s also another level of human editorial oversight as well in the form of “The Intel Social Media Center of Excellence“, a team of nine employees dedicated to this and other social publishing efforts the company has undertaken.

The design is fun and easy to navigate, optimized for touchscreen devices in response to Intel’s accurate appraisal that more and more users will be viewing the site on phones and tablets going forward.

They have kept the main categories limited to three, and they’ve color-coded the story blocks to make it that much simpler to choose what you’d like to view.  Of course, each category has its own focused page with just that category’s stories displayed. 

Although Intel is constantly creating original content on various blogs, there does not appear to be any marked effort to highlight original over curated content. And the ratio is heavily favoring curated content at the time of this writing: out of 47 stories appearing on the home page, only two are original Intel posts.

Of course, IQ is still a very new publication, and is likely to evolve quickly as Intel continues to experiment. But it’s already generated significant buzz in the content marketing community. And it’s just different enough, and valuable enough, to be a long-term contender.

In Conclusion

So what have we figured out after all this?

Here are a few takeaways you may want to think about:

  • Curation is already a proven traffic magnet – All these sites have proven to be highly successful in that unavoidably important online metric: traffic. The only exception is IQ, which is still too young to have reliable traffic data. But it’s made up for it with a healthy dose of that all-important other online metric: buzz. Don’t fool yourself by thinking that only original content will bring an audience to your door. Quality curation, done well and done consistently, can be just as effective.
  • Curation strategy needs to include a win-win for the creator – As exemplified by The Huffington Post, when curation straddles that line – benefiting from someone else’s content without offering sufficient attribution or sending readers to the source – it can lead to negative press and potential disaster for the culprit. Of course, HuffPo is too big to be stopped by a little bad press, but your site probably isn’t.  Don’t risk it.  As Matt Drudge has maintained right from the beginning, it is possible, even probable, to keep people coming back just by sending them away.
  • Quality curation requires a human element – While purely automated aggregation is possible, and technology continues to smooth the edges of the end result, these top curating sites have all come to rely on the human element to guarantee their audiences truly get the best-of-the-best.  In the case of Techmeme, this was a conscious decision after the site had started generating traffic, for the others, it’s always been part of the mix.  Some, like DaringFireball and The Drudge Report, rely on a single human expert whose voice reaches directly to their target audience. For others, such as Huffington Post and CMO, a large corporate team of contributors have a say in what makes it to the reader. And Intel’s iQ has a unique and interesting crowd-sourced social curation strategy that relies to a large extent on their employees’ social sharing trends, combined with the oversight of a small editorial staff.  Whichever method works best for your site, don’t try to squeak by without taking time to filter and add value to the content you curate.
  • Design factors into the value you create – While the popularity of The Drudge Report proves that flashy sites with bells and whistles aren’t required, there is still plenty to be said for ease of use and your site’s visual appeal. CMO intentionally keeps their original content at or near the top of the page where it’s sure to be seen, along with eye-catching Adobe ads. The Huffington Post adjusts positioning, headlines, images and leads based on click-through rates, always working to maximize the impact. Techmeme and CMO both offer various methods of locating stories based on popularity and timeline. And iQ offers a touchscreen-optimized design with prioritization based on employees’ social media sharing. Again, experimentation is the key.  But when considering design, always start with the site’s main goal and move out from there, keeping things as simple as that goal allows. Then test, test, test.
  • There is no right answer – Perhaps the most powerful lesson this three-part series has taught us is that there is no “right answer” when it comes to how curated content can be used on your site.  There’s no doubt that quality curation is a beneficial strategy that you should start making use of if you haven’t already. But to what extent?  And how should it be presented?  Only time and testing will answer that question for you.  So don’t waste any time in getting started!

 So now it’s your turn:

What sites do you rely on for solid curation and aggregation? How do you make sense of the information flood? Let me know in the comments.

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This is a guest post by Justin P Lambert. Justin is a content marketing specialist and freelance copywriter. He is also a ghostwriter, speech writer and consultant.

Lessons Learned From Top Curating Sites: Techmeme and DaringFireball

by in Content Marketing.

The flood of information available online long ago surpassed what the human mind is capable of taking in. In fact, it would take several lifetimes just to read the URLs of the over 650 million websites currently available. And over a third of these sites are updated on a regular basis, some many times per day.

