Every day, through the social networks, millions of people are sharing articles, videos, podcasts, in fact all manner of content by tweeting links to their followers, or sharing updates on Facebook or LinkedIn. From motivating quotes and funny cat videos to more serious information, we all like passing on items we think will be of interest to our contacts. Social Media has made this very easy to do and those who do it well are well thought of.

Sifting through many blog posts and websites to eliminate the dross and only sharing the best is being thoughtful. It also helps to establish your reputation as a reliable source of good, timely information. I tend to leave sharing ‘big name’ news to others, and research a little deeper for articles I believe will be helpful to my social media connections. Their feedback tells me they like my links.

Curation Tools to use

As you might imagine there are a growing number of curation tools available to use, depending on your needs. This post and video from Mari Smith provide an excellent introduction to the subject.

Before content curation became more well known, my favourite sharing tool was delicious – which was simple and effective (but I stopped using it after reading it was to be abandoned by Yahoo! just over a year ago).

I briefly dallied with paper.li as a way to automatically curate by choosing and publishing each day using feeds from my various subscriptions, but I found the stories it included were far too random and so discontinued it.

Alltop is a great source of latest blog posts and top stories that you can personalise for the topics in which you are most interested.

How curation can help your blog

Do you find it a struggle to know what to blog about? I know I do at times. I worry about finding something new and interesting to write about after over 4 years of regular weekly blogging. But somehow a new post is created and shared each week. One of the things I do that helps is to regularly read other people’s blogs, and get inspiration from them. For example, because I knew I’d be writing about content curation this week (from our Blogging Calendar), I had been on the lookout for articles about it and collected several (using Evernote) in readiness. In effect I curated that content.

Content curation can also help you to produce blog posts by using content that isn’t yours! But before you rush off and collect articles & videos with cheerful abandon, there are a few etiquette points to be aware of.

• You will still need to create your own, original content if you want people to take notice of your thoughts & ideas.
• Make sure to give full attribution to the original source.
• Don’t just copy and paste whole blog posts or articles – that’s just lazy and will annoy people.
• Don’t publish posts full of links to influential websites in an attempt to increase your SEO rankings – Google won’t take any notice.

Do you curate content? If so, what sort of content and using which tools? Please share in the comments below.

Have you noticed how social media sites are giving slide presentations a new lease of life?

Not so long ago PowerPoint (and its Mac equivalent Keynote) had a bad reputation with many presentations rightfully earning the label: “Death by PowerPoint”. Slides were often too busy, too wordy to read, or just too complex to understand. Even worse were those presenters who used them as auto cues, reading word for word and boring their audience to sleep.

But now it seems that a whole new generation of talented presenters are breathing new life into PowerPoint slideshows. The best ones are creating visually pleasing and attention-grabbing images, making text short & snappy and, most importantly, keeping us interested. No mean feat in this much reduced attention span age!

So in addition to using slide presentations at traditional offline events, such as when giving talks or running training workshops, there are now online opportunities for this frequently overlooked medium.

1. Presentations uploaded to Slideshare.net quickly show up in the search engines so it’s worth taking the time to categorise and tag them properly. A basic account is free to set up and very easy to use. Here are the Savvy Marketers presentations we’ve uploaded.
2. YouTube is already known as the second largest search engine and millions of videos are watched every day around the world. Recording your slide presentation, accompanied by audio, and uploading the result to YouTube means you can then embed the video in your website or blog, and share it with your Facebook fans & friends too. Other free video sharing options worth considering include Vimeo and Viddler.
3. Another good place to share your PowerPoint presentation is on your LinkedIn profile or LinkedIn Company page. You can either add the Slideshare application or embed the video into a Google Docs presentation.
4. Webinars are becoming an increasingly popular way of sharing information online. Depending on the service used, screen-sharing means including a slide presentation is straightforward and adds that important visual element to help get your message across and keep your audience’s attention.

Creating slide presentations is yet another great way to share that all-important content, and one that doesn’t require too much writing.

What new or different ways have you seen PowerPoint used recently? Please share in the comments below.

I’m sure you’ve heard the term ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder‘ and I strongly believe this when it comes to writing web content! What constitutes as quality to one person, isn’t necessarily the same as the next person, so telling people they have to write ‘quality content’ for their website can be completely meaningless!

For example, my idea of ‘quality’ content is to write an article or blog post that explains how to do something online or why you need to do something on your website. The next person’s idea could be to write some excellent sales copy around why people should use their services. It doesn’t mean it’s badly written, to them it’s ‘quality’ content. But it doesn’t build a relationship with readers if everything they write is sales focussed.

High Value, Useful Content

When it comes to online marketing, the general idea is to build relations with people who visit your website or who you network with online. The way to do this is to provide content which your audience will find useful and adds value. For example, it may help them solve a problem. If your content is purely sales focussed, then you’re not going to build those relations and it can be a turn off to prospects – a bit like trying to sell at a networking event!

