Squeeze Out Every Last Opportunity to Share

Content curation usually involves collecting someone else’s text, images, audio or video and presenting them to an online community. While this isn’t the first article ever written about curating your own content, it may likely present you with more reasons to do so than you’ve thought about before.

Let’s look first at a piece of content we can all relate to, the blog post. When you finish writing a post and press the ‘publish’ button, do you get a sense of relief, or euphoria or pride…and then never think about that post again? If the answer is yes, then this article is for you.

Face it; it takes time, thought and effort to write a good blog post. Therefore squeezing out every last opportunity to share it definitely makes sense. We’ve covered the ‘why to do it,’ so now let’s talk about the ‘how’ and the ‘when’.

How to Curate Your Own Content

A perfect way to curate content from a blog post is to cut and paste attention-grabbing phrases from the post and re-fashion them into tweets. Let’s use my blog post ‘Real World Ways to Measure Social Media Marketing ROI‘ to illustrate. Here’s a scenario:

I’m monitoring my Twitter stream when I notice a number of posts about a new tool to measure social media ROI. I also see that many people don’t think that the tool is very useful. I could at this point do two things: I could re-tweet my entire blog post (the headline is a good call-to-action), or I could grab a strong phrase from the post and use it as a topical rejoinder to the present conversation and add a link to my post, like this:

‘Stop looking for tools to measure social media ROI: cscinteractive.us/blog/4-Ways-To-Measure…’

If you can’t find a catchy phrase from your blog to use as a call-to-action, then write one that’s inspired by it and then link back to the post.

When to Re-Purpose Content

A particularly good time to use this blog curation method is when you have just picked up a number of new followers and you’d like to introduce them to some of your best content. What better way to welcome them to your community than by grabbing their attention with a strong call-to-action in the form of a tweet?

This same method also works well with email marketing. Instead of curating the call-to-action into a tweet, curate your attention-grabbing phrase into an email subject line. Hook the reader with that perfectly curated subject line, then follow up by presenting them with a link to your blog post. This is an effective way to provide value to your subscribers. Offer them content that will help them, don’t just ask them to buy things from you.

A Blog Post Can Live Forever Sliced and Diced Into Calls to Action

A cat may have nine lives but a blog post…It can live forever. We’ve only scratched the surface with our self-curation tutorial. Check back soon as we’ll be posting part two in this series.