In this Speak PR podcast episode, host Jim James argues that content creation and curation are the true engines behind effective public relations, SEO, and sales leads, especially when companies view PR as a non‑essential luxury. He explains why search‑driven traffic is the starting point for all marketing and illustrates the power of content with case studies such as Ronnie Nimja’s stress‑management practice (25,000 unique monthly visitors) and Mint’s growth via Gawker media. James then provides a toolbox of affordable or free resources for creating, augmenting, and distributing content: Private Label Rights (PLR) libraries (plr.me), free article sites (amazines.com), media repositories (commons.wikimedia.org), infographic tools (Infogram, Canva, Visme), icon libraries (the Noun Project), headline generators (HubSpot Blog Topic Generator), and content curation platforms (Scoop.it). He outlines a workflow that moves from content creation to curation, SEO optimisation, and strategic placement in mainstream outlets (Reddit, StumbleUpon, Huffington Post, etc.) to generate awareness, intention, desire, and action. The episode concludes with a call to adopt an “Active Communications Index” for consistent, multi‑platform publishing, emphasizing that the right mix of owned, curated, and purchased content can keep a social media campaign vibrant without excessive cost.
Chapters
Hello, my name is Jim James and I'm your host on Speak PR. On this podcast, I'd like to help you to unlock the value in your business with free and effective communications. I do this by sharing my experience as an entrepreneur and a PR agency owner for over 25 years. I've served over 500 clients, large and small, and today I'm going to talk about content. I'm going to talk about how we create content that builds compelling public relations, but also that starts to build to greater traffic to your website and your social media accounts, and ultimately to sales leads. Now, I had a conversation today with a coach called Peter Rolleston over here at the Progress Shed in Bath, and he said something that, you know, obviously set me back a little bit. He said, you know, nobody really wants to do PR or have a PR agency.
And I thought, well, that's a bit rough really, considering that's what I do.
And he said, actually, of course, what they really want is, is sales. And we all know that. And what companies do is they suffer the marketing process in order to get the leads to get those sales. And this is perhaps the uncomfortable truth about public relations. In a recent survey in Singapore in the Sunday Times published by SPH. They said that the top 5 non-essential jobs as polled by over 1,000 readers were number 1, artists, 77%, telemarketers at 69%, and social media and PR managers at 61%. So most people felt these were the top 3 jobs that were not essential But when asked which jobs they would not like to do, first came garbage collection. But only 20% said that they didn't want to be a PR person. In other words, they may not think it's essential, but they do think it's a good job to have. So I want to look at companies now in COVID times might be looking at cost cutting, and presumably most of us don't have artists on board, but Some of us outsource our telemarketing, but social media and PR managers and agencies are often considered a luxury. But I think that we know that communication with our audiences, both internal and external, and our allies is not a luxury. It's a necessity, especially at this time. So if we're cutting these non-essential jobs from payroll, including perhaps the PR person, or we're not considering bringing them on, What can a business do instead in order to get noticed?
And the answer lies in content and content marketing.
Now, the role of content is important in any company because in marketing, we all start with search. These days, really, all marketing starts with people going to Google or in Asia to Baidu in China. So unless we're seeing advertising somewhere offline or sponsorship offline, by and large most of us are looking for things by starting with the search box. So content is important because it's the content that brings us the search engine rankings, both organic and linked. Now one chap called Ronnie Nimja said that he grew his stress management practice from 0 to 25,000 unique visitors per month to his website, which is pretty impressive, with just some simple content marketing techniques, all from free Google traffic. So in other words, he let the website content do all of the heavy lifting and the drawing in of leads. And creating the kind of noise about what he was talking about, in his case stress management, so that he could bring leads through his funnel to get clients.
Now Ronnie set up a business in 2008 for health and wellness providers and it was called PLR.
Now PLR stands for Private Label Rights and what that means is that you can pay money and you can use all of these 14,000+ pieces of content on your website or in your courses or on your social media once you've paid for them, and you can use them without giving credit to the author. So this means that for those people and companies that need to have, for example, course content or blog content and don't have the people to author it, you can get it for your site and for your course and for your community by paying a small amount of money. So you can start off by just buying a few credits at $0.99 per credit, or you can move up to annual plans of 400, 800, 2,500 credits. What that means in real numbers is something like $99 per month, or you can pay up to $900 per year to have unlimited content. So with this catalog mainly covering health, wellness, but also now expanded to business, for example, in coaching, you're really free to start with all the content that you would need for your site. But it includes actually courses that you can use, we can use, that you can monetize. So for example, one person took an ebook and made it into a 5-day challenge in their private Facebook group. So if you have a community of customers, or you can even use this for press relations as articles, but not the content developer or the writer, you don't want to go to Upwork or Fiverr or one of these other places. The website plr.me, that's plr.me, is a really great place to start. Now, there are a number of other places that we can go to to get content for free, but obviously has varying degrees of quality. One is called amazines.com, and there are tens of thousands of articles on there, and they're written by aspiring authors and people that would like to provide some free sample work so that you can then contract them to write longer articles. So all manner of content categories on amazines.com. Now, if you're looking for media files, pictures and so on, a great one is called commons.wikimedia.org.
And I'll put all of these in the search— in the notes.
