Content Curation Software

This is Part 2 in a series.  (Read Types of Curation Part 1)

Today:  Curated Hubs

While many people extol the virtues and value of social or real-time curation, my personal favorite from a branding and monetization standpoint is the curated hub, which is just a fancy name for blog curation.  A curated hub contains regularly published stories that contain citations of great informatin and resources on a particular keyword topic.  Curated content is formed into a blog post, with commentary from the author that gives the topic more depth, context, and standalone value.

The effects of a well-curated hub:

• save readers time finding the good stuff themselves
• inform readers by providing context and meaning to the citations and the overall topic
• trackback links from cited sites, which improve search rankings for the curator
• loyal following from readers who have chosen your site to be the trusted “filter” on a topic
• monetization through traditional methods of paid advertising, affiliate sales, list marketing, or products and services you provide directly

How Curated Hubs Bring Value To A Niche Market

One thing is for sure:  if you provide something of value to a large enough group of interested people, you can expect a loyal and growing following.  Along with good search rankings, links, and direct traffic from sites who reference and link to your stuff.

A site on the web today has to provide a much higher level of real value to earn loyal fans who recommend it to others.  People have serious A.D.D. these days with all the social, mobile, and web channels they follow.  So much noise, so little time.  It makes for a hardcore weeding-out process for web publishers.  You have to have your A Game going at all times to successfully compete for attention these days.

The value proposition in a curated hub is essentially twofold:

1. The site must create a knee-jerk reaction in first time visitors to want to bookmark, subscribe, or somehow make a note that this is a site they must visit regularly.  This is done firstly by providing content that helps them get a bird’s-eye view and deeper understanding of an overall interest which saves them time over finding all the good stuff themselves or elsewhere.
2. The person behind the curation is not just an aggregator of content, but someone with opinion and insight to add to the discussion and the outside sources they curate into their posts.  i.e. – the readers have to get connected to the person behind the information for “imprinting” to take place which causes them to really want to follow and talk about your site.

Why is that?  It’s because they like the way the information is delivered and the way each site chooses things to curate and talk about.  It is how the reporting culture is set up behind the scenes and in the writing itself.  When Samsung comes out with a new phone and each site curates a story on it, they aren’t talking about two different phones.  But their loyal readers like the delivery and the coverage of one over the other.  Each brings a different value to different reader tastes in how they like to consume information on gadgets and tech.

All of this “bonding” has everything to do with editorial policy and the people behind the curation, and nothing to do with the technology helping the curator to research, pick, and publish curated 3rd party content.

What Being a Great Hub Curator Means

Getting hub curation right means providing a value in the marketplace that is sought after by a significant portion of the ideal reader demographic you wish to attract.  Get this down, and you’ll have the traffic, rankings, and discussion on social networks to provide you with monetization opportunities out the wazoo.

At the end of the day, all hub curation is is a way to do content marketing that can take less time, help you publish more often, while becoming a necessary, crucial site for readers to visit regularly.  It is a way to attract a demographic to advertising, products and services, or affiliate offers that are placed throughout your site and in your email newsletter.

And doing it on your own domain, your own “hub,” means you control the entire process.  You control the flow of readers from other sites and search engines.  You control how they flow from content to ads or content to email list subscription, or to take whatever action you want them to take that makes your content marketing profitable.

Who’s Castle Are You Building?

Image via Wikipedia

This you cannot do on a third-party site owned by someone else.  In every instance where someone has built a third-party, hosted solution for publishing it has been an utter failure for the publishers in terms of maximizing profitability of all the eyes they attract.  It is always better for the owner of the network than it is the publisher. Always.

So never put your business in the hands of anyone else.  You home site – your curated hub – absolutely must be on your own domain and under your full control if you want to have a successful content marketing business.  Use outposts like social networks, personal curation sites like Scoop.it, and other places to help draw attention to your curated hub where the real business of content marketing gets done.  If one of your outposts changes the rules or dies, your loss is only a fraction of your overall efforts rather than a complete decimation of your entire business.

