Once a small business owner gets his blog up and running, content curation and content marketing can help him (or her!) get more SEO out of his blog and posts.
Content marketing is creating new material like newsletters, blogs, eBooks, and videos that people can use or learn about a specific subject. This content can be made available through email, article directories, places like Google books, or even on YouTube. Any place you post your original content will increase the chances of search engines pointing back to you.
Content curation is content marketing to the extreme. You still create some new material, but you mix it up with other articles, videos, etc. from the web in an organized fashion that you place on your blog and other sites where you are active. The mix of original content with the latest, up-to-date references moves your blog and posts to the top of the SEO food chain. Search engines like to index content curated sites more often than others since they tend to be more up-to-date.
To begin content curation and content marketing, make your blog easily available via RSS feeds, linking to other blogs and websites, and posting on social media sites. In addition:
- Start searching for relevant material in your subject.
- Post your findings, with correct credit and links, on your blog, Twitter, and Facebook pages.
- Set up an account on social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg. You can share your articles and news findings easily, and others can vote if they like them.
The good news is if you don’t have the time to search the web yourself, there are programs that will weed through the mess for you. Paper.li, BagTheWeb, and Redux are a few of the pages that will sort through the virtual mass of media and pull out info on your subject.