The argument for content curation is no longer an argument. Curation is the only means by which anyone can really make sense of the flood.

But there are a lot of different forms of large-scale curation, from the purely automated aggregation of RSS feeds to hand-selected, best-of-the-best link lists. Not to mention the smaller-scale curation going on all over the social web by individuals sharing interesting and valuable links with their personal and professional communities.

To begin making sense of this range of approaches to curation, we’re going to take a look at six different large and successful websites currently using one or more forms of content curation.

For today’s post, we’re going to examine two successful curation sites that focus on technology: Techmeme and DaringFireball. Each site handles content curation (and creation) in very different ways and begins to reveal the range of possibilities in handling curation.

Techmeme

Techmeme is ranked #8973 on Alexa, which puts it in the upper echelon of websites in the highly-competitive and saturated technology category.

Interestingly, Techmeme began as a strictly automated technology news aggregator, but later added a human editorial layer. Here’s how they describe their curation strategy on their About page:

In 2012, knowing what’s changing in technology is required to understand the cultural currents and business events reshaping the world. If you’ve been watching the tech industry evolve, it won’t surprise you that social networks enable political revolutions, brand new companies can acquire millions of customers in months, or the world’s most valuable company built that wealth on products that didn’t exist five years ago.

Techmeme is the foremost source for tracking these changes. By presenting a summary of the day’s essential reports and analysis on a single page, Techmeme has become the technology news site of record for people both within and beyond the industry.

Curation

Techmeme accomplishes this the only way possible: by linking to stories from all around the web. Spotlighting the writings of reporters, commentators, and industry players from across the media and industry landscape provides the only effective means of offering a comprehensive view. And by doing this well, we spare readers the impossible task of monitoring an abundance of news sites, tweets, and status updates.

Origins

Techmeme was founded in 2005 by Gabe Rivera as an automated news curation service, like Google News, but focused on the leading edge of technology. Starting in 2008, we introduced human editors to complete the editorial process, and have now assembled the team presented on the right. Our experience leads us to believe that a thoughtful combination of both algorithmic and human editing offers the best means for curating in a space as broad as technology. Today, Techmeme remains independent, bootstrapped, and privately held, a point of differentiation in an increasingly complicated tech media landscape.

Techmeme focuses on pulling together top stories, with the human editorial viewpoint necessary to weed out the junk and the redundancies. They’re also well aware of the fact that different readers choose to consume content in different ways. The clean and uncomplicated home page provides a constantly updated list of top stories, which I’m guessing (don’t quote me on this) is populated, in part, by applying a click-through rate algorithm to the list of the “newest” stories that appears on the far right. Also, in the middle, is a list of sponsored stories supplied by paid sponsors.

Screenshot of Techmeme.com home page

Techmeme.com's Home Page - Top stories, sponsored stories and new stories

As an alternative to the home page, they also provide a page called The River, where readers can consume new stories as they arrive and look back chronologically over previous stories from the previous few days.

Screenshot of the Techmeme.com river page

The River Page from Techmeme.com - content curated chronologically

And, in a unique and powerful form of additional attribution, Techmeme also provides the Leaderboard, a linked list of sources ranked by how frequently their stories have appeared on Techmeme over the previous 30 days. Since the human editorial input ensures that quantity of posts will not guarantee a top ranking, this list provides awesome social proof for the sources that consistently provide the highest quality content.

Screenshot of the Techmeme.com Leaderboard

The Leaderboard on Techmeme.com - The best sources Techmeme uses

In a recent interview with TheVerge.com, Techmeme’s founder, Gabe Rivera, was asked if he ever considered adding original content to the mix. He had an interesting take on the creation/curation question that many content marketers are struggling with right now:

We think of almost everything, so yeah, the idea of producing original content has flashed through my brain for a few seconds before I tossed it. Producing original content would be too much of a distraction for us, complicate our product, and could sour our relationship with the publishers we quote and link to… Is news curation more important than creation/reporting? Well, you can’t have curation without production in the first place, so I’m gonna go with “no”. But I’ll add that all “original” content producers are doing curation and even aggregation themselves at some level.

While Rivera humbly denies Techmeme is “the new Digg” for technology publishers, there’s no denying the powerful role Techmeme currently plays in the tech sector.

DaringFireball

Also in the technology space, but focused to a large extent on Apple and Apple-based products and apps, DaringFireball applies a very different approach to curation.

