Affiliate Marketing & Content Curation

At first glance, you may wonder how Landing page creation ties into content curation. But if we take a closer look, we may discover that there are some major tips that we can use to help us create better content for our audience.

Let's just take a look at one example, creating an effective headline. When people view your curated content they are going to decide in a split second, while looking at your headline whether to stay and see what you're talking about or move on to greener pastures.

The content we choose to curate and how we package that content make up the offers that we present to our readers. It can make a difference as to whether our reader chooses to stay and read our content and then go on to our landing page or leave our site before they ever find out what we are really offering them.

The original article gives great information that we can use to increase the effectiveness of the information we curate.

This is a great article you should check it out
Timothy LeyferExcerpted from article:
"If you don’t have a good landing page, it’s like going fishing without a net: you might land a big one on your hook, but you won’t be able to drag it into the boat.

You don’t want people to just visit your page. You want them to take action once they are there. So make it as easy and compelling as possible for them by including these elements found in a landing page that CONVERTS:

C = Clear Call to Action
O = Offer
N = Narrow Focus
V = VIA: Very Important Attributes
E = Effective Headline
R = Resolution-Savvy Layout
T = Tidy Visuals
S = Social Proof

CLEAR CALL TO ACTION:
Whatever it is you’ve decided will move people further along your conversion funnel. That’s what you should be asking them, clearly and temptingly, to do. Don’t distract them with lots of other requests. The best pages accentuate only one CTA.

OFFER:
An offer is anything you give your visitors in exchange for getting them to do what you want. This can mean offers in the traditional sense of coupons or discounts, but it also can mean a free trial, a free version of the product, a whitepaper, or a matching gift.

NARROW FOCUS:
Research has shown that the more choices you offer people, the longer they take to make a decision. So the clearer and simpler you make your page, the more likely you are to get someone to take the action you want.
- Do you really need that navigation bar?
- Do you really need to talk about your company philosophy?
- Do you really need to collect all that information?

VIA: VERY IMPORTANT ATTRIBUTES:
We’ve all heard stories of companies that reserved a catchy URL, put up zero information about what the site was for, and harvested 1 million email addresses before they even launched.
You should assume that’s not going to happen to your company.
Instead, you’re going to have to give visitors some good reasons they should do what you want. Those reasons are the VIA: Very Important Attributes.

EFFECTIVE HEADLINE:
People coming to your site are going to decide in a split second if they want to go back to their game of “Words with Friends” or stay and see what you are all about. A key way to keep them is to tell them in plain language what your site is all about.

RESOLUTION-SAVVY LAYOUT:
Do you know that there are people out there still surfing the web on 800 x 600 monitors?
Keep the most essential parts of your message – logo, headline, call to action, a supporting visual – in the center top of the screen, with supporting messaging lower down on the page.

TIDY VISUALS:
As with the headline, distracting elements can work when you’re trying to get attention. But when people are on your site, you don’t want to sidetrack them with a bunch of visual junk.

SOCIAL PROOF:
As social creatures, humans tend to place greater value on things that other people have already approved. That is why most sites will tend to display evidence of such social validation."

In the original article there are more information about: "Considerations for strategy", "Considerations for design", "The cautionary tale", "Doing it right" and some examples. Check out full interesting article here:
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/c-o-n-v-e-r-t-s/

Via Giuseppe Mauriello, Robin Good

From Official Website:

"Spundge is the end-to-end tool for today's power curator. Connect with the best content creators on the web. Collaboratively curate the web and create relevant, influential content.

 

- Discover and Filter:

Create a Spundge Notebook to stay on top of a topic, person, company or interest. Spundge Notebooks deliver a stream of relevant content from news sources, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Flickr. Filter and then save the best of what you discover.

 

- Curate and Collaborate:

Invite friends and colleagues to collaborate on Notebooks and discover and save new items. Collaborators receive notifications when new content is saved, and can add comments to Notebook items. Collaborative Curation enables you to track information, while instantly sharing with friends and colleagues.

 

- Stream and Publish:

Transform your Notebook into a real-time stream you can embed anywhere on the web. Share what you’re reading, or curate a real-time newswire about a breaking event or topic of interest.

 

- Get Spundge PRO:

it enables teams and individuals to collaboratively create content and instantly publish to a CMS, email newsletter and social accounts. Writing in Spundge lets you drag and drop images, tweets and videos into any story, effortlessly add attribution, and easily embed and track content."

 

From review article on Nieman Journalism Lab:

"The problem is today’s journalist has to use too many products and applications to do their job, and very few of these were actually built with newsrooms or journalistic workflow in mind...

 

Spundge is a platform that’s built to take a journalist from information discovery and tracking all the way to publishing, regardless of whatever internal systems they have to contend with...

 

The software is free, but an optional $9 monthly fee adds premium features, including the ability to share notebooks with collaborators, who can also add to the notebook and see changes in real time..."

