First, I signed up for my very first class on SkillShare: HTML & CSS From Scratch in 30 Days. Hopefully, 30 days from now, I will have a (somewhat) beautiful and (mildly) impressive website to house the rest of my stories, thoughts, adventures, and projects.

I've also lined up tons of books and blogs to start following and absorbing knowledge from. I'll let you know how that goes.

In the meantime, any tips, tools, secrets, or kind words of encouragement are much appreciate.

We've all heard it: now's the time to start using content curation as a part of your content marketing strategy.  There seems to be an endless supply of articles, blog posts, and tutorials on curation - we've done the research, read the articles, learned about all of the benefits and best practices. Now, there's only one thing left to do: actually get started.

After taking in as much information as possible on curation best practices, techniques, and tools, it's possible that you find yourself asking, "now what?" 

At Scoop.it, we have the answer.

Choose A Specific Topic (or Topics) That You Plan to Focus On

One of the most important elements of creating an online collection of curated content is having a focused topic that all of the content relates to. This will help your customers more easily find your content and be able better understand and follow it.

Further, one of the biggest values of curation is that it allows you to give your readers context. Providing the best context for the content that you are curating and sharing all starts with establishing a specific topic that all of your content will fall under.

With Scoop.it Free, you can have up to five different topics for your account. Does your business have various different elements to it? Think about creating an umbrella topic for your industry, then additional topics covering the different sectors that you cover. 

When you sign up for Scoop.it, the first thing you will be led to do is create your topic. Make the name specific and unique, like "San Francisco Restaurant News" and make sure to add a brief description that explains why this topic is important to you and your readers. You can also add keywords to your topic so that Scoop.it can search the web for the best content to provide to you. Make sure your keywords are aligned with your topic so that you can discover the best content to publish.

Establish Your Editorial Line

Once you have created your page, it's time to get curating! At first, it may seem overwhelming, but as you experiment, it becomes more natural. Going through the suggested content from Scoop.it will help you to find some great content that has to do with your topic or brand. If it doesn't, you can optimize your keywords or even feed the suggestion engine with RSS feeds of sites from which you often share content.

Scoop.it gives you an option to take this even further. With the Bookmarklet, you can add a Scoop.it button to your toolbar and post content from around the web in one click! This works great for content that you find through other methods than suggestions from Scoop.it Do you use Google Alerts or another system that allows you to find content that mentions your brand or your industry? Once you find content from there, you can use the Scoop.it bookmarklet to post that content directly to your page.

Now that you've begun curating content, you will learn what types of editorial and text help make your page the best it can be, as well as what types of content that you curate. Figuring this out may take some time, but once you have that done, the process will become more and more natural!

Customize the Look and Feel of Your Topic

Once you have figured out your curation strategy, it's time to fully integrate it with the rest of your business. With Scoop,it, your curated pages are not just newspapers that you curate with content in addition to all of the other social media and internet content that you have. Scoop.it Business allows you to make your topic fit in perfectly with your website with HTML header capabilities and customization options.

By customizing the header of your topic to look just like the header of your website, you not only increase brand awareness, but you allow your readers to follow links back to your site. This also works the other way around, by adding a link to your curated Scoop.it page to your home page.

To take this a step further, you can host your Scoop.it it page on a subdomain of the domain of your business's website. Now, your content marketing efforts not only help educate and inform your customers, but they also provide you with more traffic to your site.

Make Scoop.it Your Social Media Hub

Now that you've completely mastered curation as your content marketing strategy, you can use it to run all of your social media efforts! You're always sharing relevant content with your audience, so why not do it through Scoop.it? By connecting your social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, LinkedIn, etc) to your Scoop.it account, you can share each piece of your curated content to all of your other social networks in just one click. Want to write something different on Twitter and on Facebook when you share the same content? Don't worry, you can!

So, not only have you now actually begun using content curation as a part of your content marketing strategy, but with the help of Scoop.it, you have fully integrated all of your content marketing efforts with the rest of your business, and have saved yourself tons of valuable time by being able to control all of your social networks in one place!


I know that this process isn't always as easy as it is in writing, but that's what we're here for! Ever have any questions, concerns, or just want to talk about your curation strategy? Visit Scoop.it's knowledge base at http://feedback.scoop.it/ where you can find lots of tips and FAQs or ask me any questions in the comments! (Note: I'm the community manager at Scoop.it)

We've all seen them, known them, unfollowed them, maybe even are them. This is by no means a comprehensive list (and by all means a rant), but here are some of the top Twitter characters who I will certainly not follow.