The blog has the stripped-down feel of a Tumblr blog, focusing attention strictly on the content. With an Alexa rank of 12,926, founder and only blogger John Gruber has accomplished something amazing as a one-man-show: Estimated feed subscribers of over 400,000 and estimated monthly page views of over 4 million!

DaringFireball.net's Home Page

The Home Page on DaringFireball.net - simple and elegant

Although Gruber’s technical background allows him to dive pretty deep into the tech subjects with authority, the real key to his popularity is that he fully understands his audience. As noted on his sponsorship page, where sponsors can sign up to have their ad displayed for a full week in DaringFireball’s RSS feed, Gruber lets them know who they’re going to reach:

Daring Fireball’s audience of Mac nerds, designers, nitpickers, perfectionists, and connoisseurs of fine sarcasm.

Gruber scours the net and locates breaking news, interesting tidbits, infuriating exposes, and hilarious screw-ups and adds a sentence or two of sharp-witted commentary to every one. DaringFireball readers know they’re getting one man’s well-read and well-thought-out view of news that’s important to him. And since John Gruber IS the average DaringFireball reader, this news is important to THEM too.

In addition, Gruber will occasionally run an original piece like this recent response to the upcoming schedule for the WWDC 2012 Conference. His in-depth, knowledgeable view on the subject is just as apparent in this format as in his curated posts. Interestingly, although this isn’t set in stone, he seems to generally curate between 8 and 12 posts in a day but leaves one original post alone on the day it’s posted, perhaps to draw reader attention to it more effectively.

His approach has certainly worked as is evidenced by the readership numbers, and the fact that he is able to offer a paid membership that amounts to readers voluntarily paying for something they can get for free. Here’s how the paid membership is described on the DaringFireball website:

It is essential to note that Daring Fireball is and will remain a free web site. New articles and the complete archive are available to all, free of charge. This is a good thing. However, paying supporters do get access to a few members-only perquisites, including separate full-content RSS feeds for articles and the Linked List (my daily list of links and blurbs related to Mac, web, and design nerdery).

While no one would make the mistake of considering DaringFireball to be “the next Digg,” it’s operating in a completely different space from Techmeme and other larger-scale content curators. Instead of hoping to be all things to a segment of the population, Gruber is simply being himself, which turns out to be incredibly appealing to a large audience of readers.

Summary

These two sites, Techmeme and DaringFireball, have gained a tremendous following from a devoted audience, while applying content curation (and creation) in fundamentally different ways. Techmeme focuses purely on curating stories and sources, including Tweets. Meanwhile, DaringFireball combines the curation of stories and quotes with insightful original commentary and the occasional full-length, original blog post. Both approaches are equally valid and provide significant, but different types of value to their audiences of technology enthusiasts.

Stay tuned for our next post in this series, where we cover two political and news focused curation sites: The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report.

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This is a guest post by Justin P Lambert. Justin is a content marketing specialist and freelance copywriter. He is also a ghostwriter, speech writer and consultant.

Content Curation IS a Marketing Must

by in Content Marketing.

I was impressed by a post on the SixEstate Blog the other day called Content Curation Becoming a Marketing Must. I definitely recommend checking it out. Subscribe to their blog, too. It’s a consistently good source for content marketing information.

But this post was particularly in-depth, including several well-placed references from Magnify.net, SEOMoz, and Beth Kanter‘s blog.

Some points to ponder, based on what I read:

  • As the marketing world continues to latch onto the power of curation, will creation take a back seat? (I don’t think so, but curation is a clear marketing trend with growing adoption…)
  • To what extent is the shocking popularity of Pinterest and Instagram changing content curation into image curation? (Or, put another way, how many people are going to go image-first when searching for meaningful content going forward?)
  • And what’s the impact on the original content creator if people start curating the curated content? (This may sound silly until you realize how many popular blogs and news sources are now curating a large percentage of their content.)

Now, I’m not raising any red flags here. Far from it. I actually believe curation is an immensely powerful content marketing tool. But the questions are out there and I think we need to have these conversations now rather than later. Because strategy is a huge part of what makes content marketing work.

And strategy requires looking ahead.

So what do you think? Any input on the questions above? Or what other questions come to your mind when you consider content curation?

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This is a guest post, all opinions are those of the author.

