Content Creation
Every day I search for interesting content for both myself and my clients. I read a lot of different articles, some are tech based, some are lifestyle based, some are automotive, some are…. Well I guess you get the picture, I read a lot of ‘stuff’.
The reason I do that is I’m always looking for ideas on content creation, looking for content I can curate and comment on.
I came across an article today that at first I thought was a real gem. Here’s the link – http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2013/07/generating-traffic-catchy-content-ideas.html
Now as I said, at first I thought this was going to be a great piece that I could share, one that would add value to my offerings and be of use and interest to my followers.
The first part of the article makes a lot of sense as content is indeed what you need to create on a regular basis if you want the likes of Google to pay attention to you. The problem is creating unique, compelling, entertaining and informative content. After all, how many ways can you tell someone about bottled water or mil spec packaging? Which is where content curation comes in. Instead of having to add to the millions of pages already talking about these subjects you would fine and curate existing articles or other formats.
You in effect become the Smithsonian of your market niche because you save your followers time by presenting them the best content (in link form) on your specialist subject. Sometimes you may just come across something that you tweet out as a link, or share on FB or G+ as just a link and a quick comment. At others, you may do what I’m doing and write your own take on an article you’ve found both are curated content.
Whichever way you do it, your job is to provide not only good information but to make it easy for people to act on that information. This is where I found the article a little lacking. Yes it has some great ideas, which I’m not going to duplicate here, you can read them and decide yourself which ones make sense for you.
It gives you ideas but doesn’t in my opinion go far enough because it doesn’t give you any resources to help you implement those ideas.
So my first addition to this page would be tell you to go to Google and Bing and search for ‘trending topics’ because you want your content to be fresh and of the moment, even though you may actually curate content that was published months or even years ago. If it’s good evergreen content, especially if it ranks well, then adding it to your list of curated content is a good thing. But the subject matter has to be current.
Curated Content
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends takes you to where Google curates the trending queries, if you can find something here that you can spin and link to your niche you could get a nice bump in traffic.
http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts everyone loves ‘top tens’ and at this links Google curates the most popular ‘top ten charts’ song to space objects. Children’s TV to Politicians, whisky to coffee and lots I between. It may inspire you to produce your own ‘top ten’.
http://mashable.com/category/trending-topics/ this site will always have something to offer, even if it’s got nothing in your particular niche it is a sea of great content ideas.
http://www.hashtags.org/ will give you a list of trending hashtags and http://www.hashtags.org/trending-on-twitter/ will give you what’s trending on Twitter.
http://whatthetrend.com/ has general subjects and if you investigate you’ll see how sites like Huffington Post use the hashtag to create content that could pull in visitors.
http://www.quora.com/Trending-Topics-online# has the trending questions, well worth mining for anything you can answer or use. Maybe even a ‘top 3’ questions answered for your niche?
http://www.techspot.com/trending.html if you’re in a tech based niche then Techspot may be of use.
http://trendspottr.com/welcome.php is another site that can give you ideas. It also has a widget generator you can embed so that people coming to your site or blog can get the latest news direct from you.
Finally of course there’s http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/trending-topics which has an eclectic and often funny series of trending topics for you to browse through.
There are of course many more one of which is Lumi.do which builds a page around your search habits and brings in new content as it’s published.
Your challenge is to take these resources and curate some content, giving your own take or spin and make it relevant to your niche. Then share it with us on Facebook, who knows you may create the next viral phenomenon
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