Do you want a successful, well-read, highly valued email newsletter but you don’t have the resources or knowledge to do a ton of writing each week? Consider curation as an avenue to building a great newsletter. Content curation is the art of finding great stuff online and sharing it with your community. In order to be successful at this practice, you need to fulfill two pre-requisites:
1. A deep understanding of your community and what they want. Ask your subscribers what they want to learn more about. Ask them what’s most important to them. Ask them what they wished they knew. Put all of these responses together and you’ve got a lens with which to focus your curation efforts.
2. A broad set of high-quality sources from which to draw. There is no shortage of content online. There isn’t even a shortage of truly great content, truly great authors, truly insightful material. What there is a shortage of is time to sift through it all and find the diamonds in the mud. A lot of what’s published online is mediocre at best, absolute swill at worst. To be a great curator, you will need to invest time daily in finding the best of the best.
Let’s look at how you might set up a curation-based newsletter with the four S’s of content curation: Sift, Store, Send, and Share.
Sift
First, gather your sources and read them religiously. Applications like Google Reader, River of News, Reeder, Flipboard, Zite, Google Currents, and many others are excellent for pulling together the raw sources of information in one spot so you can sift through them all. How do you find those sources? Google for them. Ask your readers what they read. Ask your colleagues in your industry what they read as well. Subscribe to industry newsletters and discussion lists.
Aim for at least 100 sources, so that on any given day, there’s always something for you to read, investigate, and think about.
Store
You’ll want to sign up for a free curation service like Instapaper, Read It Later, Evernote, or the many other ways to store raw content.
Any of these services is excellent for pulling together items of note. As you read and sift, store items, ideally in categories or folders so that you can go back and find things easily later.
Send
When it comes time to pull together your weekly newsletter, open up your vault of stored items and choose just a handful of them. It isn’t necessary, practical, or good to publish everything you find. Be selective! What are the things that are most aligned with your understanding of your community? Here are a few examples:
- Jason Keath’s Social Fresh Newsletter, which highlights just 7 articles during the week.
- Jay Baer has a newsletter called One Social Thing, a daily email which features just one article.
- I publish a personal newsletter that features 25 things (5 per workday) organized by category.
Disclosure, both Jason and I are WhatCounts clients.
Put together your newsletter with your commentary about why the items you picked are important to you and might be important to your readers, and then publish it to them.
Share
Just because you hit the send button doesn’t mean you’re done. Be sure to share your newsletter with your other online communities, like your Facebook Page or your Twitter followers. If you’ve shared or mentioned prominent figures in your industry in your newsletter, drop them a note or call them out (positively) on your social outlets, ideally encouraging them to share your content as well.
Summary
Content curation works incredibly well for keeping readers engaged and happy as long as the content you’re sharing is of excellent quality. Follow this basic outline to add more value to your existing email newsletters or jump start a brand new publication.
Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts
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