Giving information away in the form of ‘how-tos’ or helping people solve their problems doesn’t mean those people won’t use your products or services, or will go away and set themselves up as a competitor. More likely they’ll be impressed that you know so much about a particular topic and you may be worth talking to and forming a business relationship with, hopefully resulting in a new contract for your business!

Quality content isn’t about how well you’ve written something but should focus on the needs and problems of your target market and help them solve them. Think about how you can be helpful, add value or provide useful information to your prospects and forget about the term ‘quality content’!

What’s your definition of ‘quality content’? Please share in the comments below! 

Do you share what you find online?

We realise that we can’t know it all: the marketing possibilities for businesses keep changing as the internet continues to evolve at an ever-increasing pace. We don’t pretend to be ‘gurus’ or ‘experts’ (how I loathe those terms!). Instead we share what has already been written or recorded by specialists on topics that we hope will be of interest to you, and help you develop your business online.

However, there is a difference between sharing random links to the latest viral cat (or dog!) video on YouTube and engaging in what is known as ‘Content Curation’.

It establishes you as an authority in your field

Once you decide what specialist area you will focus on, looking out for relevant material becomes much easier. As you share the timely and useful content you find, your online followers will hopefully begin to realise that they need to read/watch/listen to what you’re sharing in order to be kept up to date.

It is a generous thing to do

Most of the people you meet online are incredibly generous in sharing not only their own stuff, but other people’s material too. Just as with traditional networking, the ‘givers gain’ philosophy (from BNI’s founder Ivan Misner) also holds true on the internet. The more you share, the more other people will feel inclined to share your material in return. If you share without expecting any reciprocation, it’s a nice surprise when they do.

It means you don’t have to always think up new material yourself

For some of us, it can be difficult to keep coming up with new ideas to ‘feed’ the blog and our other online sites. Content curation, if done regularly and systematically, will make it easier. You’ll be able to see what topics are ‘trending’ in your specialist area, offer the latest news and add your opinion too.

Content Curation can be done in several ways, using some of the variety of online tools available. Rather than list them all here, take a look at the following posts that we believe explain the details of curating your own content very well.

8 Ways to Find Great Social Media Content

Robert Scoble on Online Curation (video)

Social Media Gold Lies in the Inner Circle 

Are you a content curator? If so, let us know how you do it – and share which specialist area you cover – in the comments below.

The article explains how product reviews on one particular site hiked up conversion rates and led to a 119% increase in the likelihood of conversions!

I’ve noticed that many e-commerce sites now offer reviews of their products, not only to help shoppers choose whether the product is for them or not, but can also help retailers to improve their product, particularly if they get similar criticisms or feedback about it, so don’t be afraid of negative reviews.

Amazon is the master of product reviews and has been doing so for many years. Other retailers doing this include Marks & Spencer as well as smaller, more niche e-commerce sites such as Nigel’s Eco Store, here is an example of a product with a review on the site: http://www.nigelsecostore.com/acatalog/Floral.html

For many small retailers, having a review system built onto the site can work out quite expensive, but there are ways around this:

▪ Add testimonials around your website and if they relate to a particular product, add it to the specific page.

▪ Encourage reviews via social media activity. Are you active on Facebook & Twitter? If so ask your fans and connections there for feedback and reviews – perhaps encourage them with a prize draw.

▪ Ask for feedback and reviews in your email newsletters – again incentives can help!

▪ Create blog posts about specific products and encourage comments back.

If you use a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla, it’s likely a free plugin exists for handling reviews, or ask your webmaster what’s available for your particular site setup.

Any feedback and reviews you get can be added to the product pages on your site, displayed prominently on key pages and used in all your marketing materials.

Since product reviews have been proven to increase sales and conversions, this really is something all retailers need to be thinking about, however small your business is. If you haven’t got them on your site, now’s the time to do it as the next few months is the busiest time for retailers.

Further reading:

Practical E-Commerce has also has some useful tips on ways to increase reviews on your site: 5 Ways to Increase Ratings & Reviews

Do you have product reviews on your site? Have they increased sales for you? Please let us know in the comments!

Now you’re probably wondering where on earth are you going to find the time to start creating great, useful content amongst the zillions of other things you have to do, while still trying to have a life outside work!

A bit of rummaging around in files on your PC or in your desk drawers may reveal that you’ve already created quite a lot of content in the past that can be reused and repurposed. So here’s a few ideas showing how you could re-use old content giving it a very different look and format.

1. Articles
Most business owners have written articles on their specialist area and even if it was a few years ago, it doesn’t mean the article has go to waste. Often all they need are a bit of editing and updating so they can be re-used. Articles are perfect as blog posts as they can be broken down into shorter pieces and more often than not, you could get two or three posts out of them.

