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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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Bar Graphs and Presentations

Let’s make business reporting simple again. In the age of information, many of us are experiencing information overload. There is such a thing as gathering and presenting too much data, and the business world struggles to present information in a rich, powerful, and stimulating manner without crossing the information overload threshold. Remember when you were young and just conquering the skill of reading. Sure reading was fun, and our minds processed a lot of information from the words that we read, but didn’t the illustrations in the books have a more lasting affect? The old saying reminds us a picture is worth a thousands words. We can use words to describe a situation, but a picture really encapsulates the ideas we are trying to get across.

We can apply this lesson to the business world. When presenting information to a conference room full of business professionals we are eager to first obtain, and then retain their attention. This can be achieved through pictures. Now, I am not suggesting that you take your doodling and add it to your presentation, but what I am suggesting is that you make better use of custom charts such as bar graphs and bar charts in your presentation.

Bar charts and bar graphs can offer a simple, but meaningful representation of the information you are trying to relay to your audience. Bar graphs can leave a more lasting impression in the minds of your audience members than a slide offering a comparison of quantified data. For instance, when you see a bar chart, what jumps out at you first? For most people the tallest bar is the bar that is noticed first. You might also notice the shortest bar rather quickly as it stands out as well. In all likelihood, as a presenter you are hoping the eyes of your audience members will gravitate to the extreme ends of the spectrum, either the tall bar or the short bar on the bar chart. Now that you have captured the audiences’ attention and directed it towards the information you wanted to discuss, you are free to continue with your presentation.

Or perhaps you want to use your bar graphs in another manner. Rather than emphasize really high sales or really low variable costs, you wish to show an increasing sales trend. In this scenario, your bar chart would represent your monthly sales across a certain time period. Upon presenting the bar chart, it would be clear to the audience that sales had increased substantially each month from January to August. Again, by using bar graphs you have painlessly grabbed the attention of the audience, directed it toward the topic you wanted to discuss and now you can make the points that are important to you.

When using bar graphs in your presentation, be sure to keep a few things in mind. Label the bar chart clearly so the audience doesn’t spend all its time trying to figure out what the bars represent. Make your bar charts vibrant – use strong colors to make bars of interest standout and soft subdued colors to make the other bars less conspicuous. Keep the information represented by the bar graphs as relevant as possible. Just because you have a beautiful bar chart doesn’t mean it should be used in your presentation. If you have created bar charts that will enhance your presentation then incorporate them into the presentation, otherwise leave them alone. Most importantly, be creative with your visualizations and have fun. Your audience will enjoy your presentation more and come away having learned everything you hoped they would.

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