Toby is the CEO of Kapost , the leading provider of content marketing software. This post is an excerpt from the eBook, “How to Build and Operate a Content Marketing Machine,” to be co-published by Marketo and Kapost later this month. To get an advanced copy and learn more about content marketing practices, sign up for today’s webinar of the same name co-hosted by Toby and Marketo’s Jason Miller on October 16th. As many digital marketers now enter into Content Marketing , they are publishing all sorts of content: blog posts, eBooks, videos, infographics, and so forth. MORE >>

Marketers view content curation as a social as well as a content initiative. Reason 2: Because curated sites draw search engine traffic, they aid SEO strategies. True, the search traffic often goes to the microsite used to feature the curated content (which of course also includes your company’s best work). Building that kind of reputation means going beyond publishing top-notch content from third parties. Content curation can make you tremendously more productive as you interact on the web. Industry influencers want to publish articles. MORE >>

In previous blogs, I’ve explored the importance of content generation for attracting site visitors and encouraging repeat visits (see Keep your content rich, engaging, and fresh to help SEO and ensure repeat visits ). Today, I’d like to talk a bit about content creation’s cousin, curation. Content curation has become, arguably, one of the most popular activities on the social web. Assuming I post, share and maintain content relevant to my topic on a daily basis, My “Scoop.It Here are some of the ways that Scoop.it Scoop.it MORE >>

The top priority for the entire group is to deliver highly relevant emails – it ranks above even driving website traffic and revenue. This makes sense, considering highly relevant email will achieve the other two goals. But, I wonder how easily they can create highly relevant emails when only 15% reported they have dedicated resources to produce content for each stage of the buying process, as you can see in the below chart. They, too, wanted to send emails that were relevant and didn’t know where to begin. What is the pain they’re trying to ease? MORE >>

On the surface, content curation sounds like a great way to generate content with little to no time or effort. After all, you don’t actually have to write much new content, just find interesting items on the Web and point others to them, becoming a hub for all that’s relevant to your field. However, doing content curation well means a lot more than just plastering your site with a bunch of synopses and links. Doing content curation right takes a lot of time and requires almost as much investment as creating original content. Don’t Automate. MORE >>