Justin P Lambert is a content marketing specialist and freelance copywriter. He is also a ghostwriter, speech writer and consultant.

5 Blogging Mistakes That You Should Avoid

by in Content Marketing.

Several weeks ago, we published “Maintain a Rockin’ Blog for Your Startup” to the Founders Network blog (fnBlog), and reposted the article on the Intigi blog. After publishing and promoting the article, the fnBlog post made the front page of Hacker News and was spreading via social media, especially Twitter. By the end of the first day, the post had generated 3,385 unique visits. This traffic eclipsed the previous daily record on the fnBlog by a factor of 10!

Google analytics report

From our perspective, it was a successful post. It created value for readers and in turn drove significant traffic to the fnBlog. Looking back, we think the following aspects of the post contributed to its success. The title was catchy, we included a nice image at the top, the introduction (with a reference to Mark Suster) was inviting and relevant, the post was well structured, we offered some unique advice, and lastly we shared a number of quality 3rd party links.

Despite our success, there were several key mistakes. In the spirit of sharing lessons learned, here are five mistakes that you should avoid when blogging:

1. Site performance: After our post made the Hacker News home page, the fnBlog crashed due to the influx of traffic. There were two reasons for this crash. First, the fnBlog didn’t have caching installed. Second, the site is on shared hosting with GoDaddy.

Comments on Maintain a Rockin Blog for Your Startup

To avoid these two issues, you should use caching and host your blog with a more robust provider. If you’re using WordPress, we highly recommend the WP super cache plug-in. For hosting, there are many providers out there, but we are fans of Media Temple. It costs a bit more than other web hosting services, but for a high traffic website, it’s worth the premium price. For some additional tips on preparing your WordPress blog for a spike in traffic: High Traffic Tips For WordPress

2. Broken links: We drafted the post in Google Docs and then cut and paste the content into the WordPress wysiwyg editor. After publishing, we discovered that many of our links did not carry over properly.

comment on the fnBlog

Whether or not your are following our work flow with Google Docs, make sure to check that all your links are working properly before you post (we realize this is an obvious blunder!). Broken links, as well as other formatting and grammatical errors, will undermine the authority of your post. It will discourage readers from taking your work seriously, and your readers will be reluctant to share it with others. If you have a WordPress blog, here is a useful plug-in: Broken Link Checker WP plug-in

3. Calls to action: Although our post generated a significant amount of traffic, relatively speaking, the post didn’t generate any inquires or applications for the Founders Network. It’s possible that the post didn’t connect with the Founders Network target audience. But a more likely explanation is that readers had limited opportunities to comfortably engage further with the service. The fnBlog lacked any suitable “calls to action,” aside from an “apply” button and a subscription option to the Founders Network “weekly email digest.” After reading a blog post, it’s unlikely a reader is ready to apply for a high-touch service, like the Founders Network. In addition, there was likely some confusion about what’s included in the weekly email digest.

Old fnBlog landing page

To capture some of the traffic that lands at your blog, you should offer several clear calls to action that allow visitors to engage comfortably with your company. Furthermore, you should instrument your calls to action so you can observe readers’ behavior and make improvements over time. For additional tips: 7 Tips for Great Calls to Action

4. Promotion via news aggregators: We promote our blog posts via social media and news aggregators. Some news aggregators, however, discourage you from promoting your own articles. Unfortunately, we learned this the hard way. A few days ago, one of us had his Newsvine account disabled because we promoted our own content and no other content.

News aggregator misuse

The lesson here is if you’re plannig to post content on a news aggregator, make sure to first read the Terms of Service. You should also try to participate in the community beyond just promoting your own work by contributing thoughtful comments and submitting high-quality 3rd party content. For more insights on promoting your content: How to Promote your Blog Post with only $100

5. Follow up: For this blog post we were slow to engage with readers, both on the fnBlog and on social media. By failing to engage readers in a timely manner, we lost the opportunity to cultivate new relationships. Our slow response may have also dampened readers’ enthusiasm to promote our post. As an example of a lost opportunity, we could have engaged Jeanne Hopkins (the VP of Marketing at Hubspot) who retweeted our post to her 12k followers.

tweet of Maintain a Rockin Blog for Your Startup by hubspot vp of marketing

When readers comment on your blog or share your post via Twitter or other social media, you should engage readers in some way. You should answer questions, respond to thoughtful comments, whether positive or negative, and thank people for sharing your content with others. For more advice on managing your blog comments: 7 Tips to Increase Your Blog Comments

We hope you can learn from the above mistakes. We’d love to learn from your mistakes. Please share your experiences below in the comments.

