There’s a new style of content marketing that is getting a lot of attention from top content marketing experts around the web.

You can’t throw a rock right now without hitting a blog post or article about curation!  People are giving curation a lot of lip service, but no one is really training on the topic.

What is curation?

It is the process of filtering information on a topic to come up with the best articles, videos, photos, or social discussions going on at a given time.

It is done by social marketers and content marketers.  Robert Scoble is primarily a social curator for example.

He shares tons of great things daily that he find among all the noise generated in the tech and startup markets.

People love him for it because they don’t have to do everything he does to stay on top of the market.  They just follow him and use him as a filter on the market whom they trust to bring the goods.

Mashable.com is an example of a “hub curator.” Hub curators are sites that watch the news and thought leaders in their niche and report on the best information they find.  This is the content marketer’s sweet spot.  We spend a ton of time creating (or having created) articles and blog posts from scratch.

Curation enables you to “riff” off of the news in your market and just give your two cents on a topic without writing 100% original content all the time.

It sounds like a fantastic dream come true.  But does it really work?

And how do we implement it in our markets?

My good friend Jack Humphrey is going to explain what curation is and how he developed an amazing software which helps him to create pages which rank really high in the search engines.

If you are interested in getting a lot of search traffic, loyal visitors, and direct traffic from social sites through content, then click here to learn more about Jack’s amazing software:

Content Curation Made Easy

You can actually download and test it for free!

Alan

As you know, I am active in many different niches ranging from animal websites, music composition and gardening (hey… I have loads of interests!).

Online video marketing is a relatively new area for me and I’ve tentatively started creating my own videos. Some are hosted on my YouTube channel and some are on my own Amazon S3 server.

I’m not going to pretend that they are fantastic works of art but they do give me a chance to create music soundtracks (and link back to my music website) AND link back to my niche site – a double whammy! I get to promote two websites with one video.

This kind of online marketing appeals to me and I’m going to be looking into creating more videos in the near future.

If you’re just starting out creating your own videos, here’s some interesting reading material to get those creative juices flowing:

Essential Video Marketing Secrets | Understanding Online Marketing

[Online Video Marketing] – Video Marketing Secrets – Part One. Essentially your “perfect video” is as long as it … Mandy Swift – Your Online & Video Marketing “Personal Trainer”. Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger. …

Google Plus Vs. Facebook – Online Video Marketing … – Sharethrough

Check out Carethrough, Sharethrough’s team of do-gooders.

Reasons For Using Online Video Marketing – - A1 Answers Articles

Reasons For Using Online Video Marketing. If you are not convinced that your internet business should be using online video then the incredibly revealing statistics from YouTube should be enough to convince you that this …

Online Video Marketing Strategy (Tip #362: Death By Details!)

A SOLID Online Video Marketing Strategy (www.JamesWedmore.com is essential before you make the PLUNGE into video?! Follow the simple steps outlined in this Youtube Video to show you exactly how to overcome the fears and details of Online Video Market…

Have YOU discovered a quick way to get your online video marketing off to a flying start? If you have, please leave a comment or get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear from you!

Alan

Related online video marketing articles

• Tips on how to get your Video seen by your customers (marketing.yell.com)
• How to create an engaging video for online video marketing (marketing.yell.com)
• Free Downloads Make Cases for Online Video, Healthcare Marketing Done Right (prweb.com)

I’m in the process of setting up several newsletters following the training of Martin Avis over at Ezine-Academy.com. The Fresh Start Newsletter (see optin box on the right) follows this training and I’m enjoying writing the newsletters immensely.

Thanks to everybody who has subscribed so far – nice to meet you all!

However, I’m also setting up a couple of newsletters in non-IM niches (my hobbies) and so it looks like I’ll have my work cut out.

The reason for this post, however, is to talk about how I’m getting subscribers for my email list. My main method, at present, is using ListCrew, a kind of co-op where visitors to your website are given the option to join related newsletters from other marketers. A pop-up also appears on their websites and their visitors are given the opportunity to join your mailing list.

Here’s a free pdf explaining how it all works (right click, save as): Automatic List Building For IMs.

It’s a simple system (once I’d got the correct list ID from my autoresponder company, ImnicaMail) and seems to work very well. I’ll report back once my testing is complete and I see how many new subscribers I get.

Alan

Great news, super affiliate millionaire Mark Ling, has agreed to be on a webinar today where he will be revealing how to make 10k a month (and more) as a super affiliate.

Mark himself regularly makes over 100k per month from affiliate promotions, so he knows what he is talking about and has numerous examples to show you on this one-of-a-kind webinar.

http://www.affilorama.com

You’re about to learn what is probably the quickest way to get yourself making 10k a month online and more and you’ll be taught by a man who has trained thousands of people from around the world to do extremely well online, including many total newbies (this includes his own father).

This is a webinar you should not pass up lightly, I strongly recommend that you set an alarm in your phone right now for one of the event times on the page below:

http://www.affilorama.com

Enjoy!

Alan

A few days ago, I blogged about a great new tool that has made my life so much easier as an affiliate marketer. It’s called Easy Redirect Script.

Here’s the link to a webinar where you can find out more: Easy Redirect Script Webinar.

Ever want to promote something but NOT send traffic to the sale page of the product you’d like to promote?

Maybe it’s because it has too many pop ups, the site is just not optimized to convert or you want to bypass the squeeze page.

Whatever.

This script let’s you create cool little “stealth” redirects that can allow you to finally take total control as an affiliate.

There are tons of other great things this little script can do as well, including promo redirects, and even QR codes (I’d never heard of those!).

Get the full scoop by visiting the site.

Here’s the link: Easy Redirect Script

Every affiliate should use a tool like this and I’m going to be using it extensively in the future for all my marketing.

Alan

I’ve been struggling trying to find the best link cloaking solution for a few years.

As part of the 300 Internet Marketers training, we’re supposed to use a free WordPress plugin to cloak links and make them nofollow (Google isn’t a big fan of internet marketers!).

However, I’m trying to be different and reduce the number of plugins that my gardening site uses.

Here are my thoughts on the matter and a great solution that I’ve just discovered and I’m implementing imediately.

There are 3 reasons you should consider never using a free URL shortener or link cloaking service.

1) A lot of ISPs block them because they often collect your data and share it with other sites. ISPs don’t like that!

2) You don’t control the service, so if they go out of business all your links quit working overnight.

3) Those URLs you shorten are impossible to remember and/or edit later.

This is why need to use an affiliate cloaking/redirect script that protects you from all these things and more.

And here is perhaps the best one on the market. Go to the site now and see all the cool features it can do, including “hot linking”, “promo redirects” and more.

I’ve just installed the script on one of my sites (a private one) and I’ll use that for all my cloaked links in the future – a kind of one-stop-shop for cloaking!

Check it out: Easy Redirect Script

Alan

Hi all,

Well, not a lot to report, other than the fact that I’ve posted some bookmarking stuff to IMAutomator, added pages to my costume site (which is still plummeting because of Google’s algorithm changes!!) and sorted out the posts (wooden ones!) for my veggie garden (the subject of my authority site – I’ll divulge the URL once it goes live!).

Took a few photos to document the whole process.

Just shared 2 bottles of wine and it’s probably time for bed.  I have a satisfied feeling and the weather is great for gardening, so hopefully I’ll get chance to continue tomorrow.

Alan