How to generate leads just by reading

UPDATE: I've shot a video of the new workflow I use. The updated article is here: https://thomaslecoz.com/leads-content-curation/

If you're an expert —or an amateur in any kind of industry, you're probably reading a sh*t load of content online. Look, right now you're doing it.

I've done some quick maths and I spend on average 40 min a day consuming professional content online, and I'm a fast reader. This means 4 hours and a half per week. This is a lot of time and this is also very passive.

I get the theoretical knowledge, ideas and inspiration but other than that I'm not really doing anything for my business in the same time.

Well, in this guide I will show you how you can leverage all this time spent consuming content to improve your brand marketing, your social profiles ranking and even generate leads.

Introducing content curation

I see a lot of people online trying to make it but providing average content. I'm guilty too. Seriously I have 9 articles on the TLCZ blog right now and most of them are REALLY average — some of them are even bad. Two of them are unique and are bringing a lot of traffic:

• ​How to make WooCommerce Subscriptions and LearnDash compatible
• How to sell by installments on WooCommerce by hacking WooCommerce subscriptions

And it has taken me a lot of work to build those articles.

So if you can't write unique, high quality articles every week, content curation is a very good way to stay in the top of mind of your clients while pushing quality content to your audience through your various social profiles.

Here is a cool definition of content curation by Beth Kanter:

The thing is, you're already curating content by reading various articles online and taking notes when they are relevant, so we just have to tweak that process a little to make content curation a more efficient process.

How do you read online?

Here's a productivity tool I use all the time: Pocket.

It's a very handy tool that strips articles from unnecessary content (comments, ads, some formatting, etc.) to make it really easy to read across all your devices even offline. It’s very practical if you’re commuting using public transportation where you don’t always have network coverage (Paris’ subway anyone?).

Here's how I use it. When I see an interesting article online — in an email, on my Facebook feed, on Twitter, etc:

1. I save it to Pocket (using the chrome widget or an app, depending on the platform I'm on)
2. I sync my pocket app on my iPad or my iPhone (yeah I'm an Apple hostage) to be able to read it offline, practical when I'm in a country that have poor mobile coverage or if I'm commuting in subways
3. I batch read everything while snacking at around 4pm (YEAH 4, not 5).
4. If an article is really interesting or if I can use the content in a very practical way, I favorite it — and I have a special automation that happens here to, more on that later
5. I archive the article, clearing my "to read" list

Batch processing tasks is a very good way to jack your productivity up, I recommend this process rather than being very reactive to every article that pops up on your timeline / inbox.

So here are some quick steps to get started (you need this to go further):

1. Install and create Pocket account (come on, it's free)
2. Install the pocket widget on your browser and the app on your favorite devices
3. add articles to Pocket when you stumble upon something cool
4. read them (or not, your choice) in batch
5. archive them once they are read

How to publish automatically to your social profiles

Ok, so now you've shifted from reading in your browser or other apps to Pocket and potentially increased your day to day output by processing them in batch, rather than as they come — you're welcome. We also created a central point where you manage the content you consume.

When you curate content, you have to avoid posting shitty things just to post something. I hope I don't have to explain why, it just won't benefit you or your brand.​

Because you're reading the content, you’re doing the quality check. You're not just pushing an article that seem to be cool thanks to its carefully written headline: you're making sure you're sharing relevant, quality content with your audience.

So now, what we want to do is drip-feed all this content you're reading to your audience on your social profiles. Because you’re reading in batch, you don’t want to post 4 or 5 updates in a very short time window (minimizing exposition, potentially spamming your audience, etc.)

So what better solution than Buffer?

If you don't have an account you can open one for free right here.

What Buffer does is just keep a buffer — no shit — of your social status updates and send them according to a publication schedule you can customize. It also have a ton of very cool features we won't talk about today like stats and content suggestions.

So now, we will link your Pocket app to your Buffer account so that everytime you're archiving content, it's going to fill your buffer and be distributed accross your accounts.

