Content Roles

Content Role and Purpose:

For me, I’m either creating content for promotion (getting shares/backlinks), or for quick rankings. It’s one of the two every time.

Primary

If it’s going to be for promotion, I’ll need to create it into a linkable asset and make sure that it’s longer and better than my competitors. These are the kinds of articles I’ll spend more time and money on to work with better writers.

Secondary

If it’s for quick rankings, I won’t really care as much. Quick Ranking, monetize article.

What do I mean by quick rankings? These are pages published to take advantage of domain authority. When I build up enough strong backlinks, I can start ranking for long-tail keywords automatically without needing to build any links directly to that page. They’ll just index on page two or three and slowly climb into the top 5 in a few weeks. Sometimes, they’ll even index straight to the first page.

Filler Content

Curated Content

Any article that is in list-form for starters could be curated. But they don’t have to a list. It could be a text-heavy piece of content that’s a combination of other sources and your editorial contribution.

Pros:

Great results: If you put the time in and do your research, you can create something far better with curation than without.

Social media traction: If image-rich, you can get some great traction on social media, especially Pinterest and Instagram. In fact, if you have multiple images, you can create multiple social media posts from one curated article.

Organic search: Yes, well curated content can perform well in search and rank for intended keywords. Google doesn’t care if you embed Instagram photos or YouTubes; arguably Google likes it as long as there’s more to the content than just an embedded image or video.

Fun to create: Most people browse social media for fun. You, as a curator, get to browse social media as your job. That means your job is fun. It really is. I enjoy hunting around social media and image sites for the perfect image, meme, tweet or whatever I need to make my content awesome.

Can be outsourced: Since it’s research-intensive, you can outsource it for fairly low cost. Ask your hired VA to collect everything and you vet it.

People like it: Most people don’t care if something is curated unless you typically publish thought-provoking work and that’s what they expect. In most cases, people just want the content to be awesome. For example, I read Businessinsider.com regularly. That site curates plenty (as well as syndicates content). I don’t care as long as I’m interested in the content.

Cons

• It’s a lot of work: Do not think that curating is a fast way to create content. It’s not. It’s a ton of work.
• Must be careful with attribution: You definitely want to track your sources and provide proper attribution. I’ve done enough curation to realize that you need to be organized from the start to ensure that you know which site or URL to source for every snippet, image, etc. you end up using. FYI, you don’t need to provide any link attribution if you embed content such as YouTube video or Instagram photo.