Things A Curated Hub Can Sell Well

• Books and courses (your own or as an affiliate)
• Services (your own or as an affiliate)
• Advertising
• YOU (as a personal brand)
• Consulting
• Coaching
• Memberships (your own or as an affiliate)
• Any number of hard or digital affiliate products related to readership interests

Image via Wikipedia

Curation is a particularly sweet kind of honey that attracts stressed out, overstimulated, overloaded bees (readers) who want to follow someone who cuts through the noise for them and presents them with only the best content with appealing insight, commentary and thought leadership.

Part 1 of a two part series…

There are several different types of curation.  In fact, there are almost as many types of curation as there are definitions of what exactly curation is.

But there are only two, count them, TWO types of curation that can be monetized well and used for brand-building.

With that in mind, there are two major types of curation happening today:

1. Real-time curation, and
2. Blog Curation (or Curated Hubs)

Real-Time Curation

This is the realm of curation that is personified by people like Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, and Mari Smith.  They are followed on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ by so many people because of their ability to surface and post content their readers appreciate, enjoy, and spread around their own networks.

Real-time curation is all about being in-the-know and reporting on the latest breaking news and new information around a specific topic range.  Scoble is all about tech, startups, cool apps and social news.  Smith is all about sharing content on social media, branding, thought leadership, and marketing via social.

Kawasaki is the hardest to put into a box.  He shares just about anything and everything falling under the vague and subjective category of “interesting.”  But he’s done the best job of anyone in making general, real-time curation work for his brand.

The real-time curator relies on the same tools as anyone does to pick up on the latest news and information.  They live on RSS readers and other info gathering tools and they follow rich sources of information from the top content creators and leaders in their market.

Monetization of Real-Time Curation

Robert Scoble works for Rackspace.  He’s actually paid to “be” Scoble and draw attention to Rackspace.  Any company in the world would love to have Scoble as their mascot.  The amount of attention he garners with his blogging, interviews with tech leaders, and his social following is nothing short of amazing.  When he drops news about Rackspace, they are able to show off their ninja skills by keeping their servers from crashing under the massive influx of traffic Scoble can generate.

Mari Smith monetizes her real-time curation by building her brand, selling her books, and selling her expertise.

Guy Kawasaki monetizes his massive social following with book sales.  His is the house that real-time curation built.

A study of these three social mavens (by following them and watching what, when, how, and where they curate) would go a long way in developing your own strategy for successful real-time curation.

Part Two:  Blog Curation (A Curated Hub)

What about context?

Since everyone is pretty much focused on the technology behind curation these days (shiny new thing syndrome), I thought it would be nice to pull back and look at why curation works.

Specifically, why proper curation causes readership to rise and engagement to increase, as well as notable increases in social “buzz.”

The whole point of content marketing is to provide something of value which is highly desired by the target market you are trying to woo.  So it is definitely not enough to simply switch to a partial or total curation model and expect numbers to rise in all the categories above.

Nor is it a matter of which tools you choose to use to make curation possible, efficient, and effective from the publishing standpoint.  The thread which sews all these parts together is the human being doing the curation.

These Are Not The Droids You’re Looking For

Image via Wikipedia

There are dozens of sites and services that use the word curation to describe what they offer their users.

Unfortunately, most casual users of such sites are doing nothing more fancy than when we used to experiment with aggregating content onto our blogs from RSS feeds and other sources around certain keywords.  With no input from the curator as to why items were chosen or commentary that makes sense of the news or media curated, the new services for curation are just fancy versions of the “splogs” that are so frowned upon by mainstream online media.

Sure they look fabulous in some cases.  And very important looking too.  But without context and the human touch, landing on pages of “curated” content that is nothing more than aggregated content puts a big question mark over the heads of visitors.