To do this, you have two solutions:

• IFTTT
• Zapier

If you just want to increase the visibility of your social profiles, publishing public social updates regularly will suffice. You can stick with IFTTT and create a very simple recipe like this:

If you’re using this recipe, you don’t want to archive everything. Make sure your DELETE the non relevant, not so interesting articles otherwise you’re going to push everything to your buffer and you’re going to have quality problems.If you want to go further and generate leads, I suggest you use Zapier right away because we're going to need this in the next step.

If you want to go further and generate leads, I suggest you use Zapier right away because we're going to need this in the next step.

The next step Generating Leads from content curation

I have to give credit to Dave Rogenmoser of 6Ksuccess for this one. I knew Snip.ly from an AppSumo deal but never really used it — so many tools out there…

We're going to use Snip.ly to add an overlay on our shared content and generate leads.

Sadly, at the time I'm writing this article Zapier doesn't leverage the API of Snip.ly to allow us a complete automation through their service — it’s not an action app, it’s just a trigger app right now.

But what Zapier doesn’t do yet I can code and I'm a nice guy so I've created a step by step guide (with video!) on how to completely automate this step.

If you're a developer or are familiar with creating PHP scripts and playing with hooks and APIs, you can download the PHP script on my GitHub.

Here is a rough drawing of the setup.

So now, what happens:

1. You're fixing a nice snack at 4pm (not 5)
2. You decide to batch read the articles you saved today using Pocket on your iPad or whatever device
3. You tag the articles you find interesting with a specific trigger tag
4. Buffer will publish a link to this article on your social profiles
5. When someone clicks this link, he will see a Snip.ly overlay with a CTA to either opt-in or take them to a specific landing page

Voila! You're now generating leads by reading cool articles in your industry :)

Going a step further

You may have several brands or projects under your management, with different brands and audiences to talk to, interested by different topics.

In my case, some content will be relevant only to TLCZ's audience, some other only to another super top secret project and some for both. How do I manage that?

Well, I use tags. And because I'm not a very original person I have a TLCZ tag and a super top secret tag.

So here's the final process.

1. I add articles to my pocket
2. I read them
3. If they are of interest to my audiences, I tag them
4. If there's a TLCZ tag, it's going to the profiles I selected for TLCZ, if there’s another tag for another project, it's going to the profiles I've selected for the other project
5. Same thing: links go through Snip.ly and have a specific CTA overlay that fits the brand

What changes to you need to do this?

1. Create new brands in Snip.ly to hook the CTAs to the right landing pages
2. Associate tags to the brands
3. Keep the rest as it is

Bonus: keeping your favorites in Evernote

Now that we are automation badasses, we might as well throw in some fun stuff.

This is an IFTTT recipe I have running for several years now. Each time I favorite an article on Pocket, it's saved to Evernote so I can consult it later.

If you don't have an IFTTT account you can create it here for free.

Then you can use the recipe by using the widget below:

The Sky is the limit

This is what I use but you can also do a lot of cool things:

• ​one thing I'd like to do but haven't figured out yet — suggestions are welcome in the comment — is a way to add a message to go with the publication, making it more personal than just posting a title and a link 
• due to content visibility issues on some social networks, you might want to create something to repost regularly the content on Twitter or Facebook, just like you would do when your publishing a blog post
• complexify (although I think the simpler the better) this process with different tags for different purposes. for instance a tag « now » could send the thing to the top of your buffer while the rest would be regularly added to the bottom of it. Etc. Really you can do a lot of different things here.
• don’t have a website? You can use this setup with a Snip.ly's opt-in form to build your email list, or generate email leads directly from your content curation
• you can even add the Zap below to put new leads into your Pipedrive.

Yes, you’ll get leads by reading interesting stuff and sharing what’s relevant to your audience. No need for a fancy website, go make some sales.

That’s all for today. I hope it helps and you’re going to have fun. I’d love to hear about your usage of this script, use the comments below ;)

UPDATE: I've shot a video of the new workflow I use. The updated article is here: https://thomaslecoz.com/leads-content-curation/