But there's some 62 million freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. So if you've got media files that you'd like to upload and share, and you have credit for those, or you can download. And so you can take these articles and, and repost, and they're great for social media and for customers. And the content on that website seems to be a pretty good quality. Now, if you're looking for infographics, and as we know An infographic is a combination of both pictures and text. A good website to use for infographics is Infogram. So on infogram.com, you can have up to 10 projects with 5 pages per project for free, and then you can move up from starting at $19 a month. You can also create infographics in a website including Canva and Visme, for example.
But Infogram also has some samples for you there that you can use and download.
One website that I think is very interesting is called thenounproject.com. That's N-O-U-N project dot com. And there are over 2 million curated icons. Those are little icons that you might want to use in your PowerPoint, for example, or in your infographics. Very, very nicely laid out and easy to search and easy to download. Now it's free to use, and free and paid basic users can get access to all the icons. Where it changes slightly is that if you use them for free, then you have to credit the source, and you can only use them in one colour.
But if you want to pay not a great deal, but $39.99 per year, then you can use them in a royalty-free way. So you can download the, download the icons in any color, and you can get access to all of their apps, and they then embed in things like Adobe. So the Noun Project creates a very nice opportunity to get some icons for your text or for your pictures. Now, if you are thinking you'd like to create your own content but don't know where to start, which is a conversation I had with one entrepreneur recently, hubspot.com, which is the inbound marketing website, have quite an interesting, uh, tool. It's called the Blog Topic Generator, and they will create for free 5 different kind of headlines if you put in some nouns. I'm I put in 5 words and I got back the following. I got back expectations versus reality, will expert ever rule the world, the next big thing in public relations consultant, international explained in fewer than 140 characters, and this week's top stories about COVID Now those grammar errors are actually in the text, not just me stumbling through them. So they need a bit of polishing. But it does give perhaps 5 different ways of looking at the same topics, which might prompt what you might like to do. Now, if you're looking for articles that have already been written, which of course makes a great deal of sense, but are already appearing in established websites, a good service that I personally like and use is called scoop.it.
And it's free for individuals.
So you can get a free account. And what I use it for is to get sort of a curated list of editorial that's appearing around the world. So you can discover, select, and editorialize, but also what you can do is redistribute this content. There's a business account as well, and what it enables you to do is to have the search engine, a bit like Google Alerts has done, to go around the world and to bring you that content But on the business platform, it enables you then to reshare that content through your own website with a plugin to WordPress, but also through your social media channels. That's really making it almost a straight-through process. So if you've defined, uh, who your audience is, be it your internal audience, your, your staff, if it's your partners, or if it's your customers, as we say, the 3 different audience groups, Scoop.it creates a steady stream, an automated stream of curated content of considerable value because already appeared in mainstream publications and platforms. So this idea of curation of content and automation of distribution is really important. Now, This is all good and well, but I started the conversation by saying it comes— that marketing starts now with search. So if we have good content on our website, or we're redistributing other people's content, where the, the real benefit comes from in terms of content is if it can be placed in those top-ranking websites.
But what we also want to think about, and this is where it comes back to our PR people, is can we get our articles placed in mainstream media? Now, there was a, a case study of Mint, the software, where they were creating fantastic blog content, but the, the founders credited their success coming from Gawker Media. The owners of Lifehacker and Gizmodo, because whilst they had great content on the website, they didn't have anybody looking for their website. So the role of public relations and the consultant that you might hire or may not have hired is to take this great content that you've generated, either through getting one of these outsourced providers or content that you found as a combination of graphics and infographics and video from these various sites I've mentioned. But then you want to take it to where there is the traffic.
So websites like Reddit, for example, or StumbleUpon, or big mainstream media like Huffington Post, or, or any of the ones that I've mentioned in previous podcasts— this is where the traffic is going to come from. So the idea of generating content and having it on your website is great, and it will help with SEO. And some inbound marketing. But having created this great product, which is this great content, we need to take it to where people are. And of course, this is always the essence of, of why people want to advertise on big newspapers or television, because what they're really buying is the audience. So as we create great content, thought leadership, for our own business, and we put that onto our website and through our own social media channels. We also want to look at which of that original content can we use to get noticed, to get that pitch to the local editor or journalist. Because as we've mentioned before, those journalists are very short on time and they're looking for quality content. That quality content can be generated from your own ideas, but prompted and augmented by the content you can get from these other websites that I've mentioned. And as we know, infographics, video complement text and really help to make an article or a piece come to life.
So I started off by saying that companies often think about PR not because they want it, but as a necessary evil. But actually, publicity is the beginning of the sales process.
If no one knows about a company, the chances of buying from it are pretty limited.
So we have to generate awareness and then intention and then desire and then action. And we can do that by sharing through quality and engaging content across multiple platforms. And today I've shared with you ways that you can either create that yourself, augment it, or buy it so that you can get a steady stream of content in what we call the Active Communications Index for Speak PR, which is where there is consistency of content going out. And for most of us, that's a huge challenge. But the good news is that there are plenty of platforms and technologies that can make that job a lot quicker, a lot easier, and not any more costly. So thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. I hope this conversation about content curation is of value and helps you move along this week. In the meantime, if you'd like more information about East West PR, do come to our website eastwestpr.com. We have a weekly newsletter and of course this Speak PR podcast. My name is Jim James.
Until we meet again, I'd like to thank you for tuning in, and I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on creating and communicating.
