Tamela Rich noticed recently that I was publishing several paper.li papers, including Moving To Charlotte: The Un-Tourist Guide, The Fortune 500 Daily, The Creativity Times, and The Social Media Daily. You are subscribed to them, right? If you don’t know about paper.li, then you need to go here to learn more about the service.
Anyway, Tamela said she had been wondering if that approach was right for her content marketing efforts. She asked my thoughts and you only have to ask me once!
From my perspective, paper.li newspapers that you have effectively customized provide an excellent medium through which you can engage, grow and retain the right audience looking for your news. (I won’t go into detail on how to set one up, since paper.li has a good explanation of it.)
Benefits of your customized paper.li include:
- Updated daily, it serves as a regular reminder to your audience. You can set an automatic tweet to go out when it is updated, and subscribers get a note when it is updated.
- It provides your audience with consistent, relevant information about topics in which they have interest.
- Your automated paper saves you time by producing an elegant-looking paper with no continuing work or content development on your part.
- Paper.li pulls relevant content that you can then mine for your tweets, Facebook posts or to utilize on your blog.
- People you follow on Twitter will appreciate you including them and their tweets in your paper.
- Your paper can be embedded via widget on websites and blogs, so you have an opportunity to reach even more people.
- The basic service is free for up to 10 papers.
First, you need to decide what topics you should cover. The beauty of paper.li is that you can utilize hashtags, your Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Google+ feeds and RSS feeds as sources for your paper. Don’t forget to add your own blog feed!
Let’s look at an example. I am authoring a book called Moving To Charlotte: The Un-Tourist Guide, so I set up a paper.li publication to provide my companion blog with fresh news about our town. I’m using hastags like #CLT, #Charlotte, and #QueenCity. Then, paper.li scours the sources I have specified for related tweets, articles, photos and videos.
Creativity and social media are topics I want my company to be known for, so that is why we have The Creativity Times and My Social Media Daily. Fortune 500s are my target audience, so I use that paper more selfishly to discover what is on the minds of prospects.
Are you using paper.li? Please tell us how you are using it and your results.
