Best Practices in Content Curation

Building on yesterday's post on content curation, today I want to share with you some "best practices" for curating content in your career services business.

As I talked about yesterday, content curation is all about providing jobseekers with the information they're looking for — and adding value to that content at the same time. It isn't difficult to do successfully, as long as you use these guidelines.

Know What Jobseekers Want
Successful content curation requires that you choose content that your readers (jobseekers) will find useful or intriguing. Start by understanding your readers and what they're looking for online, information-wise. The better you know their interests and needs, the better you'll be able to deliver the most relevant content. Some jobseekers are interested in the resume (they may have one that's not working, or they may be looking to create one for the first time); others want to know how social media can help in their job search (LinkedIn strategies especially); while others may be in the interviewing stage and be looking for ideas on questions to ask or salary negotiation techniques. Understanding what topics you can curate is the first step.

Follow Other Curators
The best way to learn any skill is to imitate those that came before. Follow other content curators and see not only what kind of information they share — but how they go about doing it. You can learn a great deal about sharing content and engaging readers by simply paying attention to the methods of the experts. Wendy Enelow does an excellent job of this for career services professionals in the Career Thought Leaders E-Bridge newsletter.

Here's a snippet from the Nov. 1 E-Bridge (Issue #20):

Choose the Right Tool
There are many good tools to help you deliver content to your readers. In fact, there are too many. Resist the temptation to bounce around among different tools. Instead, choose one that you like and that does what you need it to do, and stick with that one. You can deliver your content via email newsletter (I recommend AWeber), blog posts, via Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn (simply sharing links to content you come across), or using specific content curation tools. Pinterest can also be a great tool for curating content — especially those with strong visuals. (One great tip I heard last week was to curate videos in a YouTube channel using Pinterest. I did this a few weeks ago with "Call Me Maybe" videos on YouTube on a Pinterest board.)

Add Value
Don't just present the content "as is." Always add some extra value to it by commenting on it, giving it your own spin or opinion, or even contradicting it and creating some controversy. A blog post that starts off with, "I found this article online and I totally disagree with it," can get others commenting and giving their two cents. This is especially important when curating content and sharing it via Twitter and Facebook. Even a sentence or two can increase engagement and discussion.

Quote Articles
One important note about content curation: when you refer to an article in a blog post, don't just put a link to it. This makes your readers follow the link, which is extra work for them and also leads them off your site. Instead, include a snippet or quote so that your reader doesn't have to go anywhere to get the gist of what the article says. Then they can make an informed decision as to whether they want to read further. (Note: When using Twitter to share content, you obviously can't do this -- but it does work when using Facebook, LinkedIn, blog posts, and content curation tools.)

Mix It Up
Don't present the same type of content in your content curation efforts. Mix it up. Rather than just curating articles and blog posts, share videos, infographics, resource sites, and podcasts as well. By curating content from as many different sources as possible, you'll make the learning and reading experience more interesting both for your audience and for yourself.

Always double-check your content curation from the reader's point of view to see if it's truly providing value. Is it better to read your posts or just go straight to the source? Put yourself in their shoes and you'll understand what you need to do to add value to the content you're curating.

Next up: Where To Find Careers Content To Curate

Curating Content to Attract New Clients

I'm a content junkie, I guess. If you've been following me for any length of time, you've probably figured out that I'm a huge fan of using content to build your career services business. Whether that's using content to attract media attention ("Feed the Media" special report and teleseminar), or blogging ("Resume Writer's Guide to Blogging for Profit and Promotion" special report), or using content in many other ways ("Using Content to Capture New Career Clients" teleseminar, "Resume Writer's Guide to Article Marketing" special report, "Resume Writer's Guide to Profiting From Speaking: How to Use Teleseminars, Webinars, Workshops and Seminars To Attract New Clients and Generate Revenue" special report, and "Capture Clients With Content: Use Information to Attract Resume Clients" special report), one of the most powerful tools we have as resume writers is the knowledge we possess about the job search process and how to help jobseekers be more successful in their job search efforts.

But what if you don't want to generate original content? What if you want to instead focus on sharing best practices and targeted information? Then content curation might be exactly what you should focus on.

Content curation means pulling together content from various sources and presenting it to the reader in your own unique way. It may be easier to understand content curation by defining what it is not. Content curation doesn't mean presenting a list of stories or a weekly roundup of links. It's definitely not a simple cut-and-paste job where you just point to content that's out there.

Instead, the idea is to take the information available and make sense of it for your readers. It starts with carefully sifting through all that's out there and selecting the best items that would interest your readers. You then put this content together into an easy-to-digest format that tells a story, making it relevant, valuable and memorable.

