Images are great to boost engagement but they can be hard to source: what is free? what is copyright-free? what is indexed? 

It's easy to spend a lot of time sourcing for images and it can turn out to be a pain. 

Solution?

Canva has compiled 74 sites to solve this and let you know exactly which ones are searchable, whether they require a membership, whether they require attribution when you use the image, the size of their picture database and the resolution of their content. Bonus: they also rate their quality level.

Save time and... enjoy! 

Apparently this new study shows that content clarity is highly correlated with its impact and effectiveness.

The clearer, the more efficient. 

Easier said than done though as apparently most brands fail at delivering a simple and clear enough message to get an impact. 

If you think curated content is dangerous because it can be seen as duplicate content by Google, you're missing out. Even though it’s been addressed by a lot of professional SEO experts, including Google’s Matt Cutts, this is still a question we get a lot. So let’s review it in detail.

That's an important precision and it comes from... Google's Gary Illyes.

Why is it important? Because it means it impacts only those pages of your site which might have duplicate content - not the entire site. 

The confusion some professional SEOs have made on this topic show that there is a lot of myths which can circulate fast since nobody but Google knows how Google works. 

All the more since it is not news but simply a reminder of what Google's Matt Cutts said already some time ago: "Google looks for duplicate content and where we can find it, we often try to group it all together and treat it as of it's just one piece of content."

Another similar myth we've heard a lot is that content curation can be seen as duplicated content, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what content curation and duplicate content are as one has content curation brings SEO benefits while the other has none.

A good summary of what you should definitely consider to implement if you're not already doing so as part of your content marketing plan. Planning and doing research sometimes are a little vague and obscure but Julia McCoy gives great actionable tips on how to make that practical so that you can be efficient. 

To build on her content auditing recommendation, you can check out this other post she wrote detailing how to do it with tools like SEM Rush, Excel templates or the services of her own company ExpressWriters.. 

Wonder what the most important is when starting your content marketing strategy? It's easy to get lost in all the noise there is on the topic but Jason Miller makes it simple for you. After all, his first point is to not over complexity content marketing: a lot of people try to make it sound harder than it is but as Jason puts it, it's funda et tally about answering your customers' questions. What are they looking for? What are they asking you? Every marketer and business should know these so starting to write your own answers or curate other people's great answers shouldn't be a major headache. 

So if you're still wondering whether you can effectively get started with content marketing or if you want to ensure you're on the right track, this post is a great read. 

And if want to go further, make sure to download our Lean Content Marketing Handbook for SMBs, an eBook to which Jason kindly contributed to as well. 

This post by HootSuite's Olsy Sorokina is a great recap of how a content calendar can be a fantastic tool to better manage your content marketing and ensure you're getting value out of your publishing efforts. 

All these points make sense: content is hard to produce and your content team (or your content time if you're a team of one) is a rare  and precious resource.

You can get started with some fo the templates that Olsy included in this post and that are downloadable or better yet, with Scoop.it Content Director which adds critical improvements to the spreadsheet:

1. It's smart as it tells you automatically when content is missing and schedules it for you once you've defined it. 

2. It's integrated with Scoop.it Smart Suggestion Engine, our curation tool that helps you discover great content to publish. 

So not only will it provide you with an affordable way to manage your content resources, but it will also enrich them by adding to your created content. 

For content marketers looking to scale their content volume, outsourcing comes as a natural idea. But for a freelancer or an agency to reflect your brand, your tone or even simply your expertise, it takes some effort which Rebecca Lieb gives a great check-list for in this blog post. 

One thing that certainly changed over the past few years is that new content marketplaces such as Scripted or ExpressWriters simplified the matchmaking between companies and writing talents. 

But even so, having a great writer or designer for your blog or your infographic is just the beginning of the process. We will probably share our own experience on this in greater detail in a follow-up post but outsourcing still takes work: creating a brief, editing, sending feedback and iterating content is not to be neglected. 

So what should you look for when engaging a content agency? Here's her list of criteria.

Very useful tools here, compiled by Ian Cleary.

We particularly love Zapier here at Scoop.it and we've used it to integrate our lead generation pages on Unbounce with Pipedrive which is our CRM tool.

We'll probably write a post on what we've learned doing that but it's been extremely useful as it enabled us to precisely measure the origin of a deal and trace it back to a specific piece of content. So now our content team is able to not only understand which content converts but our business team clearly understands the value of content.

Blogging remains the pillar of content marketing, particularly for SMBs. Here's a list of tips from expert bloggers from which to cherry pick.

If you're overwhelmed by the length of this list, here's my own Top 3 (beyond the obvious "create amazing content"):

#14 Check out how Joseph Ho combines careful content targeting (keyword choices etc...) with synchronized social and email distribution. SEO comes from being relevant and consistent but also getting natural back links which social and email distribution will augment your opportunities of getting. #16 by Kristi Hines is a valuable variation of this as well.

#22 by Sean Si is a very good one too: because blogs were originally web logs, we tend to see them as journals and often forget the role of evergreen content. On the Scoop.it blog, we also observe that our evergreen posts tend to be a significant part of our content and SEO.

#24 by Steve Brodsky reminds us that there's been a lot of confusion about guest blogging since Google's Matt Cutts announced its demise last year. What's been targeted by Google is fake, non relevant guest blogging: the kind a blog will start to attract the minute it becomes successful with invites such as "publish this piece on LED or light bulbs which has nothing to do with your editorial line and I'll publish anything you want on my own blog". This kind of cheap trick used to work and Google killed it. But having industry experts contribute adding-value pieces genuinely to your blog and contribute to leading industry blogs your opinions, data or experience is invaluable and is a great lean content technique. Genuine guest blogging still works.