For additional guidance on blogging, here are some best practices suggested by experts:

If you’re interested in staying current on the latest news about content marketing, please follow us on Twitter @intigi.

If you’re a tech founder, and want to learn about the latest tips for building a successful tech venture, please follow us on Twitter @foundersnetwork.

About Michael J. Fern
Michael is the CEO, cofounder of Intigi. Intigi is an online service that helps marketers find, curate, and share engaging content so they can build their company’s thought leadership and increase qualified website traffic. To learn more, please visit http://intigi.com.

About Thue Lægdsgaard Madsen
Thue is a Social Media Intern at Founders Network and a Graduate Student at Copenhagen Business School. Founders Network offers peer mentorship to tech startup founders. To learn more, please visit http://foundersnetwork.com.

A version of this post first appeared on the fnBlog.

Why Startups Should Curate Content

by in Content Marketing.

Information Chemist Quote
Test Tube Image by [F]oxymoron, modified under CC by Intigi.

Robert Scoble is a prolific content curator. By curating and sharing the latest news about technology and startups, he has developed a remarkable online following. For instance, Scoble has 245,192 Twitter followers, is included in 781,318 Google+ circles, and has 151,217 subscribers on Facebook. He has an active following on at least a dozen other social media services, from Quora to FourSquare.

This tremendous online following provides Scoble with an expansive channel to convey information and ideas. His reach is so valuable that Rackspace employs Scoble simply to attach its brand to Scoble and his ongoing technology evangelism.

Just like Scoble, startups can use content curation to catapult their online presence and influence. Content curation is a useful approach for all companies, but especially for startups. Here’s why:

  1. Thought leadership: Curation is an excellent way to establish your startup as a thought leader in your space. If outsiders view your company as a key source of industry information, you will quickly build your brand recognition, as well as develop trust and goodwill among customers. In addition to the branding benefits, curation grounds you in a domain, learning the field as you review and share content with others. This helps ensure that your expertise remains relevant and at the leading edge.
  1. Hub of information: Many startups are competing in frontier, niche markets. In these markets, it’s unlikely that there are established, consolidated sources of high-quality information. By being first to market as a content curator in your space, and by hosting curated content on your website, you can quickly rise as a primary destination site for those interested in your industry.
  1. Resource constraints: Instead of curating content, you could create all original content, from authoring blog posts to white papers. But for startups in particular, it’s difficult to find enough time to produce enough original content in-house and it’s equally challenging to allocate funding for contract writers. By complementing your original content with curated content, you can accelerate your content marketing efforts using fewer resources. In this way, content curation is an ideal approach for the lean startup.
  1. Breadth of coverage: If you decide to focus exclusively on creating original content, you’ll be unable to cover all the important trends in your niche that are critical to your customers. By bringing together your original content with curated content, you can round out your coverage with valuable 3rd party content. Furthermore, by combining your content with others, you can add a new level of richness and flavor to your content marketing efforts.
  1. Repetition: The amount of material available online is so vast that many topics have already been well covered by others. In this case, you’re better off pointing your audience to other articles and sources versus creating a nearly redundant article on your own website. Your customers will appreciate you sharing high-quality content and you’ll also gain the attention of the 3rd party source, potentially sparking a new relationship in your industry.
  1. Momentum: Since you can only post so much original content, content curation can help you sustain daily and weekly momentum with your content marketing efforts. While original content will attract new customers, curated content will ensure your audience is regularly engaged and your company is top of mind. In short, curated content will ensure customers remember you if and when they’re ready to make a purchasing decision.

In addition to these six benefits, here are 10 other reasons why startups should care about content marketing, the umbrella under which content curation falls.

So now that we’ve described the benefits of content curation for startups, let’s review several different curation approaches.