Why Curate Content?
The content is already out there for your readers to enjoy, so why put it together for them? This is the key to good content curation — it's not just a pile of information. We're inundated by a deluge of information every minute of every day. The Internet is wonderful because of this, but it also can be overwhelming. Everyone has to sift through all that's out there to find what they're truly interested in reading. A good content curator does this for you, and builds a following of loyal readers as a result.

How Content Curation Helps You
Like the content you write yourself, the content you curate can help you establish authority and create a connection with your readers.

Think of it from the reader's point of view. Your blog or website is a source of the exact information they want on a regular basis. It saves them from having to do their own sifting online. Over time, they come to see you as a go-to source for their information. They see you as a knowledgeable expert in the career services field.

If your content is relevant and helpful to your readers, they'll keep coming back for more. It doesn't matter to them whether you're the actual content creator or not.

Curating content should be taken just as seriously as creating your own content from scratch, but one of the advantages of this approach is that it is easier and more cost effective than writing your own content or hiring a writer. It's just a matter of understanding your readers well and choosing the right content.

Check out: Best Practices for Content Curation

Create an Email Marketing Course to Promote Your Resume Writing Business

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Even with the popularity of social media, email marketing remains one of the best ways to connect with prospective resume clients. The key is getting them to provide you with their email address. One way to capture email addresses of prospects is to enroll them in an email course! How do you get them to sign up for the email course? Help them solve a job search-related problem!

An email course combines email marketing with information marketing. Use an autoresponder like AWeber to set up the enrollment process (AWeber will automatically generate the code to copy-and-paste onto your website or blog to capture email addresses and it will also handle the fulfillment of the delivery of the emails to those who sign up.)

Probably the most intimidating part of this process is coming up with the content for the email course. But actually, that's not as difficult as it seems either! You can either re-purpose information you already share with your clients -- or use Pass-Along Materials.

(You can take almost any of the Pass-Along Materials and divide it into lessons. Each message can be anywhere from 150 to 1,000 words. Make sure each email message builds upon the last one while also offering a benefit. Be sure to include a call to action. For example, you may direct readers to visit your blog for more information on the topic, or you might send them to a sales page on your website where they can learn more about your services related to that topic.)

Your email course needs to scream BENEFIT to your readers. It's not as difficult as it might sound. One way to easily demonstrate the benefit is to position it in the title of the course. For example,"Five Ways to Make More Money in This Job -- Or Your Next Job" can walk them through the principles of salary negotiation.

Think about how you can provide the most value to prospective resume clients and then craft a course that solves a problem for them. Make sure the title of the course makes the benefit apparent. (One recommendation: Don't teach subscribers how to write more effective resumes or cover letters -- these types of courses are not as effective in converting prospects into clients as email courses focusing on topics that are related to other areas of the job search -- LinkedIn, salary negotiation, online reputation management, etc.)

When formatting your email course, each lesson should follow an easy-to-use format. This system ensures your readers know what to expect. It also makes it easier for you to create valuable content with less effort. Here's a template you can use or re-work to fit your needs:

• Address your reader by name and start the lesson with a short sentence that identifies the topic of the lesson. 
• Write the content of your lesson. Use bullet points, steps, or numbers to help make it easy to read.
• End the lesson with a look ahead to the next lesson. This helps motivate your reader to look forward to your emails. 
• Include a signature and a P.S. that includes a call to action. 
• Start the next lesson by briefly reviewing what they learned in the previous lesson and introducing the current lesson. 

If you currently have an email marketing system in place, consider updating it with a course. You can use it to drive traffic, build a larger list, sell more products or services, and strengthen your relationships with prospective — and even current — clients.

How to Use On-Page Search Engine Optimization To Get More Traffic To Your Resume Business Website

One of the most frequently asked questions I get from resume writers is, "How do I get more prospects to visit my resume business website?" (This is also known as "website traffic.")

An important part of the overall search engine optimization process is what is known as "on-page search engine optimization." Basically, this is just making sure that you're labeling your website content in a way that the search engines will find useful so that they can direct folks who are looking for what you provide (interview-winning resumes!) to your site.

Having your on-page SEO done well isn’t necessarily going to help you achieve the #1 position for the type of searches your prospective resume clients are making. However, if you don’t have your pages well optimized, chances are you won’t rank at all.

Taking some time to label your pages and content properly is an all-important prerequisite to getting your website ranked on the front page of your preferred search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.). If you don’t have your on page SEO done properly, chances are you won’t be found on the first, or even second or third pages of the search.