2. Blog Posts
I recently did some major updates to our Savvy Marketers site, which I’ll be writing about soon, and was surprised that in the three years we’ve been blogging, we now have over 300 posts between us. That’s an awful lot of information! Blog posts can be re-used in few ways: updated and re-posted to make them more current, put a few together as a longer article, or even turned into a guide or white paper if you have lots of posts around the same subject.

3. Videos
If you’ve written how-tos in the past, particularly with some screenshots or something like that, why not record it as a video how-to? Video sharing is huge and YouTube is one of the biggest social networks on the web, so don’t let your written word go to waste – change the format and get new use out of it!

4. Audio Interviews
Louise did a regular Blog Talk Radio show for a whole year back in 2009 (you can listen to archives here) and interviewed a different expert each week on a particular topic. Rather than let this great content go to waste, these expert interviews could be turned into articles, blog posts (with a link to the original interview), how to guides or white papers. It would take more time to do this than repurposing other content, but nevertheless, it would get more mileage out of the interviews as long as the content is still current. Another use of audio would be to take some previous blog posts or tips articles and make a series of short audios using a service such as Audioboo, or using your own digital recorder.

5. Webinars
Moving on from the monthly teleseminars that we’ve been doing, we’re now doing monthly webinars (and you can find out about our next one here), which means we’re producing information on slides in Powerpoint each month. Afterwards, we’re sharing the slides on Slideshare for those who couldn’t attend the live webinars, and along with our notes and the recorded audio from it, are able to produce how-to guides for our community.

This is just the start, there’s plenty more that you could do with existing content, whether it be written, audio, video or photo. Depending on what type of information your target market is looking for, and which format is appropriate for them, all you need is a bit of imagination to make your existing content go that much further.

What have you done to update or repurpose old content for your audience?

Image: Recycle Logo From Recycling Bin by chrissatchwell, on Flickr

Content Marketing is wonderful!

Our post explaining what content marketing is gives you some easy steps to get started with your own campaign. It’s so important that you do.

But we don’t want you to think this is a fast route to riches, or a shortcut to attracting more business. It’s actually quite hard work – just like all the other more traditional marketing you do.

However this can actually be an advantage

When people are searching for helpful information, they’re only really interested in the best, most up to date and accurate information to read, listen to or watch and learn from. Not so long ago they had to sift through a lot of poor content to find the occasional nuggets of good stuff (until Google’s famous panda update in March 2011). This update was bad news for for all the article spinners and ‘me-too’ scammers who were only interested in making a fast buck.

However, the update was great news for bloggers and creators of high quality original content – like you and me! Because the search results are now leading with better content, we have a better chance of being noticed for our areas of expertise and rewarded for our hard work with more leads. No longer are blatant promotions considered good content, whereas informative how-to articles and well-reasoned opinions are.

Good quality content brings other rewards worth having too

When you publish good quality content, the people who read/listen to/watch it will want to share it with their social networking contacts. They will also be more likely to write a comment (on your blog or Facebook page) so you’ll know who is interested in what you do. And of course, the more different platforms you publish on, the wider your reach will be, and the greater number of people will be likely to find out about you and share with their social networking contacts …..

Content marketing is definitely a marathon and not a sprint, so settle in for the long haul. You can watch the wimps and the fly by nights fall by the wayside!

If you found this post helpful, we’d appreciate if you would share it with the network of your choice by clicking one of the buttons below!

In its most basic form, it means that you need to create and promote useful, quality content, get it out online to attract visitors to your site. But isn’t that what you’re doing when you promote your site? ‘I’m already sharing my blog posts in the social networks’ I hear you say!

So what exactly is content marketing?

Yes, it is about distributing and sharing your content in the social networks and search engines, whether it be written, video or audio content. But it’s also a lot more than that. It’s about having a proper strategy to creating relevant content for your audience, not just a random approach – writing a blog post when you have the time, sending a newsletter every so often.

By planning what type of content to create for your audience, when to create it and where to distribute it, your ‘content marketing’ activities will have much more impact and attract the right type of prospect interested in your products or services.

For example, our Savvy Marketers content marketing plan includes writing regular blog posts 2-3 times per week, sending out newsletters each month, hosting a webinar each month and sharing the slides on Slideshare afterwards. There’s plenty more we could do, but we do these things regularly and consistently.

Perhaps you sell a product, whether it be a business or consumer product. A good example is a company I worked with a few years ago who sell wet umbrella wrappers called ‘brollymacs’. They have images of the product on their website, but wouldn’t it be so much better if they videoed how the product worked, distributed those videos on YouTube, and included them in a blog, which could be shared on the social networks? (I did suggest this to them at the time!).

