In yesterday's Daily Nugget I explained the "creation aspect" of the online content marketing method. Today's Daily Golden Nugget will explain how you can organize the information that other people created and use it for your own content marketing.Within the internet marketing industry the words "curating" and "curation" represent the organization of online information into a single location. This single location can be a landing page on your website or you can use an online curation system like http://paper.li/.
Paper.li calls itself an online newspaper and they give you the ability to select different online sources to organize into a daily "newspaper." The goal of this process is to attract regular readers. What you do with those readers is up to you. Some people build a paper.li for fun, some to educate, and some to build customers.
I'm honored that Gen-Next Jewelers frequently include these Daily Nuggets in their http://paper.li/GenNextJewelers/jewelers-on-twitter newspaper. Take a moment to click that last link. You will see that Gen-Next gathers together tweets and blog posts about various industry topics including blogs from jewelry stores, news from JCKonline.com, deals of the day, photos from Twitter and Instagram, business topics, and technology topics.
Gen-Next Jewelers "curates" all that information together daily for their regular readership. To curate information for your own store, I don't actually suggest using the Paper.li system. Curation is like blogging in that you want to use the technique to attract people to your website. I'm going to propose a random example and show you how you could find and gather information to curate on your website and use it to attract customers.
I googled the phrase "blue diamonds" found several images, videos, news articles, and jewelry stores selling fancy blue color diamonds. I also find a lot more information about the 1960's group The Blue Diamonds, the Blue Diamond Almond company, the VFA-146 Blue Diamond fighter squadron, and a lot of other random non-jewelry related "blue" diamonds. I was a little surprised by the randomness of all the blue diamond information and someone searching for actual information on a fancy blue diamond certainly wouldn't know where to look.
Although this was a completely random search while I was writing this Nugget, this "blue diamonds" topic lends itself perfectly for curation and content marketing. To perform the curation process correctly you would need to read through the news and articles on the blue diamonds and watch the videos. Here's the list of a few of the pages I would look through:
* eBay's page on Blue Diamonds
* Google's Image search for blue diamonds where you should be able to find a few creative commons licensed images.
* What causes the color of blue diamonds
* News story about a rare blue diamond selling for $9.6 million
* The Smithsonian Education page about the Hope Diamond
* Details about the Curse of the Hope Diamond
After reading all of those I would write an abstract for most of them and a commentary for one of them. An abstract is a 50-100 word explanation of what the original article is about, who wrote the story, and why the reader will find it worth their time to click the link to read the full story. If you decide to curate 10 articles or videos you would write an abstract for 9 of them.
Then you would write a full 200-500 word commentary on one article. Choose the one article that you are knowledgeable about because this commentary needs to be both a summary of the original article and also include more information that isn't in the original article.
The last step in the curation process is to create a single page on your website where you would post all the abstracts and the single commentary you wrote. By the way, if you have a YouTube video as one of your curation items you could embed it right into this page. This single page becomes a landing page for the "blue diamonds" topic.
Although I used the random example of blue diamonds to illustrate curation I want to return to the topic from yesterday's Nugget where I was explaining how to create content using the source information provided in a designer's press kit. As part of the content creation I explained how you could take previously published magazine articles and write a commentary on them. Some of your designers might have several magazine articles, news mentions, and even red carpet type appearances published online. You should consider curating all these sources onto a single page using the same process explained today.
As I said above, there are several online services that will provide easy automatic curation of topics that you can send out to your list of customers, but when it comes to content marketing you need to include this strategy as a component of your website just like your blog should be.
