Curation Nation

No need to sugar coat this – “newsmastering”, “curation”, and “engagement marketing” are the dominant trends in online marketing.

And I don’t just mean our little “internet marketing” sub-culture. I mean ALL of online marketing. That’s what “Curation Nation” is all about – how to tap into this approach.

Honestly, for most internet marketers this totally, 100% s-u-c-k-s. We’ve all been taught to focus on “buy, bookmark, or leave” websites. We hate any notion of branding and authority building. We chase Google traffic and search rankings. We pick niches not based on value but on keywords. We don’t build markets – we exploit them.

Now before you start calling me a hypocrite and say the baby is ugly let me get this onto the table – I still LOVE affiliate marketing. I still believe in content generation and the value of a little aggressive, grey hat SEO and traffic getting…

And I’ve been talking about “newsmastering” since 2004. So this leopard isn’t changing his spots. I am just telling you that there’s a shift and content curation is the dominant model most of you need to be looking at.

There aren’t a lot of good resources for you to learn this stuff. It’s not hard but if you’re a died in the wool IM’er that never saw a WSO you didn’t get excited over you may have some difficulty. Here are some places to go to get started:

Curation Nation – How To Win In A World Where Consumers Are Created.

This new book (yes, an actual book) is required reading to understand why people are flocking to “curated” content – summaries, guides, and snippets as a way to get their arms around the sheer glut of information we’re all facing.

Goobert

Michael Campbell’s little guide on trend marketing and newsmastering is a refreshingly simple and direct model to get your feet wet. You won’t become the next Gary V or Ariana Huffington reading this but you’ll understand what and how to deliver value to your readers without endless hours “learning” internet marketing. (disclosure – there’s a podcast Michael and I did a while back included as a bonus in this package).

Nano Bloggers, Nano Context, Nano Nano…

No, this isn’t a subset of the collected recordings of Robin Williams. The “nanoblogging” concept is the brain child of Dr. Peter Spaepen. Nanoblogging is a controversial approach to engagement marketing that’s kind of a combination of Goobert and a legitimate way to apply the flog approach that was popular in the CPA industry a while back (and still is). It’s not subversive and I consider it completely white hat.

But, some people get their feathers ruffled by the mention of “personas” and “archetypes” and what not. So be it. Bottom line – this is the way successful corporate persuasion has been done for years. It’s just applied to our little world. Bottom line – you need to get on Peter’s list and read his stuff. It’s thought provoking and as good as it gets.

Affiliate Bully – The New Cruel Rules For Success

Andre Chaperon’s insider’s email list on building marketing funnels, delivering value, and cutting through the bullshit that is our little IM sub-culture.

SINdicator

Keith Baxter’s take on building and scaling mashed and curated websites. This is an evolution of the “Blogging to Sell” material Keith and Peter Spaepen put together a few years back. Because Keith is known for traffic generation using (sometimes) aggressive techniques the SINdicator approach has gotten tied a bit with autoblogging. While I understand this it really is more than the typical Adsense or banner ad autoblog. Or at least should be.

Vishen Lakhiani’s “Growing Exponentially” talk

Vishen delivered this at Yanik Silver’s Underground conference a while back. It is a true success story about HOW he step by step built a news mastered website and turned it into a multi-million dollar business and market dominator.

There’s more stuff out there – Peter, Matt Trainer, Harlan Kilstein, and others have coaching programs out there teaching their version of this stuff. Some of it is a little more “borrowed” than others but that’s the nature of the game in this business. Matt’s blog post “The Times They Are ‘A Changin” describes his take on this pretty well and is a good read. Harlan has a coaching program over at BlogCuration.com as well. I don’t have any personal experience with either.

Where should you start?

Honestly, I wrote this post initially to tell you about the “Curation Nation” book and it kind of grew from there. I do think the book is required reading and HIGHLY recommend you check out Michael, Peter, Andre, Keith, and Vishen’s material.

Some of it is free, some of it is pay. But none of it breaks the bank and ALL of it is great content that’ll help you think about building a real business with real people.