 

Read more on Nieman Journalism Lab here:

http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/09/first-look-spundge-is-software-to-help-journalists-to-manage-real-time-data-streams/

 

Check out Spundge here: http://www.spundge.com

 

Via Giuseppe Mauriello, Martin Sturmer, Heiko Idensen

Create vs. curate? They aren't mutually exclusive.

According to Mark Sherbin, some of us are still trying to wrap our heads around what exactly content curation is. How does it differ from content aggregation? Should it be a higher priority than building your own content? 

He makes the argument curation as a strategy is divisive and even states: " Who the hell should you believe? "

Continuing ... Curation doesn’t require you to replace content creation. Instead, curating content eases some of the editorial burden. As a result, your role as content strategist consists of one part creator, one part curator.

So What’s the right way to curate?

Curation doesn’t require you to replace content creation. Instead, curating content eases some of the editorial burden. As a result, your role as content strategist consists of one part creator, one part curator.

To curate content the right way, experts suggest best practices like these. 

Explain why the content is important to your audience
Rather than simply posting content, it’s important to put your own spin on it. That way, you can imprint your brand on an article without claiming full ownership. It also builds reader trust by clearly showing you actually read the article, raising the value of the pick in the eyes of the audience. 

Include clear links and credit for the original content
The way to avoid morally dubious curation tactics is to clearly identify the original writer and the source of the content. That way, audience members find information through your site, and publishers, if they take any action, will thank you for sending traffic their way. 

Post snippets of content 
Curating content doesn’t require you to post articles in their entirety. Instead, it’s important to post snippets of content. Curata’s  Curation Habits Report 2012 finds that medium snippets (141-1,200 characters) get a 20% higher click-thru rate than small snippets (<=140 characters). 

 

Pickiness is encouraged
Most marketers will tell you that producing too much content is almost never an issue. Aided by software, curation offers the temptation of posting as much content as you can get your hands on. But experts say it’s better to be picky — your audience can only digest so much content. 

 

In fact, Curation Habits Report 2012 finds that email newsletters featuring curated content average 12% list growth when they publish less than 50% of articles they find. In comparison, curators that publish more than 50% only average 5% growth. 

“Your search for relevant content may return 200 to 300 useful articles,” Kolowich  [Rich Content Daily] explains. “But the closer you can get to those 10 absolutely vital articles — the cutting-edge ones that advance your audience’s understanding of their jobs — the stronger your readership will be. Respect your readers’ time and they’ll repay you for it.” 

 

Find a unique voice
Again, you want to associate your brand with the content. In order to accomplish this, you should find ways to stamp your flair on the content you share. 

According to Steve Rosenbaum [Magnify.Net], “Curators have a voice. If you’re a company that produces a consumer product, you need to figure out not just what you’re going to say, but also the kind of content you’re comfortable drawing in around your brand and how you’re going to contextualize it.” 

 

Following best practices clearly requires time and effort.

 

Deciding whether content curation is right for your business

So how can marketers at mid- to large-sized companies reduce that burden — especially when they’re spending time to create content as well? 

According to Pawan Deshpande [Curata], marketers should evaluate three crucial points before deciding to implement a curation strategy:

1. Is there a dominant publication in your market? 

2. Does your topic of focus align with the interests of your audience?

3. Is there enough content to curate out there? 

 

By Mark Sherbin http://bit.ly/QzFH8r

Source http://bit.ly/Ng4qMg

Download Curata's Curation Habits Report 2012 [PDF] http://bit.ly/MsX9w6

Via maxOz

Content Curation is Needed.Because getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant (Content Curation: definition and generation.)...

Robin Good: Summarize the content of any web page by simply clicking on a dedicated bookmarklet. This is What Cruxbot does, while adding two great features:

 

1. The ability to determine how much to summarize dinamically.

 

2. The ability to have the summary built around specific keywords available in the content.

 

Cruxbot is free to use.

 

How to use it : http://www.cruxbot.com/howToUse.html ;

Try it out now: http://www.cruxbot.com 

 

This seems to be a great way toget your curated content into a form that you can publish on yor blog. It's free to use so I recomend checking it out. I will be giving it a try and reporting my results later.  Timothy Leyfer

Via Robin Good, RPattinson-Daily, Kevin I Mills

Robin Good: Here is a good guide providing the basic principles that should be followed when using, reposting, citing or quoting other people's content (both text and images).

 

The article outlines "proper methods of source attribution on the internet to guarantee the right people get credit for their hard work and ideas."

 

Specific sections of the article cover:

How To Cite Content in Blog Posts How To Cite Content in Social Media How to Give Credit to Guest Bloggers and Ghost Writers How to Cite Images and Visual Content

 

 

Well done. 8/10

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33098/How-Not-to-Steal-People-s-Content-on-the-Web.aspx

 

 

 

Via Robin Good, janlgordon