Today we’re going to talk about the three Cs of content: curation, content location, and creation. Content is king, and content is always going to be king. If you have excellent content people will always come back to check out what you’re doing. Sadly, the most common mistake I see is burying people with sales information and you lose your audience. You have to bring value, and part of the value is having content. Infuse content into your marketing plan. 

The easiest way to get content going for yourself is to have a plan so you know what you’re looking for. That’s curation. I like a two-week plan because it’s so much easier and not so repetitive. People have a tendency to forget what they don’t see in about 7 days and you can repeat content about every 90 days, unless it’s seasonal stuff like Halloween. So to me curation includes a suggestion for yourself, Monday through Saturday, on exactly what you want to create. How-to posts, problems your customers are having that you can help solve, tips and tricks — these are just some ideas of where you can create content. Testimonials are also great. Just make a list of about 10 to 12 things and rotate those topics so that you’re not talking about the same thing everyday. And, of course, if something urgent comes up and you want to share that, do that. So, make sure you have curation first.

The second thing is content location. Ok, that’s not really a “C” it’s more of an “L,” but 3 “Cs” sounds so much better! Anyway, location. Where are you going to find the information? Well, everybody can Google, that’s kind of boring and you don’t want to repeat information that other people have. So I’m going to tell you to go to other social media sites for your resources. Why? Well, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and most people don’t utilize it like they could be. Or Pinterest. Pinterest is one of my best resources for content. So if you know you have commonly asked customer questions and you want to find the answers might be you’re going to get a completely different result if you search on Google versus searching on Pinterest or YouTube. 

You’ll also get something totally different if you search it on Twitter. The Twitter search tool is amazing. Twitter listens to everything and it pulls information from everywhere. It’s one of the best resources if you’re searching for content. I highly recommend the other social media platforms, you’re going to get content that you won’t find anywhere else. 

Number three is creation. Once you’ve found the information, you can share the article and that’s OK. But it’s even better if you brand it and make it your own. You might have an article on the top 10 disasters related to your business, but you might not agree with them. You can pick three or four of them and make your own graphic, make your own post, brand it with your colors and put your logo on it — you want to create it so it’s just for you. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like articles, and I love video. But you always want to have your personality and your brand in there. So if you find an awesome quote or piece of inspiration, brand it! Then when people share it it’s got your information on there.

So those are the three Cs: curation, content location, and creation. Now that you know what you’re going to post, where to find it, and how to make it your own, what’s a good tool to use? There’s an app called Pocket that allows you to capture content from everywhere. You can save articles, videos, stories from any publication, any page, any app, and you can curate your own content file. It also allows you to tag, which is very cool. If you have more than one category and you don’t want to go through 100 different articles you can create a tag for each category. Pocket — it’s a great tool!