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5 Ways to Present Curated Content to Your Readers

There are two steps in the procedure of content curation. The first is to find outstanding content that your readers will love. You can do that through feeds, alerts and other tools. The second step is to present the content. There are numerous and different places where you can share content with your readers.

1. Your Blog

Curating content on your blog can expand the range of your followers, it can also add SEO power, and helps you keep posting fresh content when you’re low on ideas. When you’ve been writing and posting articles to your blog for a while, it’s easy to run out of fresh and new ideas. Curating content for your blog helps you create original posts that your followers are interested in. The one great advantage is that you don’t have to be an expert on any niche related topic to find articles related to that topic and comment on them.

2. Facebook Fan Pages

Facebook Fan Pages offer an even more “social” place to share your curated content. Create Fan Pages that highlight sub-topics within your niche. You can even create separate pages for each specific topic. Find content to share via Facebook and post it directly to your page, or share content from other sources. Articles, blogs, videos, and images all work well.

Make sure that you use your pages as a means of engaging with your audience and not just publishing. Don’t run them on autopilot. When there are comments, questions or other activity on the page, respond and engage with your audience.

3. Infographics

Infographics are really nothing more than curated content presented in a graphic form. You take content from various sources and create a graphic that presents this content to your readers so that they can take it in at a glance. Infographics are especially good for taking complex ideas and breaking them down into a more easily digestible form.

Online tools and templates are available that help you make creating Infographics easier. Once you create the overall design, it’s only a matter of plugging in the content and then tweaking to make it more visually appealing.

Also, a great thing with infographics is that you can give them away to your followers and allow them to re-use them or even add their own name to them.

4. Email Newsletters

Curated content offers a great way to keep your email subscribers informed and entertained. It takes much more than promotional offers to keep them tuned in. When you send your subscribers a steady stream of fresh content that answers a problem they may have, updates them on a new procedure or is just interesting to them, you stay on their radar and by doing this can establish your reputation as a valuable information source or the go to guy for their own problems.

One of the best ways to choose the right topics for your emails is to come right out and ask your list what kind of content they’d like to receive from you. Your subscribers will also give you feedback in the form of analytics. Watch open rates to find out which content is most interesting to them.

5. Social Curating Sites

Sites like List.ly and Pinterest are social media networks designed for curating content. These are wonderful because they allow you to find and publish content in one place, as well as interact with other users. Look for sites that are loaded with features that help you customize your content curation.

No matter where you publish, always remember to add something of your own to the curated content. Just sharing a link on Twitter isn’t content curation; neither is copying and pasting sections of someone else’s article to your blog, even if you give them attribution. Try using your curated content as the basis for explaining your opinions, giving insights on a new topic, or exploring the opinions of others.

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Speeches and Presentations – Guidelines on How to Say it Best

Everyone can find the right words – all it takes is practice and some guidelines to help you structure an effective presentation.

Firstly, and most importantly, start with the end in mind. Set aside enough time to determine your purpose and intention in preparing and presenting your speech. Your purpose may be to entertain, to educate, to inform, to persuade or even a combination of the fore mentioned. A clearly defined purpose is a blueprint or a template that structures a meaningful and focused speech.

Your second step to finding the right words will be to brainstorm the topic by spontaneously writing down your keyword ideas.

The third step is the planning phase. People tend to rush through this important phase, but it is time well spent. Plan your speech here. You may wish to use a mind-map, a flow chart or even a horizontal plot-line to help structure your thoughts. Concentrate on the introduction, the development of the body of your speech and finally the conclusion.

These three phases can be likened to a sausage dog. Picture a sausage dog in your mind.

The head is your introduction. It should introduce your topic, capture your audience’s attention and lead the audience into the purpose of the presentation. Remember, that the sausage dog’s head is relatively small in comparison the rest of its body – so short, pertinent and gripping work well here.

The introduction is followed by the body of your address. A visual reminder is the long body of the sausage dog. This section of your speech should consist of four or five paragraphs that individually develop a different aspect of your speech, but at the same time are all linked to a common purpose – pretty much like the body of our dog.

Finally, the tail – possibly with a twist or a loop? The conclusion should sum up your speech. It may tie up loose ends, finalize an argument or highlight the end of your speech. Either way, your audience should clearly see that this is the end of your speech, just like the tail is the end of our dog!

It is only now that the planning phase is over, that you will choose your words to achieve your initial aim and the purpose of writing your speech.

This is the easy part. There are so many resources out there to help you to find the right words to say it best. The Internet, book stores, friends, magazines and libraries are all invaluable resources at your disposal. Finding the resources is relatively easy, but it is very important that you personalize the content.

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Let Go of the Past to Succeed in the Present and Future

What is keeping you from reaching your goals? If you have the “know how” and the “want to” it could be your past that is holding you back.

Many people spend a life time worrying about the future, especially if you have reached adulthood or middle age. In other words, with each new idea or each new goal, you become stymied by the WITCH hunt. The WITCH hunt pertains to those of us who are always asking, “What If This Could Happen?” Those of us who hunt WITCHES can become paralyzed by fear of the unknown.

However, too many of us prefer to use excuses from our past to keep us from success. Some of us had less than an idyllic childhood. We may have been criticized unduly by parents who expected more than we could — or would— deliver. Some of us may be products of a totally dysfunctional family. We blame them for our present day failures. In other words we use our bags full of guilt and blame from the past to prevent us from moving forward.

It is time to lose the luggage if you are going to succeed. It is imperative that we live in the present if we are going to accomplish our goals. We cannot foresee the future. All the worrying about the WITCHes lurking ahead of us is a waste of time. In fact, there may be no real WITCHes out there.

Or, we are carrying baggage from our past that is too heavy. We certainly do not need all that baggage. But, the secret of the baggage is that it allows us to see ourselves as victims. It allows us to make excuses for our failures. However, we must all remember that excuses only satisfy those who make them.

Once we realize that even with the advent of quantum physics we cannot travel back in time to repack our bags or change our histories, we can let go of the excess baggage. The events filling our bags is over. It has been done. No matter how hard we try or what we do, we cannot undo what happened when we were children, or what happened ten years ago, or last week, or even one minute ago. We only have now.

Deciding to loose the luggage is the only way to get out from under the burdens of the past and free ourselves to move successfully into the future. Success starts now.

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