Where the failure comes into play is a lack of education on just how to curate effectively.  On most of the sites we’ve reviewed where curation is the buzzword, the focus is on the technology and not the art of curating effectively to achieve reader engagement, rankings, loyalty, or social buzz.  The result is often just a mashup of seemingly unrelated or loosely related content completely out of context and with no added value or use to the reader.

True Curation Delivers The Goods

True curation works precisely because of the opinion, commentary, and engagement of the curators themselves.  Even the simple act of attaching a question to your readers at the end of a curated piece can result in vastly more engagement from your readership.

This type of extra input delivers vast potential in increased traffic, better rankings, more links, and more social buzz.  Not to mention a loyal readership that is happy to curate your  stuff on their social networks, bringing you more readers all the time.

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• Hand-Picked Content Is Marketing Gold (curationsoft.com)
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Image via Wikipedia

As a blogging coach, I’m hyper-focused on helping clients put out great, regular content in the easiest ways possible.  Time is either your enemy or your friend in content marketing, whether you run a news site, a personal blog, or a business/corporate blog.

A publisher’s ability to put up content that excites readers is will dictate the level of success a site has in attracting traffic.  The problem is that most publishers, bloggers, and journalists still seem to feel that the best performing content is always original content.

But there is also “riffing” and curation to consider.  Oh, and TIME!

Original pieces take the most time and they won’t necessarily hit home with your readers every time.  That hurts when you pour a lot of effort into a post.  I’ve found that I can get more activity on well-curated posts than original content, as have many others who’ve tried curation in their markets.  Not all of my curated posts hit home either, the the pain is far lower because the time investment is much lower.

How Much Time Can You Save With Curation?

With a curated post, depending on how ambitious it is, I can save anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or more over an original piece.  Given that “everything has already been said” and the fact that you had better have a new, original insight on a topic before you consider an original post, curation is the way to go for time-strapped, bootstrapped individuals and small organizations.

Scenario 1:  50% curation

If you were to change your content marketing campaign to include just 50% curation, meaning half of your posts are curated, the other half what you’re doing now, you could realize the same or better search engine rankings and traffic from social and repeat visitors while cutting 30-60+ minutes out of your content development for each curated post.

Say you try to post once per day, 5 times per week.  Curating 2.5 of your posts per week can save you, at the very minimum, 1:15 per week.  Most likely you’d save much more time when you consider the time saved in research and preparation before you write anything.  The savings can be a few hours or more per week, easily.

Scenario 2:  90% curation

For news sites of all kinds and sizes, curating most of your content makes sense.  Huffington Post, Mashable, and many other massive sites rely heavily on curation to fill their wide-ranging categories with new content multiple times per day.

Doing curation for a majority of your content and saving, say, 10% of your publishing for original content to maintain thought leadership can lead to massive time savings which can be applied to other areas like marketing, product development, fulfillment, networking (or vacations!)

Again, as long as your traffic, social sharing, and repeat visitor stats stay level or, as they do in most cases, grow, there’s no downside to curation whatsoever.

Curation Often Means More Traffic

Publishing more often, because you can, means more chances to get new keyword rankings in the engines.  And more chances to turn on a wider swath of your potential audience.  It also means you have more chances per week, even per day, to have something go a bit viral on the social sites as your readers have more to share and you have more to talk about.

You never know what’s going to really take off, and you never will if you are constrained by “sloth publishing” where you can only be so productive.

It’s counter intuitive for most traditional bloggers and online journalists that you could gain more attention by spending less time on content, but the stats we’re seeing on our sites as well as feedback we’re getting from other curators shows the benefits clearly.

Is There Enough News And Content For Everyone To Partake In The Curation Boom?

In every moderate to high-interest topic range there is more content uploaded and published to the web in a day than the leaders in a given market can possibly cover.  Whether it’s video, audio, photos, the plethora of original content, or new products introduced to the net every day, there’s a seemingly endless supply out there.

Someone will always miss something cool.  Something important that just slipped past their radar.  When you pick it up and talk about it on your site, you can often get serious brownie points in the form of heightened attention for the day and links that carry you upwards in search rankings.

