Release Your Inner Curator: it’s good for business development (Part III)

This final post on my three-part series, Release Your Inner Curator, provides the fifth and final step in the content curation process.

In addition, I’ve provided some thoughts on worthwhile curation apps available to simplify the process.

Step Five: Share your curated content

Sharing your findings can be as simple sending them in an email to your prospects.  However, the more thought you put into this part of your program, the more sustainable it’ll be over the long term.

Let’s go through some of your options for publishing your curated content.

1. A weekly digest sent in newsletter format to your prospect list.
2. Posted on your agency website, either as part of your blog or on its own.
3. Shared via social media channels.

My suggestion is to do all of these, but you should also keep the original scope of your program in mind.

If your original goal was to replace your maybe-not-so-good blogging with a more consistent and time effective alternative, you may want to post the content to your site.  If you’re looking for an extra touchpoint or a follow up to your agency’s already strong blogging effort, it may be that you’ll only want to share your curated content a couple of times a month in a newsletter format or even spaced throughout the week on social media channels.

Let your goals dictate your deployment.

 

**For all you Moneybag$ out there**

So far, time has been the only limiting resource I’ve considered.  Anyone with a computer and an internet connection could conceivably follow these steps to get started on the road to content curation bliss.

But what if thy pockets are of a deep and spendy nature?  Well, then you can really make some big things happen.

There are dozens and dozens of content curation apps out there, and while many of them have free entry level versions, for the really powerful features, you’ll have to unleash the credit card.  Let’s talk about just a couple of these tools.

Basic free Feedly is great, but the Pro and Team versions make it possible for you to crowdsource your curation efforts quite a bit with team knowledge boards, group article annotation, and the ability to create a URL linking to your collections of feeds.

On top of that, the possibility of app integration can really increase your productivity.  Using something like Zapier or IFTTT, you can create recipes (automation workflows) that connect various apps together to save you time.  Want to create an RSS feed of all of your Feedly saved articles, which you can then email? Or maybe you want your saved articles to be sent to your Buffer queue, which would then disseminate them to all your social media channels?

Is it nerdy to think that automation’s really cool?

But, let’s suppose you want to go even deeper and forget all of this app integration nonsense.  Maybe you want one content curation tool to be your everything.  You’re in luck you lovable, lazy, and apparently budget-rich marketer.  There are software platforms out there that can be your go-to content curation tool, the apple of your content curation eye.

Curata, PublishThis, and Trapit are a few platforms that offer all-in-one content curation services.  Curata, for example, utilizes artificial intelligence to allow users to fine-tune its search engine, which will increase the relevancy of the content it finds over time.  In addition, publishing is enabled from within the software, so you can easily share content to your blog, social media, and marketing automation platform.

Convenience like this doesn’t come cheap, of course, but you’ll may find that as your hunger for curated content grows, paying for premium curation software starts to make a lot more sense.

In conclusion…because the word count of this series of posts* is embarrassingly high

Prospects want the Content.

Find the Content.

Curate the Content.

Give prospects the Content.

The Content will make you both strong.

(Please, give them the Content. If you don’t feed your prospects, who will?)

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*This three part-series, Release Your Inner Curator, includes the following previous posts:

— Part 1:  Set your curation strategy.  Choose a topic

— Part 2:  Gather sources.   Provide your own insight.