blog curation

Page 1 of 8 2012 © Those2Marketers.com Page 2 of 8 2012 © Those2Marketers.com Curation Mastermind ‘Quick Start’ By Paul Wilson & Rob Bradley

2012 © Those2Marketers.com Page 3 of 8 2012 © Those2Marketers.com

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COPYRIGHT This publication is protected by copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, review or criticism, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced or copied in any form, in any language, whether by graphic, visual, electronic, filming, audio recording, any method via the internet or any other means without the prior written permission of the author. DISCLAIMER None of the strategies here will work unless you actually do something about it and take action. Knowledge is useless without action. Only reading these pages and taking no action will have the same effect as not reading it at all. This manual is intended for education and informational purpose only and the author does not accept any responsibilities for any liabilities or damages, real or perceived, resulting from the use of the information. The information contained herein is the opinion and views of the author at the date of publication based on information gathered from many sources but mainly from personal experience. As technologies and conditions constantly change, the author reserves the right to alter and update his opinions based on the new conditions. While every attempt has been made to verify the information provided herein, the author and his affiliates do not assume any responsibility for errors, inaccuracies or omissions. Any slights to people or organisations are unintentional. All earnings described in this product and shown on our website are accurate to the best of our knowledge, and should not be considered "typical". Every person has different goals and expectations. This combined with vast differences in personality, discipline and other traits means that every person will reach a different outcome. No responsibility whatsoever is assumed by the author for any material contained herein. RIGHTS There are NO Resell rights for Curation Mastermind. There are NO Private Label rights for Curation Mastermind. You may NOT distribute this report in any way (paid or free). Page 4 of 8 2012 © Those2Marketers.com

QUICK START! We’ve put together this guide to help get you up and running as quickly as possible. This simply contains the key ‘set-up steps’ stripped down and in order. This does NOT replace the main guide. It’ll get you to Phase B where you’re ready to curate the conversation. It’s just a handy view of the big picture. Like a map, so you can see where you’re at in the process.

Paul Wilson & Rob Bradley

http://Those2Marketers.com Page 5 of 8 2012 © Those2Marketers.com

THE STEPS Phase A - The Setup Steps Step 1 - Picking Your Niche Firstly, pick your niche. For your first blog, I would recommend you pick something you are passionate about, although not a necessity. You don’t need to worry about competition from other sites here (this will actually help you!) If you're stuck for ideas then here are a few places you can browse:

http://www.magazines.com/ - that's a whole directory of niche information that people pay to receive!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hobbies - include a few lesser know favourites of Tea Tasting and String Figures.

http://www.about.com/#!/browse-categories/ - very nicely organised directory with sub directories.

http://ezinearticles.com/category-guidelines.html - that page is about a mile long with niche categories.

http://lists.nextmark.com/ - secret weapon. if there's a list on it you can bet there's people into it, which means there's' money to be made.

http://reviews.ebay.com/#AnchorBrowseGuidesByCategory - often overlooked resource.

http://www.43things.com/ - for a little 'out-of-the-box' thinking Page 6 of 8 2012 © Those2Marketers.com

Validating Your Niche

Spend a couple of hours researching your niche, check there is plenty of information, blogs, and forums from which you can use to curate content for your own site. The more content there is, the better you will be in the long term. I know it’s probably different to what you’re used to, but competition is a good thing here, really! Grab a bunch of popular keywords or phrases that you come across on other sites or forums. (Tip: These will be the ones with a ton of comments!) Further validate your niche with the info found on Alexa.com: Query Populatity, & QCI. Step 2 - Building Your Feeds - The 4 Steps Of The Curation Inbox Step 2 is to build your ‘kick-ass’ curation inbox. The beating heart of curation operation. i) Getting Your List Of Keywords Just use Google Keyword Tool to do your keyword research. Yes there are a whole bunch of other tools that will do this for you, but seriously, this is more than good enough for what we need here, and FREE! Your aim is to come out with a list of 2-500 highly related keywords to your niche. You need to make sure that “phrase” match is checked (“Broad” and “Exact” unchecked), and “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” is un-checked. ii) Getting Your List Of URLs

Get the top 20 most relevant URL’s in Google for each of the keywords you have gathered from the Google Keyword Tool. We use a tool called Scrapebox for this, but if you don’t want to invest any money, we can do this for you. Click here for more info: http://those2marketers.com/go/url-list-generator/ Page 7 of 8 2012 © Those2Marketers.com

iii) Finding The Best Of The Best Now what you should have is a BIG ass URL list of every relevant site there is on your subject. This is pure gold, although covered in a little dust at the moment. The next task is to pick out the nuggets and clean off the dust. You will need to take your spreadsheet with your URL list and manually visit each URL to check out the site. What you are looking for is high quality content relevant to your niche that is posted to regularly. You need to be ruthless in this process. It’s no good if most of the content is complete rubbish, or it only has one decent post in the last few months. If it’s not even been posted to for several months, then forget it! Just delete it from your list. iv) Getting The Feeds

You’ll be relieved to hear that this is the final process you need to go through in order to create your final ‘Curation Inbox’! You will then have access to virtually ALL relevant sites within your niche right at your fingertips. What you need to do here, is grab the RSS feed for each site in your newly trimmed relevant URL list. Now you need to grab the RSS feed for each of the relevant URL’s you have gathered. These will need to be added into a tool like Google Reeder, or Reeder for the Mac, iPad and iPhone. Step 3 - Building Your Site. This isn't a technical guide. Many of you will already know how to do all of this stuff so if that’s the case skip it.

1. In order to set up a website, you will need to pick a domain for it. We use NameCheap.com for this process as they are both cheap and reliable.

2. Once you have your domain, you will need somewhere to host your website. We use a few different providers ourselves, but if you’re just starting out, a service like HostGator is great, and they have packages starting from just $3.96/mo! Page 8 of 8 2012 © Those2Marketers.com

3. We recommend Wordpress as a platform to run your site. It is both free, reliable, and there are a huge amount of plugins and themes to customize your site in an almost infinite way. If you have not come across Wordpress before, we would recommend a product called The Wordpress Classroom which will give you everything you need to get your new site up and running in the quickest time possible. WordPress is also covered on the Getting Technical tutorial pages of T2M.

Plus here are 2 out-of-the-box themes that are ideal for curation sites. Genesis News Theme & WPZoom Tribune Theme

If you need logo or graphics creating check out the resources in Outsource Blitzkrieg. Here are some of our graphic favourites:

Oald Design - Nauman K - Agung Prabowo - d3sign3r -Logo Nerds Again, we're not saying these are 'must haves', just something to consider from our experience. That’s it! Now you have your site set up, you’re ready to start filling it with content.

You have access to you’re kick-ass niche curation inbox via Google Reeder. When you’re at this stage it’s the easy part!