Evolution of Content Marketing and Tools

Really, all that’s left to do is to figure out how you’re going to set yourself up to be an efficient and prolific content curator.  Tools are important.  Keeping your incoming flow of news and info manageable, while also making it easy to use in constructing individual posts efficiently is key.

Gorilla using tool

Throughout human history, one of our most important evolutions has always been our ability to create and use tools to make formerly difficult, time-consuming tasks more manageable.

Curation tools give us the ability to “puff ourselves up” and look like we have a big team behind us when, in reality, we’re just really good at picking and using the right tools for the job.

Image by anniebee via Flickr

A good curator delivers the most important, most interesting, or most informative content from a sea of noise.

In any lively topic range, curators deliver clarity while saving readers time. Rather than having to navigate the noisy sea of date themselves, they are able to rely on the curator to make sense of any topic.

Curation is not a side-show to the internet. It’s smack in the middle of the action and used deftly by all major news and entertainment sites.  Curation often hides just under the surface, but is detectable in articles by the citations and links to other sites in the telling of a story.  Or it can hide in plain sight as a list of resources with commentary from the author.

Image via Wikipedia

CNN is a curator of news. They only have 24 hours per day to broadcast, and there’s far more news than they can report on each day. They must sift through all the news and, based on their editorial policy, choose what they think their viewers would appreciate the most.

For the blogger, the problem is exactly the same.

• Too much going on to report it all.
• A lot of it not newsworthy.
• Newsworthy items hidden by the rest.
• A readership that demands the best of the best.

The solution to good curation for bloggers is different than CNN’s.  Rather than having news teams all over the world and tons of research staff, producers, and reporters, bloggers are either on-person operations or very small groups of writers.

Luckily, the web makes it easier to follow the most important sources in any niche.  One person can keep on top of an industry and become a great curator with some organization and the right tools.

Some tools of the trade:

• Google Reader
• Google Alerts
• Sites like Scoop.it
• A good digging and publishing tool, like CurationSoft, to surface good content and provide a quick and easy way to publish to any platform with a basic html editor.

The opportunity for building a highly addictive web presence using curation as part of your content marketing campaign has never been greater than it is today.  Or will be tomorrow after terrabytes of new information has flooded onto the web.

Image by bunchofpants via Flickr

There’s nothing more satisfying in the office than sitting down to clean off your desk.  Well, the sitting down to do it part isn’t always fun, but the end result is!

Everyone has a different system of organization, but the sort-and-pile method runs through any good system.

Picture your desk in disaster mode:

• bills,
• statements,
• magazines,
• catalogs,
• newsletters from charities you support,
• notifications of massive lottery winnings,
• other junk mail

When you get around to organizing this, you prioritize things.  Bills always seem to get the most esteemed pile placement on any desk.  The everything else becomes a pile or goes in the shredder, trash, or recycle bin.

Image by Amanda Schutz via Flickr

Now imagine sneaking into the homes of each of your readers and doing this for them.  They return from work to see their desks all nice and tidy with everything organized into piles of priorities for them to go through.  For many of your readers, this would be the first time they’ve seen the top of their desks for quite awhile.  You’d be like the Santa Claus of office organization!

Curation accomplishes the same thing for your readers when it comes to information consumption.  Their inboxes are full of emails from the places they promised themselves they’d keep up with.  Their notifications from social sites and their RSS feeds are hounding them for attention constantly.  And you’ve taken all this information and surfaced the best of it for them.

They are left with a feeling that it is ok to delete emails on topics which interest them, but that they don’t have time for, because they know you’ve done a great job giving them the Cliff’s Notes to their interests.  You save them time.  You make sense of all the noise.  You give them a sense of accomplishment in keeping up with their interests and a feeling that they aren’t missing a thing.

This is kind of an important function.  It fulfills your readers’ desire to get a handle on a topic without becoming a researcher themselves.

Another great question came in recently about curating from sites you find when you’re using Google Reader or just surfing links people pass around on social sites.

