Ep. 127 – MASSIVE GROWTH: Why Curator vs. Creator is a GAME-CHANGER I Jay’s Scoop

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. We are here for do this, not that.

And today we're going to talk about the value and the difference of you or your business being a creator versus a curator. This is something that I really became more aware of during COVID and it has changed my business massively. And I'll explain what I mean.

So during COVID I didn't have a lot of connections on LinkedIn or anywhere else for that matter. And frankly, I got really nervous.

So I have an agency, about 100 or so people in my agency, and Covid had hit and marketing budgets were getting slashed all around the country. All the big brands were slashing marketing budgets. And frankly, I got nervous.

I'm like, I got to make this big payroll every week and budgets are getting cut. What am I going to do? And so I said, wow, I need to connect with a lot more people. I need to know a lot more people.

Because my theory was if I knew a lot more people, then maybe I'll get more business and I'll make it through Covid. So I started to go on LinkedIn. That's my platform of choice.

Maybe you post on Instagram or TikTok or wherever, and it's not just for your personal page, but for your company pages as well. And I did this on both my personal and company pages, and my team did. And I said, okay, let's start posting a lot more.

And then all of a sudden, I'm going to meet a lot more people. And then I quickly began to realize that creating content ongoing, lots of it, takes a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of resources.

And I'm not ChatGPT, I'm not Google. You know, there's not this endless amount of ideas that any person or any company has to share.

So I had a conversation with my buddy Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials, and I was telling him, I go, this is hard. He said, you know, you have to think about this idea of creator versus curator.

And he explained it to me, and it really resonated and changed the game for me. And here's why you want to be both.

And I don't think enough companies and enough individuals Leverage the idea of combining being a curator and how to do it the right way and a creator at the same time. So creators is just that. You are creating content for your email newsletter.

You're writing original things, original ideas, you're doing original posts on whatever social media platforms you are a creator that is hard to do. Right. A curator is someone that goes on and they see a really insightful thing that they found interesting.

They find a funny meme, they find anything that they think is cool and they post it. And they're curating information and they're doing the same thing in their email newsletter as well.

Now, some of you may say, okay, I don't want to curate anything because then it doesn't feel original. People aren't going to think that I know anything, that that's a big fat waste of time. And so there's two pieces to it.

Number one, most people do curation wrong and I'm gonna break into here how to do it the right way. And they also don't understand the value of a bigger tent. It's not a numbers game.

You don't just want X number of followers or connections on your company pages or X number of subscribers to your newsletter or your personal following or anything like that. It's not just a numbers game. But here's why. Growing that tent.

The more people are connecting with you, more people are following you, the more people that are signed up for your newsletter, why it matters, you say, well, I posted a meme and I got a bunch of followers, but those people are never going to buy from me. It's ridiculous. But here's why it matters. And then I'm going to tell you exactly how to do it.

So when you find that funny meme, okay, that somebody else posted, and then you go ahead and you post it and you give them credit, you always have to source wherever it is that you found the, the thing, okay?

And now all of a sudden you get a lot of engagement, you get more likes and comments and shares and all this stuff and you're like, well, what's the value of these random people that have just connected with me? I'm going to tell you the value.

Because when you mix in, let's say every other post is one that you created, it's original content, and then the post after that's one that you've curated, and so on and so forth as you're getting more followers and you're getting more connections because of the stuff you're curating. When you go to post whatever it is that you created that original content.

All those people, right, that now follow you, connect you, with you, whatever, on your company page or personal page, some of them are going to also engage with your original content.

And because these are people that engage with content overall, when they engage with your original content, it makes the algorithm make your original content go further. So because you have more people in the tent, more people that like to engage in the tent, they're helping you get in front of the right people.

And over time, as that grows, you will get more business, you will get more opportunities. So, yeah, ridiculous memes can help. You know, content you didn't create can help in a huge, huge way.

Now, what is the secret sauce to curation that I think most people aren't doing? So what you want to do, I'm not going to tell you how to create content. That's for you being a creator, you have to have your own process.

It's really hard, but you're working through it, whatever.

And then what you really want to be thinking about, okay, every other post I'm going to do is going to be a curated post and that's going to help me get a lot more people. So how do you actually find and know what to curate and what to post?

So what we do, my team does, is we follow all these accounts that are on Instagram, on TikTok, on LinkedIn, all sorts of stuff. And these are accounts of memes, of motivational business sayings, of motivational things within the marketing industry.

And you can find these accounts are not hard to find, right? And they're constantly posting stuff.

And then you want to leverage human behavior, you want to look for the posts that have the highest engagement, right? So if you see a post on LinkedIn that got 100,000 likes, it doesn't matter if you think that that's the most interesting post of all time, right?

