I am an evangelist frequently preaching the importance of adding fresh content to your website. This is referred to as Content Marketing and one of your main vehicles for this type of marketing is your blog. Each time you write a blog post, it is a lottery ticket that might come up in a Google search on that topic. I have some posts on my site that get 100 visits a day and have been getting this number of hits for four years! In addition, and more importantly to making your site a search engine magnet, fresh content gives people a reason to come to your website. It shows that you are an active player in your niche, and that you care about educating and engaging with others.
For the most part, I work with small and medium sized businesses and there are three main reasons people give for not blogging:
I don’t have time.
I don’t know what to write about.
I am not an expert in some of the things that our readers would be interested in.
Today, I am going to share one of my secret content marketing weapons with you so you can start getting more traffic, more engagement and build Know, Like and Trust, which will bring you new subscribers and down the road some new business.
Scoop.it is my secret weapon for keeping up with new information on the topics I am interested in. With a free account you can select up to three “topics” and get updates with Scoops (articles in those topic areas). You can also add new “scoops” from the articles you find and recommend in those topic areas.
Your scoops can come from a variety of sources. They might by be posts that other Scoop.it members have found. You can add a Scoop.it icon to your browser so when you find articles that you think would be of interest to people following your topics you can Scoop them with a click of the button which will add them to your Scoop.it account. After setting up your topic areas you can add sources you know of for posts on the topics but just by putting in some keywords, Scoop.it will find and send you relevant articles that you might Scoop. You can also Scoop your own blog posts and they will get sent out to others.
Best practices are to add your own commentary to a story when you Scoop it. You can set up links to your social media sites and send your Scoops to your various social media accounts. So I don’t deluge my feed with too many updates at once I use Buffer App, another app that lets me schedule my social media updates. Although I have never used this feature, Scoop.it can send your Scoops directly to your MailChimp account for a newsletter you can out to your list. It will send your Scoops out to a Tumbler or WordPress.com blog, but it won’t automatically send updates to your self-hosted WordPress site.
Give it a try and let me know what you think. Will it work for you?
by Judi Knight