If you are working with your audience and are creating consistently valuable content that they appreciate, you are doing a great job to enhance your brand and the products or services that you are offering.
You can augment your own high-value content with a content sharing or curation approach that will see you positioning yourself as a subject-matter expert who is able to share the latest and most pertinent content with your audience – this supports your own position and extends the knowledge that you are offering from your own direct experience.
If you do take this route though, be warned that your audience will start to expect a consistent and continually great stream of content from you, so be ready with a system that will allow you to provide the latest news without it consuming all your time.
If you are going to do this, be focused and identify the types of content that will extend your readers’ knowledge, and choose key topics that will enhance your own offering.
Here are three tools that will make searching out that content simpler and more time-effective
- Rather than subscribing to individual news sites or blogs, subscribe to their RSS feed and organise your Google Reader to bring the latest news straight to you. That way you can scan for the most relevant items and keep your inbox free of multiple subscriptions. Find Google Reader here.
- While Google Reader collates and prioritises blogs and sites you have already identified as potential sources, there is another tool from Google which is easy to set up and which uses a keyword search to bring you targeted content straight to your inbox – Google Alerts will highlight the latest developments on a topic and mail you the most relevant links on a daily basis – this is great for tapping into articles from sites that you aren’t yet familiar with, and will throw up items that otherwise you, and your readers, might have easily missed.
- And finally, my favourite secret weapon of the moment, Buffer. Buffer is a super tool that allows you to schedule tweets at the times when your audience is most active; it has a free plan that allows up to 10 tweets to be scheduled, and upgrades if you are a more industrial user. But the best bit by far of Buffer is that it carries plugins for Chrome and Safari browsers that lets you tweet the web page you are reading straight into your twitter stream – just by pushing a button next to your browser address bar. So when you find the latest and greatest article that will thrill your readers, sharing it on Twitter is just a click away – courtesy of Buffer.
What tools are your timesavers and secret weapons? I would love to hear from you in the comments below.
