Entertaining. Strategic. And shareable.

This is an old post by Sonia Simone from Copyblogger that is still very valid and inspiring today. This last point stresses out the importance of the new model for SEO and content marketing, driven by social media: content that is not entertaining, strategic or interesting enough to be shared won't raise above the noise. 

Content curation helps in that respect through a couple of things:

1. Curating content is a great way to understand what gets shared vs what's not: this will inform your own content creation.

2. Content curation will help you constantly identify and publish good shareable content, enriched with your own context and expertise. 

This post is a good framework to structure your content marketing strategy. 

There are many interesting points in there but the above diagram is the keystone to any successful content marketing: you have to be meaningful (or they won't come), target the right people (or they won't convert) and consistent (or you won't raise above the noise).

The last one is the real challenge here: being consistent is hard as you compete for attention not only with your competitors but with all sorts of other content your target audience could read instead of yours. 

Key elements to achieve that consistency:

- what are the topics you want to cover/own?

- define keywords are associated to that.

- use a mix of content creation and curation so you don't rely just on inspiration but also can react to what others have produced.

Here are my views (excerpt from original post by Heidi Cohen):

I understand why some people like Mark Schaffer are scared: content marketing seems to be a victim of its own success and as more and more companies publish more and more content, it becomes more competitive and could have diminishing returns. But as I’ve answered to Mark in this post, that’s no longer true if we consider the new models for content: while content marketing is about making your company a media, nobdy said you had to do it old-fashioned 20th-century style and produce all of their content in house. Look at BuzzFeed, Business Insider, the HuffPost or Upworthy: they’re all using a mix of creation, curation and aggregation and that should tell us what the future of successful content marketing is.

Read what the other 23 had to say about this.

We're opening up our data logs and our analytics to share how we've been doing on SlideShare. If you're thinking about adding a content channel to your blog, SlideShare is an interesting candidate.

Here's why and how.

We're always finding different ways to use Scoop.it, mostly coming from the intelligent community of curators that has manifested itself over the last few years.

Scoop.it Specialist @Martin (Marty) Smith wrote an explanation of how he's using Scoop.it to gauge interest in potential original content. When his posts on Scoop.it do well, he is able to see what his audience likes, and create content along the same vein.

He also explains some of the SEO benefits seen by other Scoopiteers like @Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com.

Read Marty's post to find new creative ways to measure the potential success of content using Scoop.it and share your thoughts in the comments!

It's true that the human brain favors visual content because it's easier to process and understand. According to this post, readers will only actually read 28% of the words on a page. Why create so much if it might not even be read?

Keeping this in mind for content marketing can lead to some great visual storytelling - this piece explains some of the steps to building the perfect story to keep the brains of your audience engaged for an optimal amount of time.

It's not the first piece I read on how some people have been putting a lot of analysis to understand how and why stories go viral: after all - as this great article points out - this was already something Aristotle was intrigued by. 

The findings are interesting and I encourage you to read them as it can inform your content strategy. Keep in mind the conclusion however - which I think is great and wise: the more we understand viral content collectively, the less we understand it.

Why?

Because whenever humans are involved, martingales don't exist.

It reminds me of financial markets: whenever stock information is perfectly distributed and statistical models are the same for everybody, no one really has an edge. For content, it's a bit the same that applies: when everybody's trying to do an Upworthy-like headline, they become much less effective than they used to be.

The #1 of these 4 is straight to the point: The social Web will have more impact than search-engine ranking says Holly Berkley, author of the Social Media Advantage: an Essential Handbook for Small Business. 

Nice provocative title by Jody Biagini. While the reality is "it means a lot", the ways to get there have totally changed as she correctly explains.

SEO has changed. 

The new SEO is good shareable content.

A great compilation of studies on the ROI of content marketing from Eloqua and Hubspot. There are lots of interesting numbers which show how valuable content marketing can be in the long run: unlike advertising which costs increase with success, content marketing scales up by delivering economies of scale with lower and lower costs per lead or visitor. 

Now, the caveat is that these studies focus on sizeable organizations who can afford the following investments: "According to Eloqua’s findings, a mid-sized organization should expect to spend approximately $12,000 a month and a larger-sized company could expect about $33,000 a month."

This raises the question of the accessibility of content marketing to small and mid-size businesses. To really be the new advertising, Content Marketing needs to become accessible to all - hence the growing interest for leancontent solutions and tools. 

Great infographic: it tells about three things to look for when determining whether your content is successful or not.

What would you add?

Emily Bailey from Digital Relevance recaps how content curation helps fixing your blog, social media and email content marketing efforts giving concrete examples and highlighting the role content curation plays in not only building traffic but also credibility and trust.

In smaller companies, some people might wear several hats but this is nevertheless an interesting ways to look at how you can simply organize your content strategy and split the workload between content creation, content curation, analytics and editorial planning.

This testimonial by Nick Whitmore who's a published journalist, blogger and Managing Director at ContentWriting.org captures in a few lines how much SEO has changed. 

From being a nerdy, expert-driven pseudo-science, SEO became much more human through the influence of social media. 

For Content Marketers, this means one thing: write and curate to answer the practical questions your audience has. Use their words and keep it... human.

If you're not using Google authorship yet, you're missing out. Here's why in this great roundup by @Ally Greer with advice from top SEO experts such as Google's Matt Cutts as well as great content strategists such as @Cendrine Marrouat - https://www.cendrinemedia.com and Joe Rizzo.

And as we're convinced that curation is a form of creation, we've made it simple to add your authorship to your Scoop.it topics.

So no time to waste! And let us know how adding Google authorship is working for you.