Content marketing is only going to get more impactful, so if you’re not on the bandwagon already, now’s the time to jump on. If you’ve been hesitating because this type of online marketing requires so much content creation, get ready for good news:

You don’t have to create all that content yourself.

Most of the content you publish should be your own, but you can also curate content for your business blog. Content curation saves you time and helps you build relationships with other businesses and blogs.

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With the rise of inbound marketing and the growing popularity of curating content, the number of content curation tools to help you find and share content has exploded. Use the following list of the best content curation tools for entrepreneurs and small businesses to jumpstart your efforts as a curator.

*Please note: we haven’t been able to test every content discovery and curation platform out there, but all resources listed in this post are popular and have great recommendations.

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With technology and internet marketing trends changing so fast these days, it can be hard to keep up. Social media is an excellent example. Which platforms should you use? How often should you publish updates? What kinds of content should you publish?

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You already know that guest blogging is an awesome technique to build and grow relations by generating incoming links. It’s 5 times more effective to grow a website audience and traffic by publishing posts on other websites than on your own. Even further, it’s the only white-hat SEO technique left out there that allows you to legitimately grow incoming links and audience.

Yet, there are mistakes that will absolutely sabotage your guest blogging efforts.

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“So, stick a fork in it. Guest blogging is done, it’s gotten too spammy.”

Every marketer with an internet collection gasped when Matt Cutts, Google’s head webspam fighter, published these words on his personal blog a little over a week ago. For decades, guest blogging’s been the backbone of many brilliant brands’ outreach strategies, and often with remarkable results. Case studies have reported remarkable results, including 400% jumps in subscribers from landing a single post on a high-authority site:

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There are few shortcuts to great SEO in the post-Panda update era. While quality content, and a powerful social media strategy are key to earning higher organic search rankings, your website can’t gain authority overnight. Or can it?

Guest blogging is a remarkable tool for earning backlinks to your company’s website, a component that Google and other major search engines use heavily to determine the rank of your content. Not fully convinced that a high search ranking matters?

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A lot of us try to succeed in online and content marketing. Yet not all of us do.

Meet Marcus Sheridan. He succeeded.

I interviewed Marcus and asked him to share his advice and expertise with us. Over a period of 4 years he managed to increase his online marketing efficiency 15 times over for his company, River Pools & Spas.

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Building a small business content strategy is hard work, but it’s probably about to get much harder.

Many subject matter experts believe that our current state of content overload is just the calm before the storm. As Doug Kessler of Velocity Partners spectates, “the rush to content marketing in every industry will make it harder and harder for your brand to rise above the noise.” If your entire strategy to date has relied on doing what you competitors already did, a few weeks later, it’s definitely time to pause and reset.

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You know that inbound marketing is the hot new trend and that attracting customers with compelling content really works.

The problem is creating and distributing all that content.

Knowing what works and actually making it work for you are separated by a vast chasm, and the bridge that connects the two is a plan. Creating a content marketing strategy that incorporates customer research, quality content, and methodical distribution is key to successful inbound marketing.

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Experienced content marketers have been hailing the expert interview as one of the best sources of content since the Internet was born, and with good reason. Interviews with experts help you get better information than you might have been able to get otherwise, vary the content you produce for more engagement, and lift the burden of creating tons of content on your own.

If you’re using content to attract and engage your prospects and customers, expert interviews can take your content marketing to the next level.

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