1. The one who sends Auto DMs
Unfortunately, this is one of the most common ones. To me, Twitter is one of the best ways to humanize your online presence, whether you are a brand or a person. If I follow you and then immediately get a Direct Message letting me know that I can check out your website or Facebook page, that's an automatic unfollow. If you want to engage with me, send me a tweet. Twitter is for conversing, not spamming your followers with other self promotional links via DM.

2. The hashtag freak
First off, if your bio looks like this, I will not follow you: 

#seo #socialmedia #curation #pr #marketing #blogger 
#mommy #foodie #loves #sushi #fitness #yoga

This tells me nothing about you and/or your personality other than the fact that you love the "pound key" and are probably just looking for new followers to build your numbers anyway.

The second subcategory of this one is that guy who tweets #more #hashtags #than #words in every single tweet. No, turning every other word of your sentence into a hashtag is not going to help you in any way, unless your idea of success is looking spammy and like you don't know the first thing about hashtags.

3. The one who feeds their timeline with links/articles without any commentary or conversation
The only thing this tells me about you is that you know how to click a "Tweet This" button and perhaps how to use Buffer or Hootsuite. I follow people on Twitter to cut through the noise of the Internet, not to have a timeline filled with random articles shared with no insight, value or conversation.

4. The one who spends way more time than necessary clarifying that his tweets are his opinions and they are his
Yes, I understand that the things you're tweeting under the handle @yourname and the profile that says Your Name at the top are things coming from your brain. 

I do, however, approve of facetious claims like "RT's mean I'm flirting with you." or "all views are in fact the views of my employer."

5. The one who pays way too much attention to his "ratio"
I once had a "Twitter friend" who, after he had racked up a couple thousand followers, decided to unfollow all but 20 of them. Great, you have tons of follows that aren't follow-backs, but what does that say about you? You probably don't engage much, and are thinking way too much about looking cool on the Internet, which, let's face it, we're all nerds here...

6. The "Negative Nancy"
Sometimes, I have a bad day. I have an awful experience at a restaurant, forget things at home, hate a product I just bought. We all do. That said, there's enough negativity in this world to last every citizen of Earth for the rest of his/her life, we don't need your constant tweets reminding us how horrible everything is.

7. The one without an avatar
Why don't you have an avatar? There's nothing less personal/engaging than seeing an egg come up in my feed. Also, I don't trust people with animated avatars. I don't know why. I just don't.

8. The one with a "profound" quote as his bio
A bio explains who you are, what you do, and a little about your personality. As much as you love that Ghandi quote, save it for your blog and instead let me know who I'm connecting with.

9. The one who asks for follows
As a community manager, I'm a firm advocate of the philosophy that follows mean nothing if you don't have engagement. I could have 30,000 followers, but if I tweet a question and get one response, that is not engagement. Like I mentioned before, Twitter is for interacting. I will follow you because of the value you bring to me via content, conversation, etc. Plus, once you reach your "mission to a million followers" and don't have to ask anymore, what will you even tweet about?

10. The one who doesn't engage
Yes, this is kind of a repeat. That's beacuse it's the most important. The purpose of Twitter is not solely to broadcast. Yes, it is valuable for sharing information that you find relevant, but it doesn't mean anything if you don't engage with your Twitter community. This goes for both brands and people. It's not hard to find content around the web these days, and having it fed to me without any context or conversation in a place where that's expected is not appealing. Converse, engage, and interact! Who knows who you might meet...

Cendrine is an incredibly insightful social media blogger that I have had the pleasure to work with over the last few months. I'm glad to have her as a part of my online community, and honored that she views me the same! Check out her 2012 year in review post to see what awesome things she did this year. I'm looking forward to seeing what Cendrine has in store for us in 2013 on her must-follow blog!

True Love

When it comes down to it, what's the point of all this search engine marketing anyway? You don't want to pay for people to click on your site, get to it just because it's there, and then find no value in it. What you want is for readers to view your content as relevant and helpful to a problem they're trying to solve. You want to earn true love. In his presentation, Rand Fishkin provides two ultimate truths about true love: 

     1. It lasts.
     2. It can't be bought.

How did he come to this conclusion? With a little research, marketers have found that only 18% of clicks actually go to the ads at the top and side of the Google search page. On top of that, only 2% of clicks go to Facebook ads, and less than 1% to promoted Tweets.

So, what are we spending all this money for? Search engines are increasingly favoring honest, quality content over paid content, and readers are too. The more companies embrace content in 2013, the less return your paid content is going to see.

