Friends (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My aim in blogging…
… is to provide interesting content to my readers. I can try to do this by writing interesting blog posts, by having guest writers who do so, or by finding interesting content on the web, among other possibilities. To the extent that I’m successful in the doing this, I can attract more and more readers who come back or subscribe to my blog. I consider this an unwritten contract I have with my readers: I provide value to them, and they in turn explore my web site and blog at least, and possibly consider buying one of my books. Allow me to lay out one of the ways in which I attempt to provide value.
Use Paper.li to gather…
…interesting content. You list the sources of desired content (some provided by Paper.li), and they tap into the stories and articles generated by these sources daily by scrutinizing their daily Tweets. Paper.li then presents these in an attractive and effective newspaper format. My chief source is the blog posts created by the bloggers in my primary Twitter List named “My Writer Friends”. To the extent that my list contains creative and energetic bloggers, the content they produce in their blog posts will provide a continuous stream of good content. I have over 1000 bloggers on this list, and Paper.li culls 100-150 stories for me daily from these.
Curate the daily stream of posts.
The posts that Paper.li provides are categorized by type of content. They fall into the categories I have chosen: Stories,Technology,Education, Art and Entertainment, Videos, and Environment. I select the top 4 articles from the daily content. “Top” means to me that the content of the article is interesting, informative, and valuable. I never select bald promo posts and in fact will de-list bloggers who persist in doing this. I choose the Top 4 and use a feature of Paper.li that allows me to pull the 4 articles out of the newspaper and present them as the “best of the day”. Example
Accessible Twitter website icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Post to Twitter
Creating an attention grabbing title for my Tweets is important. From the four blog posts I have selected, I further select two topics that I use to create the title for my daily tweet. An example of this would be my tweet of December 30 named Wonder Woman & Tom and Jerry Fr Larry’s Twitter Pal Daily Dec 30. I provide a link to the “4 best” articles which goes directly to a post on my blog , but I hope that readers take the time to explore my blog once they get there. The four best of the day articles give full attribution to the blog and the blogger who originated it. Exploring the articles takes the reader directly to the originating blog. Bloggers who benefit from this often Retweet, Favorite, or Mention back to me.
Use the Most Compelling Photo
I use the most compelling photo from each day’s four top posts as the feature photo for my blog post. I also link the photo and the blog post to Pinterest where I pin it in “My Blog Posts”. The Pinterest post links back to my blog. So, I get a lot of mileage out of each of these daily posts.
What is your strategy for providing valuable content to your readers? I’d love to hear of it. I’d also love to hear what suggestions you might have for improving on my strategy.
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This is a great idea Larry & thanks for sharing it. I read an article by Jane Friedman when she did something similar a few years ago. It never occurred to me to do it via paper.libut it’s a great format. Really great of you to support your writing friends too. Wish I’d thought of it first! Thanks so much for sharing your process. Always of interest to me.