If you sell fashion items, don’t just limit images to your site. Add them to a Flickr photostream, make sure they’re updated on a Facebook page and shared across the social networks. Don’t forget to optimise them for image results in search.

Once you’re clear about the type of content your audience is looking for and where they’re looking for it, you can create a plan as to how you will distribute your content, regularly and consistently. This will result in many more sales and leads than just a random approach to content distribution.

What’s your content marketing strategy and what’s worked well for you? Please share your experiences in the comments!

Image: Vegetable stall in a Market, Beijing by DPerstin, on Flickr

With such an overwhelming amount of reading material online to get through every day

How do you keep up with your favourite blogs?

Are you trying to read too much online?

Managing your online reading list

Today, I’d like to revisit Feedly.com and how you can use it with Google Reader to ensure you don’t miss reading anything important. This tool also comes in handy for curating (or collecting) content to share with your social media contacts.

First step is to register for your free Google Reader account.

• It has a rather plain appearance, but we’ll do something about that in a moment.
• If you’ve been using another reader, you can import those feeds to Google Reader.
• You can easily track down blogs of interest to add to your reading list by doing a search within Google Reader. The results will helpfully show the number of subscribers and there’s a one-click button so you can subscribe to the RSS feed. Here’s an example from our recent Google Tools Q&A webinar:

• If you use an iGoogle Page as your ‘home’ page, quite a useful way to be able to see ‘at a glance’ the latest posts as they’re published, is to install the Reader Gadget.

Next step is to go to Feedly.com and sign up for your free account

It will connect you using your Google account and automatically pull in the feeds from Google Reader.

Feedly works well with the main internet browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome) and will enhance the appearance of your online reading list, as it brings in thumbnails of any images the blogger has included in each post. The result is a pleasing magazine-like page.

You can organise feeds into folders or tabs, both in Google Reader and within Feedly. There’s a two-way sync to make it super easy to do. Additionally, in Feedly you can just drag & drop to reorder the different categories (folders) how you want them presented on the page.

There’s a choice of ways to read your feeds – Cover, What’s New, Latest, Category, Saved (by you). I have a ‘must read’ category set up for those extra-busy days when reading time is even more limited than usual.

Feedly is a social sharing tool too

When you set up your Feedly account, do install the mini toolbar (in Preferences). This shows up as a little semi-transparent grey icon on the bottom right of your browser screen and stays there. Clicking on it enables you to share the web page you’re currently browsing with the social network(s) of your choice, email the url as a link, or save it to read later. You’ll need to spend a little time configuring your social networks at the set up stage, but it’s worth doing so you can use this convenient tool.

How do you organise and read your RSS feeds? Please share in the comments below. 

Email Newsletter – If your article was originally written for a newsletter then these articles can be submitted to article directories. This is where our advice may change as I now believe it’s probably worth only concentrating on one or two of these directories and varying the submissions, i.e not putting the same article on more than one directory. Although these sites are currently changing their processes to improve the quality of content, they may go down the route of exclusivity. I also believe that just submitting the same article in several places doesn’t really serve much purpose. Ezine Articles and HubPages are probably the two I would concentrate on and both have different formats. If your article lends itself well to images etc, then submit your article to Hubpages. If plain text is fine, use Ezine Articles. It’s worth trialing the sites you choose for a few months and monitoring results. This means you can find out which of these sites returns the best visibility of your articles.

Blog posts – blog posts are usually shorter than newsletter articles, so don’t lend themselves so well for article directories, which now require longer length articles. However, don’t let them just sit there. Many leading bloggers re-use their posts to create short guides (particularly if you’ve written a series of posts on a similar subject), or write longer ‘101’ blog posts which reuse these posts again, linking to older ‘evergreen’ content (meaning that although the post may not be recent, the subject is still relevant). Think about how you could use old posts you’ve written into short guides for clients or to re-use in newer posts as a more comprehensive longer post. Here are a couple of useful resources:

Go Green Or Go Home: Recycling Content For SEO – from SearchEngineLand.com

Blog Post Recycling – Get it Done Right! – from SearchEngineJournal.com

Video – not all content is text, many of you probably use videos in your website. If they’re created as tips, then again, you could put them together as a longer tutorial post. Make sure you create your own YouTube channel and re-use on other popular video sharing sites such as Vimeo.

Images – if you’ve taken some brilliant images and added them to your blog or website, then create your own Photostream on Flickr, which is the most popular photo sharing site. Regular readers to this blog may have noticed that we use Flickr images on some of our posts, and this is a great way to get your images reused around the web, as you have to give credit to the photographer if you use a Flickr image on your site. You could try submitting your photos to stock photograpy sites such as iStockphoto – you never know, you may earn a few extra ££s too!

How have you re-used your content? What tips can you give to to bring life back to old blog posts? Please share them in the comments!

Image: Shadow of a Writing Hand by lowjumpingfrog, on Flickr