By Nick Hoover
In last month’s article, we talked about sharing content with your audience, and why that is important for brand growth. In order to share content, you must find content. This, in and of itself, can be a daunting task.
Through the years, I have experimented with several different online tools and have settled on a mixture of free and paid apps to run my content curation. My current workflow involves three different steps—content discovery, content sharing and content research.
1. Content Discovery—In order to find share-worthy content, you need to consume content, a lot of content. (Seriously… a lot.) The good news is the Internet is full of content. Some of it is even pretty good. So how do you find it quickly?
I use feedly.com to aggregate my content for initial review. Feedly is an rss reader that organizes feeds into categories. I typically organize my feeds around topics I think my readers are interested in, such as fishing, technology, wordpress, SEO, etc.
Next, find a site you think posts quality content. Once I find a site, I add it to the appropriate feed and start monitoring the posts. (You can add a site from within the feedly app.) With a quick glance, I can see all the new content that has been added that day and further explore a post I find interesting.
2. Content Sharing—Okay, great, we have some content to share. Now, how can we quickly get it into our social media feeds? Wouldn’t it be great if we could just hit a button and post directly to our social media accounts and automatically space our posts out throughout the day?
Enter bufferapp.com…
Once I’ve targeted a post for sharing I utilize the built-in buffer app sync to share my posts to my buffer. The buffer app allows me to manage my posts on various social networks. When I add an article to my buffer it automatically spreads them out. The power of this system is it’s simplicity. Hit one button in feedly and boom the article you are reading is shared with your fans across all your social networks. On top of that buffer offers useful analytics that allow me to track clicks to make sure a post I think is relevant, really is.
3. Content Research—In addition to sharing content, I also need to write a blog post from time to time. When doing research, I find this method to be invaluable for organizing my thoughts. One of my all-time favorite apps is Pocket. www.getpocket.com. How many times have you read a great article only to lose it in the shuffle? With feedly and Pocket I can instantly save articles I like. This keeps me organized and helps consolidate my thoughts.
Running a successful online marketing campaign can be a time-consuming affair. But finding creative ways to use existing apps can be a real time saver and get you back to doing what you do best… running your business.
Nick Hoover is a principal of Sage Lion media, and he’s been giving AT readers great tips on optimizing their online efforts through this regular E-column (see past issues of Angling Trade E-News if you missed them…).
