As the month of September rolls to an end… have you taken steps to become a content curator?
Fear not, because even without our monthly ekit (which soars to $27 in just two days!), you can follow these five tips and get a head start on becoming a source in your niche.
1. FEATURE OTHER BLOGGERS.
Featuring others on your blog (individually) is a great way to let them speak for themselves. Try contacting the people you would otherwise curate and let them speak to your audience in their own words. As an added bonus, they can choose to include excerpts from material on their own blogs.
Heidi and I actually suggest that you feature others on a regular basis. Maybe pick a certain day of the week to make it ceremonial, like a “Feature Friday.” Be consistent and stick to a schedule. Doing so creates a sense of excitement with your readers and “trains” them to check in on that day to see who the week’s special guest is.
2. FIND A GOOD BALANCE.
Once you’ve found great places to pick up fresh curtable content, get into the habit of visiting them regularly—but don’t get overly comfortable. Instead, always keep your eye out for new and unusual sources of news.
However, don’t exhaust yourself looking for “secret” places where you can find great content to curate either. You can always fall back on old favorites like Google Alerts and Twitter lists. You can also use Twitter Advanced Search as a shortcut to finding specific materials, using keywords and/or proper names of experts you’d like to quote.
The key here is finding a good balance between being complacent and overexerting yourself.
3. MAKE THE MOST OF LINKS AND ANCHOR TEXT.
Don’t just leave your curated anchor text or links in a jumble of letters or five-hundred-character mega-marathon-length title. Change them up so that they become irresistible in their own right.
Use keywords. Better yet, use catchy or descriptive phrases. Make the most of every opportunity to increase your shares.
4. MAKE IT EASY FOR READERS TO RETURN TO YOUR BLOG.
Set your original source links to open up in a new tab instead of the same page. Doing this increases your chances of having your reader return to your site by about 60%. If you have an external site open in the same tab as your blog, you risk your readers clicking through there and forgetting about you.
Take an awesome example from IFB: Every Monday, they release a column called “Last Week’s News Today,” where they list fashion-related links from around the internet. Each link opens up in a new window. See it in action here.
5. USE NOTICEABLE SOCIAL MEDIA SHARING BUTTONS.
Calls-to-action are powerful (and we love them!), but don’t solely rely on them. If you want to increase the chances of your content being shared, include large and noticeable social media sharing buttons with all your content—curated or original.
For example, we usually end our posts with a call-to-action, but glance down and you’ll see that we have our social media sharing buttons right there! So for today, I’m wondering… Have you used those buttons to share our articles and learning library materials with your friends? 😉 Tell me all about your (and their!) experiences below.