As robots start to write content in a way that's hard to distinguish from human-created content, one might wonder as Dennis Shiao: will Content Marketing also be done by robots?

Technical SEO is less and less relevant as Google becomes smarter. There are still a few rules to follow but url optimization is mostly useless as Neil Patel explains, backing that up with solid data.

This post is a good reflection of 2 recent trends that completely changed marketing over the past few years:

1. SEO is not about page ranks, keyword stuffing and backlinks anymore. Google evolved its algorithm to make it smarter and smarter and to look at semantic and quality above anything else. 

2. Social Media Marketing has matured. While we discovered the magic of social media marketing, it was ok to look at engagement metrics such as page likes. But as Larry Kim explains in that funny and smart post, who cares about likes when organic reach on Facebook kept decreasing over the past year?

So what are the good metrics? 

I'll probably write a longer post on this but these are 2 metrics that I find myself using as an alternative for content marketers:

- volume of shares per content: this metric (and more importantly it's progression) is the best proxy I found of audience/quality fit. 

- visitor to lead conversion rate: measures whether your content helps the business objectives or not. 

What are the marketing KPI's that you feel deserve to live? 

Under constant pressure from spammers, Google couldn't be Google if it wasn't an obscure black box. Which means that SEO remains sometimes very confusing with a lot of unclear questions starting with... do you even need to do SEO? Or do you need a SEO?

This post on CgColors' blog lists a few of them and clarifies the situation on a number of confusing topics. Of course, some of this is opinion rather than certain facts but the analysis in itself is interesting. 

Great recap by @Stephanie Frasco of all the reasons why images are so important for content marketing. We live in a visual Web as our brains process information better. 

At Scoop.it we've experimented with adding images to tweets and found out images not only increased engagement by 1.8x but also link clicks by 88%.

We've shared these results on our blog and more data as we announced the launch of our new feature enabling to add images to curated content.

@Stephanie Frasco crafts a great summary of the respective benefits of content curation and content creation for business. But, she adds, this is not a question of one vs the other: combining both into a proper content marketing mix is the real killer. 

Getting impact with your content heavily depends on how good it is but it's easy to forget some details or to get carried away as you create and forget the essential objectives. 

This concise and practical list from Heidi Cohen that you can run through easily every time you create a blog post will ensure your blog post gets the impact it deserves. 

Great and concrete recap by Heidi Cohen on why content curation is not just an option for marketers: it's a must. 

Beyond the fact most marketers (particularly SMB ones) lack budget, time and resources to produce 100% of the content they need, content curation is also needed because:

- it makes your content more credible: being 100% promotional doesn't work as the table above shows and as also demonstrated by this study that showed customers do not trust vendor-generated content as much as 3rd-party content.

- customers will do their curation anyway before buying your product: they will search the Web for reviews, advice, tips... So why not give it to them directly? Several studies have shown customers are 50% to 75% through the process before reaching sales. 

I would also add one more reason:

- curating content helps you connect with influencers in your space: if you're an SMB marketer, chances are you will need amplification for your content and that you'll have limited content promotion budget to do that. Influencers can help but before you can ask, you have to give: curate and share their content will help them and bring you in their radar, making it more likely for them to respond to your requests later on. Here's a great slideshare by Traackr on how to do this. 

Great post @Rohit Bhargava - Speaker | Author | Blogger | Professor who says he's inspired by curators: well, this post is inspiring for content marketers and curators too!

To elaborate on the value of content curation for marketers, there are a couple of benefits which are often overlooked, beyond the obvious cost/time saving one:

- First, curating valuable 3rd-party content adds credibility. We've evolved as consumers and we know content produced by brands or vendors is biased. 3rd-party content has been found 3 to 7x more credible in studies.

- Second, curation helps build connexions with influencers: by curating

their content, marketers get in influencers' radars and bring them goodwill.

A good routine of 5 habits to develop.

I love the way Tomasz Tunguz puts things in a concise, elegant and convincing ways. He's not a marketer (originally an engineer and now a VC) but what he says about content marketing is priceless (about startups and particular saas startups too! - I've often curated some of his stuff here).

By going to the point, focusing on data and making complex things simple, he's been building an awesome readership on his blog.

His 5 tips will take you less than a minute to read and are either a great reminder or great things to start doing as a content marketer.

Last year, Mark Schaefer's post on Content Shock sounded like a wake-up call for content marketing as a marketing strategy. In short, he was predicting diminishing returns for content marketing. As more and more companies adopt content marketing, he explained, it becomes increasingly difficult to raise above the noise. 

While there's been some debate on whether or not content shock was real, marketers have certainly been challenged by declining opportunity to get organic distribution from social networks.

This year, he focuses on the need to find new ways to distribute content and ignite it, as he puts it, so that it becomes impacting. 

As I replied last year to Mark and we've seen since then, there is a great opportunity to turn that content shock into an opportunity: content curation. In a world where more and more content is being produced, value shifts from creation to curation.

Building content hubs with not just your latest creations but also curated content creates new distribution opportunities to ignite your content:

- instead of being too self-promotional, you become a resource that adds third-party content to your own;

- you make it easy for your readers to reshare your content and direct traffic back to your site;

- you increase your SEO footprint;

- you build relationships with influencers in your space, making it more likely for them to reshare your own content.

In this podcast, expert content curator @Cendrine Marrouat - https://www.cendrinemedia.com shares her vision and her approach to content curation with Brooke Ballard. She gives a lot of interesting insights on what content curation is and isn't, debunking some of the myths also covered in this great post. The recap of the podcast by Mallie Hart is in itself a great example of content curation: if you don't have time for the podcast, you can read the list of key take-aways and I'm sure you'll find some to apply and learn from Cendrine's expertise.