JASON DROHNCreating Lead Magnets with Curately
Another way to create a lead magnet is by using one of our software tools,
Curately. You've probably heard of content curation, which is the practice of
gathering content from around the web and presenting bits of it to your audience
with proper attribution and links back to the original source.
That last part is important. It's the difference between the routine, legitimate
practice of content curation and copyright infringement. You can't just to to
another site, copy entire posts or articles, and slap it on your site.
You can do curation manually. A common way of doing this is to find a really
good article or post on another site, write a summary of it in a couple of
sentences, then put that summary on your site with a link to the original. This is
a win/win/win scenario. It's a win for the original site because it gets a link from
you and the social proof of you citing it as a good source of content. It's a win
for your readers because they find good content that they probably haven't seen
before. And it's a win for you, because you get good content on your site without
creating the whole piece, you look good (and selfless) to your readers for
sharing it with them, and you look good to the original site by citing them.
What Curately does is dramatically speed up this process. It lets you easily
search for content you might want to curate, pick the items you want to use, and
generate a post from them on your blog that you can then make final edits to.
Curately is NOT a “scraper” or automated blogging tool. There has been a lot of
software that just went out and copied a bunch of content from around the web,
just to create a bunch of pages on a site, usually so the new site owner could slap
ads on those pages. This was not about quality or serving the readers. It was
about trying to make a fast buck, and there was usually no filtering or quality
check to find great content, just to grab a lot of content to fill a bunch of pages.
That's not curation- it's copying, and it can get you in lots of trouble. The owners
of the sites you copy from can come after you, you can look bad to your readers
for having a bunch of content that may not be the best, and you can possibly lose
your advertising accounts by putting ads on what the company decides are low-
quality sites.
Curately does almost the exact opposite of what those content copying programs
do. It assists you in finding good content and in putting together snippets of it,
but it also allows you the final decision of which pieces of content to curate and
how to arrange them. It does what you would do manually, but much faster. It
takes most of the grunt work out of curation, but there is some thought required
on your part. :) It's not for the lazy, fast-buck artists who don't care about what
ends up on their sites.
Besides building curated posts for you, Curately can also create PDFs, which