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Content Curation in an Age of Fake News, with Dave Pell

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It’s been almost two years since I started Further, my curated email newsletter about personal growth. And there’s no mistaking that the project was inspired by Dave Pell’s NextDraft.

Content curation is all about becoming a trusted editorial source that finds the best information within a certain topic from amongst the valueless clickbait and mediocre dross that overruns the web. Pell’s NextDraft takes on the daunting task of delivering “the day’s most fascinating news,” plus commentary that’s often better than the links themselves.
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Do You Have What It Takes to Publish a Curated Email Newsletter? [Infographic]

Curated email newsletter, decision tree

Let’s start with the basics. What is a curated email newsletter?

Think Dave Pell’s Next Draft. Quartz’s Daily Brief. Peter Cooper’s Cooper Press. Brian Clark’s Further. Brian Gardner’s No Sidebar. Pamela Wilson’s Weekend Digest. Ryan Hanley’s The Sunday Seven. Jason Hirschhorn’s MediaREDEF.

What do all of these email newsletters have in common? They all sift through a mountain of information on a specific topic (like news, health, HTML, entertainment, lifestyle, content marketing) and pluck out the best content.

This is what it means to curate.

They then package that curated content into an email, add a little commentary about each link, and deliver it to your email inbox.

Some do it daily. Others do it weekly.
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How an Email Newsletter Publisher Built an Audience of 223,991 Subscribers

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Brian and I have been talking about his new curation-based email newsletter lately, and I thought it’d be interesting to have a similar conversation with someone in a completely different topical market.

It’s about one person writing and curating a topic he knows and cares about, building a massive email audience over a period of four years, then turning all that work into a sustainable business.

And hang in there, even if you have no interest in (or understanding of) programming, Javascript, Ruby, or HTML5, you’ll be able to apply the lessons of this episode to your own business …

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5 Traffic Strategies That Build Your Curation Audience

Note: This is the third of three core lessons related to content curation based on a case study of my new email newsletter Further. You can listen to the initial two episodes here:

Now we tackle the eternal question: how do you get traffic to your curation site so you can build an email list? Should we start building a war chest for advertising?

Not yet. First we’re going to apply some creativity and sweat into driving traffic. Some of these methods are tried and true, but need to be executed a certain way for a curation project. Others are seemingly a little “outside the box,” and yet they complement a curated email newsletter perfectly.

In this 22-minute episode Robert Bruce and I discuss:

  • What makes curated content shareable and linkable
  • The best audience building strategy on the planet
  • How to borrow (and delight) a massive audience
  • How to get others to share your curated content
  • Why infographics are pure media curation
  • How to take advantage of visual microcontent
  • The true value of iTunes for audience building
  • The podcast interview as valuable curation content
  • The viral catalyst the exploded Copyblogger in the early days

Click Here to Listen to Rainmaker.FM Episode No. 26

Or, grab it in iTunes.

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Rainmaker.FM Behind the Scenes: 2014 in Review and the Road Ahead

2014 was a pivotal year for Copyblogger Media. We:

  • Launched a Pilot program for our Rainmaker Platform using a podcast
  • Evolved the platform to version 2.0 during the Pilot phase
  • Arrived at the 8-figure level for annual revenue, up 34%

For an added twist, we tried things, observed, learned, and made changes on the fly throughout the year – from content, to format, to development. Which, let’s be frank, may have made us look like we didn’t know what we were doing.

Welcome to the real world. When you play in real time with a real audience, you figure out everything you need to know. But you can’t be afraid to adapt based on what they tell you just because it differs from “the plan.”

In this 32-minute episode Robert Bruce and I discuss:

  • Why 2014 was such a strange year around here
  • The big project we’re working on for 2015
  • The biggest Rainmaker.FM episode of 2014
  • I (finally) reveal my new curation project
  • The future of the Rainmaker Platform
  • The content trend you need to focus on in 2015

Listen to Rainmaker.FM Episode No. 23

Image by Bjorn Simon

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How to Use Content Curation to Create a Recurring Revenue Business

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It’s no secret that I’m a tireless advocate for the creation of original content to fuel business growth. My next online project, however, is based on … curation.

You read that right. I’m starting a new site, and the centerpiece of my content strategy will be locating and making sense of the smartest articles, audio, and video I can find in that topical market that are created by others.

Sound strange?

Listen in and check out the three-part process I’m following, so you can start building your own profitable content curation strategy:

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