Published Monday March 18, 2013
We wanted to refer back to our January Blog article: Top Content Marketing Tactics That Grow Your Business and Brand and talk more about aggregating rich content on your blog site.
Making your blog an active hub that people want to frequent, learning from and recommend pays big dividends. Ultimately, if you can write content, you should, but finding and featuring great articles and authors is also a great way to provide resources for your community.
Here are some FAQ's about aggregating content.1- What kind of content should I be featuring?
This is all about what you do and whom you serve. What are the top 3 areas of expertise you feature and want to be known for? What are 10 additional related or complimentary content areas you can feature? Whatever business or industry you are in; gather the content that is most useful and interesting to your community and for those who you want to attract.
Jeff Sonderman of The Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St Petersburg, Fl, says: "By aggregating the work of others alongside your own, you place the readers' interests ahead of your own competitive pride. You build a stronger reader relationship than other sites, and you earn loyalty and trust that can pay off in real dollars".
2- Where do I find the best content to aggregate?
The best ways to find just about anything is of course using a major search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo, and put in very specific key words or key word phrases. Also, use the top websites and blog sites of your industry and professional organizations. Follow the RSS feeds of sites and experts you want to keep up with weekly.
Some of the major news and information sites such as CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes or the New York Times are always great sources for content or finding other sites to link to. Here are some must read tips for using Google search for content curation.
3- What are the best ways to promote my content rich site?
The "best practice" for promoting content is using social media marketing, through all of the social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, as well as a permission based email marketing system. These tap into your voluntary, permission based community that you already have a relationship with and then are re-posting out to their communities.
Another feature you can use is to put a "Blog-Roll" feature or resources section on your blog that lists the experts and their blogs and links to their sites. Linking to your guest bloggers, authors and writers not only features them but gives them a reason to feature you.
If you want to see how some of the top blogs and websites present and aggregate their content in a diverse cross section of categories check out Daily Tekk's 100 Best, Most Interesting Blogs and Websites for 2013.
Aggregating quality articles and content from key websites, writers, bloggers or industry sources is a smart way to support people whose content you enjoy, bring people to your site, brand your business and keep people coming back and staying on your site longer.