“How do you load that content into CurationSoft so you can drag and drop it?”

Here’s the answer:

1. Grab the title of the article – the whole thing – just copy it to your clipboard.
2. Paste it into the Google search in CurationSoft. Click search.
3. Enjoy your drag and drop curation!

Here’s the article on the site that I want to curate:

So I copied the title of the post (in blue above) and fed it to CurationSoft…

The second result in the pic above is the site I wanted.  As you can see, this was probably a press release because a ton of sites came up for that exact title match.  But I want to pick the site that will reward me the most for linking to them, so I would decide in this case in favor of NewsBlaze.com because they have a ton more traffic and might give me a trackback for linking to them.

Here’s what I was able to simply drag and drop:

EPA Affirms Current National Air Quality Standards for Carbon Monoxide

CO is a colorless, odorless gas emitted from combustion processes. Nationally, and particularly in urban areas, the majority of CO emissions come from motor vehicles. CO can cause harmful health effects by reducing …

How Much Time Does This Save?

Lots. Consider the old, manual way of doing this:

1. You have to copy the title of the post from the site.
2. Paste that into your editor back on your blog.
3. Go back to the other site and copy the URL.
4. Come back to your editor and link the title you pasted before.
5. Go BACK to the site once more to grab a quote from the post.
6. Come back to your blog once more and paste the quote under the title.

Now you know why I had this software created in the first place for my own personal use. To be a good curator, you’re going to have to follow the 6 steps above multiple times for one curated post. I couldn’t stand doing that anymore and asked Brandon if we could do something to greatly speed up the process. Apparently, we could!

Image by alexdecarvalho via Flickr

The reason some people really go big in social media and get huge followings boils down to one thing: they originate discussions much, much more than everyone else.

What this means is, people like Scoble and Kawasaki curate some pretty serious content.  Casual observers just think they’re “noisy.”  But more often than not, they are originating discussions with curated content that few, if any, are already talking about on social media.

They originate discussion by sharing content they find through a very efficient discovery system of RSS feeds (Google Reader) and multiple sources they monitor for news.  And, in Scoble’s case, he creates content as well through interviews with startups and industry leaders.

Every time I use CurationSoft to search for videos or blog posts on a topic I pick up something others haven’t shared yet.  And that leads to people, in turn, sharing what I share.  Which leads to more followers because all those shares and discussions put me in front of a lot more people.

What the average social media marketer does is “like” and share what others have already shared.  This is when most people start to think social media isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Because they don’t get the results that others brag about.  Just being a “me-too” curator is the reason 99% of the time.

Image via Wikipedia

A good mix of  ”original curation” and simply sharing what others are curating is the best way to get the most out of social curation.  Using tools to reach deep into places like YouTube to pull out a video from the 80′s means you aren’t likely to be posting something anyone else has posted that day, week, or month.  And the people who loved that thing from the 80′s get nostalgic and appreciate the “blast from the past.”

You cannot just react to trending topics unless you are the original sharer of a trendy bit of news or very close to the first.  The game is to get people to credit you with breaking news or bringing something to the forefront that was “sleeping” in the archives somewhere that gets people talking, hitting the +1 button, liking, and retweeting.

Everyone shares stuff.  The ones who have the biggest piece of the attention pie are the ones who curate content that gets people talking and passing it around.

This is yet another reason I love CurationSoft.  I can look like a hero for finding a great piece of content that would take more time to find, cut, paste, and share without CurationSoft.  It is definitely helping me grow my following in Google+.  And it’s helping me surface quality content for my blog posts in the same way, adding a ton of value to my blogs over the me-too blogs in my niche.

Related articles

• What is Content Marketing? (curationsoft.com)
• What is Curation? (curationsoft.com)
• Social Content Curation (curationsoft.com)
• Social Curation: Original Curation vs Me-Too Sharing (curationsoft.com)
• Deep discovery and social curation and a bunch of other geeky stuff… (fridaytrafficreport.com)