  1. Link lists: A link list is a dynamic and structured list of links on a particular topic. The list can either be curated by a company (e.g., Techmeme) or by a user community (e.g., HackerNews or Inbound.org). Techmeme is a structured link list and is one of our favorite sources of technology news. According to Compete.com, Techmeme generated about 50,000 unique visitors in January, 2012. Not too shabby.
  1. Collections: A collection is a bundle of articles, images, videos, or websites, that relate to a specific theme. For instance, SEOMoz created a “Social Media Marketing Guide” that lists 101 of the best social media sites that you can use to market your business online. By creating this list and keeping it updated, this “guide” has become an important resource for social media marketers.
  1. Periodic summaries: Periodic summaries are daily, weekly, monthly or annual summaries, often including a list of links, around a particular theme. These summaries can be presented online (e.g., The Lede by CopyBlogger), via email (e.g., The Moz Top 10), or in magazine format (e.g., HackerMonthly). An example of an email summary is the CEA SmartBrief, put out by the Consumer Electronics Association. The CEA SmartBrief is an excellent way for the CEA to stay in touch with its primary audience in between its major trade shows, such as CES in Las Vegas.
  1. Content with Commentary: Content with commentary is when you identify one or more 3rd party articles (or other media) and then add your own point of view. Microblogging often follows this approach. One of the best examples of content with commentary is Daring Fireball, a blog that focuses on Apple’s strategy and products. With 3rd party content and commentary, and the occasional full-length blog post, DaringFireball has built a dedicated following (30,000 unique visitors in January, 2012, according to Compete).
  1. Social media sharing: Another approach is to share curated content (with or without commentary) via social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.  For instance, the Inbound Marketing Agency, Kuno Creative has developed a nice following of nearly 8,000 followers on Twitter by sharing its own original content along with related content from HubSpot, SEOMoz, and other sources in the inbound marketing space.
  1. Hybrid: Last but not least is a hybrid approach that combines original content and different forms of curated content. Because a hybrid approach combines a variety of content, both original and curated, it creates a particularly rich experience for viewers. A nice example of a hybrid approach is CMO.com, a website developed by Adobe for marketing professionals, which presents original content along with high-quality 3rd party content. According to Compete, CMO.com generated about 10,000 unique visitors in January, 2012.

These are six common approaches to content curation. Successful curators often employ several of these approaches, while combining their curation efforts with producing original content (e.g., blog).

Although there are many benefits to content curation, there are also a few pitfalls to watch out for. Two common pitfalls are the effects of duplicate content on search engine rankings and potential copyright violations. There are many articles that have explored these pitfalls in depth, and in the spirit of content curation, we’d like to point you to several helpful resources. For avoiding issues related to duplicate content and search engine rankings, here is an excellent video and article by SEOMoz. For issues dealing with copyright and “fair use,” here are several useful resources.

We started this post by pointing to Robert Scoble, who has used content curation to develop an enviable online following. This following has afforded Scoble with significant influence in the tech community. He is also well liked, because he’s developed his following by promoting others, not himself. Like Scoble, you can use content curation to quickly elevate your own company and brand. We hope this article has provided you with some valuable tips to help you get started with your curation efforts.

If you want to learn more about content curation, you can check out these links:

Please let us know if you found this article helpful or if you have any tips that we forgot to include in our post.

If you’re interested in staying current on the latest news about content marketing, please follow us on Twitter @intigi.

If you’re a tech founder, and want to learn about the latest tips for building a successful tech venture, please follow us on Twitter @foundersnetwork.

About Michael J. Fern
Michael is the CEO, cofounder of Intigi. Intigi is an online service that helps marketers find, curate, and share engaging content so they can build their company’s thought leadership and increase qualified website traffic. To learn more, please visit http://intigi.com.

About Thue Lægdsgaard Madsen
Thue is a Social Media Intern at Founders Network and a Graduate Student at Copenhagen Business School. Founders Network offers peer mentorship to tech startup founders. To learn more, please visit http://foundersnetwork.com.

BufferApp and Content Marketing

by in Content Marketing.

Actually up until the past 2 months, content marketing accounted for over 70% of our daily signups.

via How The BufferApp Grew To 70,000+ Users With A Solid Product & Content Marketing.

Leo Widrich of BufferApp provides some useful tips on how to use content marketing as a go-to-market strategy for a startup: make sure your content is everywhere, create blog posts with data driven insights or that include lists (e.g., top 10 lists), contribute to other blogs as a guest writer, build a following around your content by using email and other tools, if you use Twitter include a Tweet a day without a link, and for your Tweets that include a link make sure you provide your own commentary.