Do You Give Good Link? What Content Curation Is (Done Right)

Curation is the “selection of, care for and presentation of the objects entered into a collection.” As online entrepreneurs, we have to attract the right people to us who will become our clients, and curation is one way we do this. Only in this case, we’re talking about content curation. Content curation is really just a fancy-schmancy way of saying we share links.

Sharing links which are highly relevant and valuable to your client base is one of the best forms of marketing you can do. Why?

• You’re not tooting your own horn, it’s not about you at all. It’s about your clients. You’re looking out for them. You’re caring for them (by the way, a Curate is religious clergy charged with the care of souls in a parish—not a bad way to think of content curation: I’m looking out for your soul! ).
• It keeps you involved with your client base and keeps you in their collective mind. You’re maintaining an active presence in their attention space.
• It shows you as knowledgeable and as an authority on your subject: you have to be in order to deliver the good stuff. People want to hire experts.
• It puts you into contact with others for mutually beneficial networking opportunities.
• It drives traffic to your site, pure and simple.

Awesome, yes? But how do you do it, and, more importantly, how do you do it well?

Content Curation Tools

Chances are you already have everything you need to give “good link” (a nod to the phrase giving “good phone” to describe a person who’s got great phone manners):

• Blog
• Social media accounts at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others.
• Email

However, in order to do a really great job of curation, you need other tools to manage this activity efficiently:

• Note-taking application to quickly grab links as you run across them online. Evernote and SpringPad are popular for this.
• Social media dashboard that lets you post and monitor multiple accounts at multiple services. I use HootSuite (affiliate link) for this.
• Google Reader or a feed reader with high-powered sharing tools built in.

Scanning and Capturing Content

Most of the links I share with you come from a multitude of sites which I subscribe to in Google Reader or by email (some are email newsletters, not RSS feeds I’m getting via email). Every day, I pore over (English gripe tangent, here: it’s pore over, not pour over, folks) hundreds of articles in Google Reader and my inbox. If I stay on top of it, every day I’m greeted by around 500 or so unread items in Google Reader alone. If I skip a day, it blows up into the thousands.

I just hit my Page Down key like a boss and start scrolling.

What am I looking for? News that’s relevant to you. Stuff that helps you get ahead and make smarter decisions. Stuff that you would also feel like sharing with others, because whether we realize it or not, we’re all content curators to some degree. Remember the last time someone sent you a funny joke in an email and you “just had to” send it to all your friends? That was content curation in action.

In Google Reader I can immediately share content with people who follow me (if you’re not, you should). I use HootSuite to post links to good stuff I find via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. But every week, I also have a Link Journeys post and email to send out. So I need a way to save links for later. That’s what I use Evernote for.

I also curate content out of my social stream. I try to follow people who themselves are consciously offering high-value curated content and I retweet it or share it to my own followers.

The Secret Ingredient: Artful Irrelevance

What does a crazy nastyass honey badger have to do with blog marketing?

Absolutely nothing! And that’s the point. You know what else is completely pointless? What I’m listening to on Pandora while I work.

Or is it?

I call this the art of irrelevance. The right “wrong” thing at the right time is twice as right as something that’s merely useful. Entertainment can trump usefulness.

Of course, if this kind of stuff was all I shared, I’d be in trouble. But we need to remember the social part of social media. All work and no play, etc. Have you ever been to a party and had a conversation with someone who only talked about their work? Don’t be that person. Have some fun. Let your personality come through. There actually is a marketing benefit to this: it bonds you closer with your audience. It attracts people to you like you, and who like some of the same things you do.

Content Distribution

I listen to my intuition about whether to post something on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn. Sometimes I post the same link to more than one service simultaneously (yay HootSuite!). I rarely post to all services at once though, because redundant over-posting will quickly get you unfollowed. Generally, the more fun stuff will be posted on Twitter or my personal Facebook profile. The more business-y stuff can go anywhere. Your mileage may vary, but that’s how I roll.

Every week on the blog I post Link Journeys, which are the links I’ve collected over the week. I do a short little write up about why I’m sharing each link. Not every one of you is following me on every social network, so I make sure curation takes place on my blog, too.

Tip: Don’t post five freakin’ billion links in one post. People see that and they say, “Forget it,” and they just leave the page without clicking on any of your links. There’s definitely a quantity vs. quality perception thing happening, here. If your link list is too big or too small, it looks like you don’t care enough to choose high-quality links. I never put more than 20 links in a link list post.

I also use Link Journeys as a way to grow my email list. Getting an awesome free ebook is incentive enough, sure, but I try to find other ways to reward people for being on my email list. One way I do that is the best, juiciest links go to my list subscribers. If you think the links I post on social media and my blog are good, you should see what my list subscribers get (you can sign up here if you’re interested).

Am I Doing it Right?

Don’t forget to ask for feedback from your readers and followers and monitor data like retweets (another reason to use HootSuite). When I get “thank you” tweets or replies to my emails praising the content, I know I’m on the right track. Most people won’t bother to tell you if you’re whiffing, but they won’t be clicking on your links or sharing them with others. You won’t know this unless you check your social media analytics.

Be Valuable

What this all distills to is this: be valuable to the people you want to attract as clients. Providing kick-ass links is one of the best ways to do that.

Now, go forth and curate!

Image Attribution: digital cat