Spend half the money, earn 100 times the love. Seems pretty simple. What are you doing to jumpstart your content marketing efforts in 2013?

For tips and tricks on getting into content marketing, head here.

According to Michael Brenner, cofounder of Business 2 Community, content curation is the process of identifying relevant content for your audience from multiple sources, modifying or editing that content to reflect the needs of your audience and delivering the content to the appropriate channels of distribution.

The truth is, you're probably already curating content. Do you share links on Twitter? Do you Retweet content that you find interesting? Do you write blogposts referencing content that's been created by others? If so, you're a curator. You know what you're talking about, you know where the best content on your topic of expertise is, and you put it together for the world to see. But, the question still looms: if no one knows who you are, how will they find it? 

Enter a platform like Scoop.it. Scoop.it is a topic-centric curation publishing platform that allows you to create a digital magazine of the content that you're sharing. This type of platform feeds you with content that's relevant to your brand and your area of expertise, lets you hand select which content you'd like to share, provides you with the opportunity to add insight and context, and shares the content to all of your social networks.

The icing on the cake, though, is that all of your shared content is indexed in a visually pleasing magazine and in search engines. Sharing content on your social networks is great, but you're only able to reach those readers within your social graph - that is, the ones who already know who you are and follow you. The benefit that topic-centric curation provides to you is that your name is now attached to all of the most relevant content on your topic of expertise, and you can be discovered by people within your interest graph - those who are looking for content on your shared topic of interest.

Picture this: A small business is curious about jumping into content marketing. I bet I could be a great help to them, but like most people in this world, they have no idea who I am. So, they turn to Google. Upon searching for "content marketing tips," they click on a link to the article that I've shared on my Scoop.it page. To their delight, they're brought to this online collection of numerous articles about content marketing where they can also find some context and added value thanks to what I've written in each post. To my delight, they can also see that this content was scooped by "Ally Greer." Now, I've established myself as a reference for content marketing tips, and gained a whole new audience along the way.

Now, take my personal example and apply it to your brand. Perhaps you're a social media consultant looking for new clients. You're the best in the business and know everything there is to know about the importance of social media marketing and SEO. You're using curation to share content and showcase your expertise. The only thing missing are the clients - the ones who don't know you yet, of course. Now, when they search for information on social media marketing and SEO, they cant find all of the content that you found important and shared with the world and be led right back to you. Once they're able to see that you have the expertise, they can click on you and be led straight to your profile and/or website. The rest, of course, is history!

This upcoming year is going to be the year of content. You've found it, you know about it; why not be discovered by it? Curation is in for 2013 - don't be left out.

This post can also be seen on everythingpr.

It’s been a while since I’ve heard about the term “echo chamber,” and the last time I investigated it it was mostly concerning the social graph and surrounding yourself with the same people and the same ideas.

I always like seeing how social phenomena convert over into the business world, and this is a perfect example of that. If the entire online presence of your brand, including your content, only consists of talking about your own brand and encouraging others to talk about your brand, there is no room to grow, and no actual value to the content you’re providing.

Michael Brenner says that “good content educates, entertains or even amazes your audience because it starts with a focus on them, not you.” Get out of the echo chamber and stop throwing around generic praise and information about your brand, and start telling your story and demonstrating your expertise.

See on b2bmarketinginsider.com

Max Minzer is a Seattle SEO consultant, internet marketing strategist, entrepreneur and business adviser who helps businesses and individuals establish and maintain engaged online presence.

Every Thursday, Max hosts a “Max Impact Hangout,” a conversation designed to help businesses have maximum impact in their industry on social media.

This hangout is centered around content curation, and feautres AJ Kohn, the owner of Blind Five Year Old, an online marketing consulting firm out of San Francisco.

Kohn has some great points about the benefits of curation, including:

-“It’s not just about sharing the content; it’s providing your context. It’s good to be able to read a lot, but it’s better to be able to understand it, and so it’s your job to help your audience understand it and put context around it. If you’re not doing that, it’s just a bunch of links, and that’s not particularly helpful.”

-“Curation at its core is about expertise.”

-“People are looking for trust and expertise, and they don’t have a lot of time. If they can rely on you to continuously deliver that trust and value, they’re going to continue to come to you.”

He also points out an interesting curation practice that is probably forgotten (or dismissed) by some businesses: curating the content of your competitors. Regarding this practice, AJ says, “Your users are talking about [your competitors] anyway. You want to control the story: if they’re going to be reading it anyway, it’s better to provide the context for them.”

The hangout also includes a Q&A/discussion session with AJ.