Eric Nagel

Digital Curation with Scott Jangro

I have been, or can be if you click on a link and make a purchase, compensated via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value for writing this post. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

Curation was a hot keyword in 2011, and it’s going strong into 2012. Scott Jangro, creator of Shareist, held a session at Affiliate Summit West on Digital Curation, which answered some of my questions about what curation is, and why I (as an affiliate) should care.

Digital Curation with Scott Jangro

The beginning of Scott’s presentation reaffirmed that affiliates should build sites with their future audience in mind. He then went on to discuss the (brief) history of curation, from a museum curator to Curation Nation to Scobleizer’s The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators to today’s digital curation tools.

Here are my notes:

  • Quora released a curation model in December
  • Why is curation important / necessary / critical?
    • Internet is growing quickly / exponentially
  • Information discovery
    • Random
      • StumbleUpon
      • Twitter
      • Facebook
    • Specific question / search
      • Google
    • Curation is in the middle
  • Aggregation is not Curation
    • It’s tempting to automate
      • Danger – it should be filtered
  • How to get started with curation
    • Choose a topic
    • Create a profile of your ideal fan / customer / user
    • Discover great content and organize it
      • Use the tools mentioned (see photo)
      • Twitter / Google / Youtube / etc keyword searches
      • RSS feeds
    • Publish and Distribute
      • Biggest mistake affiliates make when publishing is affiliates try to get users to leave quickly & get the cookie set. Make that visitor yours.
        • You’re borrowing Google’s customers
        • Great & easy when the traffic is coming. What happens when the traffic dries up?
        • Pay yourself first.
          • Fan
          • Newsletter
    • Publish to a platform that you own
      • Not ezinearticles, wordpress.com, pintrest
        • Great for marketing, but make these drive traffic to you
  • Engage with your audience
  • Curation is a tool and a mindset
  • What audience can you build?
    • What problems are you solving?
    • For whom?
    • NOT: What website can you build?
  • Using curation as an SEO strategy
    • It adds value to your site