Humans out there have found it to be a super interesting post. And what is an absolute fact is if it works on one platform, it will work on another platform.

So all you really want to do is take that motivational quote, take that meme, whatever it is, make sure it is relevant for your industry. You don't want to be a clown, right? Whatever the meme is, or whatever the motivational thing is, it should be relevant for your industry.

And then you take the ones that you see have the absolute highest engagement on all other platforms, and then all you do is go on the platform of your choice. For me, it's LinkedIn, right? You post it with some Sort of whimsical thing. Saying, this is, you know, super interesting and here's why.

You source it, you tag whoever it may be, and if they're not on LinkedIn, you could say, find them on Insta and put their handle and then you post it. Okay. By curating this stuff. And you could do the same thing in your email newsletters.

You could put interesting quotes and interesting memes, all sorts of stuff. You don't need to be an engine of content creation.

You can build your network, you could build your following, you can build your business by mixing in curation.

And if you're just trying to be a creator or your business is just trying to post original content all the time, your growth is going to be so much slower. Go back to that original story that I told you at the beginning.

Yeah, it changed my business because instantly I was connecting and meeting thousands and thousands of people. And then over time, people would start to message me, hey, what do you do? What do you actually do for a living? And that was a game changer for me.

So I think this idea of curation versus creation and mixing them together can really impact your business. Okay, before we get to.

Since you didn't ask, which is the ridiculous portion of this podcast, I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is my email sending platform. I've been using it for years.

It's a roll up of sale through my Emma and Campaign Monitor and all these other platforms. It is awesome. If you don't really love your platform that you're using to send your emails, you got to try or consider Marigold.

You could find out all the information about them@meet marigold.com and if you want to hook up, you want to meet the exact right person at Marigold, just DM me on LinkedIn. Say, Jay, can you connect me with the right person at Marigold and I will get you connected to the people that I work with there.

They're all fantastic people, but I want to get you connected and get you kind of that VIP treatment. So just DM me on LinkedIn and I'll get you connected to the right people at Marigold.

But if you're in the market for a new email platform or, or a relationship marketing platform or a loyalty marketing platform, I am telling you, check out Marigold. Strongly recommend meet marigold.com. all right, let's get into. Since you didn't ask, this is the portion of the podcast that we just talk about.

Nonsense. So really, what is going on with Me. That's the nonsense of my life right now.

Well, for the last two days in my home, our hot water heater has not been working. And I. We have had only cold water. So it's me, my wife, my teenage kids. And I don't know why, but for some reason, this is my fault.

And I have to tell you, I know everyone says taking cold showers is good for you and all this stuff and all these studies, whatever, that's fine, maybe once. But when you're like multiple days in, it is not cool. Like, I have to hype myself up to get in the shower. It sucks. It just sucks.

So cold showers fail. What else is going on with me? You know, with the summer right here, I realized.

I don't know why, but I have, like, these overly ambitious summer plans. I'm going to do none of what it is I keep saying I'm going to do. I'm like, I'm going to lose ten pounds. I'm going to read these ten books.

I'm going to do all these other amazing things. Like, why do I think I'm going to do any of that? I'm going to do none of it. And I keep saying it out loud.

And I was telling my son that said that I'm going to do all these things. He goes, no, you're not. And I go, you're right, I'm not. What am I talking about anyway? What else is going on? Oh, you know what's going on.

This is not important, but America's Got Talent's about to start. Or it is starting. I don't even know. Maybe I already started. I got to catch up on it. I like that show, except it stresses me out.

I know you don't care.

America's Got Talent stresses me out because it's fine when people sing and stuff, but sometimes they do these, like, acts, you know, America's Got Talents, where you got, like, Simon Cowell and whoever else is now a judge, and they get all these people do these crazy acts, and then somebody wins a Vegas show at the end of it. And it's been on for years.

But it stresses me out because sometimes they have, like, people doing, like, balancing stuff really high up, or they have, like, people playing with fire or. I don't like any of that. I like the ventriloquists, right? I like that. I like magic tricks. I like that. I don't like anything dangerous or any of that.

So I'm going to get involved with America's Got Talent because I think that's pretty cool. Yeah, this was really meaningless what I just talked about. But anyway, listen, if you could leave this review, I would appreciate you.

You would be awesome in my book. Also, you got to register for Guru Conference, the world's largest free email conference. We're going to run out of seats.

We have over 20,000 people there. Sarah Jessica Parker is going to be speaking there. It is free. My company puts it on guru conference.com don't miss out. Leave this thing a review.

And yeah, I hope you have hot water later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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