The primary reason you want to do on-page SEO is so that Google can accurately tell what your page is about. A poorly optimized page will seem like it’s about "everything." A well optimized page, on the other hand, will tell Google exactly what the page is about, so Google can give you strong rankings for your chosen keyword(s).

Here’s how to optimize your resume business website page for search engines. For the purposes of demonstration, we’ll be using the “All in One SEO” plugin for WordPress for a number of these steps.

Step 1: The Title Tag
The title tag is the most important tag in all of your SEO efforts. It’s what Google places the most weight on when they’re trying to determine what your site is about.

Your title should have as much of your keyword towards the front of the tag as possible.

Different pages on your site should have different title tags. Do not have the same title tag throughout your entire website. If you do, you waste each individual page’s potential to rank for unique keywords.

For example, below is a setup for how your WordPress pages and posts might look like. You can configure your system to by default put post’s title first, then the blog’s name second, rather than the other way around.




Step 2: Meta Description
Your meta description tag doesn’t actually help you rank higher. Instead, what it does is tell Google what to display beneath your search listing. This can help you get a lot more clicks from Google by writing the “right thing” to hook your audience in. 

Each page on your site can have a different meta description. You definitely want to write the meta description for your home page and the popular pages on your site yourself. For the pages on your site that aren’t too popular, Google will just take an excerpt from your website and use that as your meta description. 

Step 3: Meta Keywords
Your meta keywords tags tell Google what keywords you think your site is relevant for. It doesn’t bear much weight as far as helping you rank goes, but it can really help Google figure out what your site is about. It takes just a minute to do them and is good SEO practice in general.


 

(Yes, you definitely can come up with a better description for your site -- and be sure to include your keywords!)

Step 4: URL Structure
Generally, you want your URL to contain your keywords as much as possible. You never want to use just your post ID or the date as your URL. You should also avoid cryptic URLs that contain data that no human being can read.

If you want to use just your post title as your URL for example, this is how you’d do it in the WordPress “Permalinks” settings.



Step 5: Image Alt Tags
Optimizing your alt tags plays a much larger part on SEO than a lot of people think. It won’t single-handedly help you improve your search engine ranking, but it is an important factor for your on-page SEO.

Give the images on your site good alt tags. Make sure the filenames are meaningful and make sure that your alt tags are descriptive. If you have purely navigational images on your site, such as white space or button backgrounds, name them numbers (111.jpg) rather than a text-based keyword.

In WordPress, you can change the alt tag of images by going to that image’s preferences.

Step 6: Noindex Non-Content Pages
You should "noindex" your non-content pages. Your affiliate pages, your category pages, your archives, and so on should all be "noindexed." This is particularly true if those pages contain duplicate content. On most blogs, category and archive pages are mostly duplicate content, so you definitely want to noindex those pages.

Step 7: Internal Linking
Internal linking is one of the most crucial factors you can do to improve your SEO.

Make sure you have links going from all your content pages to other pages on your site. Embed these links within your actual content, or within links on the site or bottom of the article.

Things like “You May Like” boxes or “Related Posts” boxes are all good choices.

Step 8: Have a Robots.txt
A robots.txt file just tells search engines where to go and where not to go. This is a good way to disallow search engine spiders from going where they’re not supposed to.

This can help you keep the areas you don’t want from ranking out of the search engines. For example, you probably don’t want the paid areas of your site (like a members-only section) indexed and shown in the Google search engines.

Step 9: Low Ad-to-Content Ratio
One factor that’s become more prominent since the Google Panda and Panda 2.0 updates is the ad-to-content ratio on your website. As the name suggests, the idea is to avoid stuffing your site with ads.

Google knows that great websites tend to only have a few ads on their pages. On the other hand, people who focus too much on milking their visitors for as much cash as possible tend to produce lower quality content.

So, therefore, pages with more ads tend to rank lower. Of course, you do need to make money – just limit your ads to one or two per page, rather than including ads all over the place. 

Step 10: Regular, Fresh, High Quality Content
Finally, it all comes down to content and content quality. Google is looking to promote websites with high quality content.

Produce fresh content as often as possible. The more fresh content you have, the higher your chances of ranking. Blogging is a great way to add new content -- but also consider articles, videos, and audio links as ways to share content. (Check out "Using Content to Capture New Career Clients" for more on this topic.)

These are the most important on page factors to pay attention to in search engine optimization. Get your on page optimization right before you try and topple your competition.

If you found this information helpful, check out "Website Traffic Secrets for Resume Writers."

Or this post by Vayu Media.