In a world in which content curation is more and more important to help achieve your goals, it’s imperative to explore new ways of presenting this content uniquely. Using Paper.li for marketing can have all sorts of benefits, if done properly.

It allows you to create an online newspaper on the subject or subjects of your choice by importing content from up to ten streams, including Facebook and Twitter feeds, keywords and hashtags, which you can then share among your followers – or tweet out automatically if you’re on Twitter – and link to from your website. This includes articles, photos and videos. And it can all be automated so that, after initial set-up, you don’t have to do a thing.

Just to give you an idea of what paper.li’s all about, here’s what it can do – here’s a paper for fans of Game of Thrones, while here’s one for kitesurfers; different markets, yes, but rammed with relevant, accessible content.

paper.li for marketing

To get started, visit the main site and register and once you’ve done this, you will be able to create your own paper by choosing ‘create a paper’ from the top menu bar. You will then be presented with the following screen.

Considerations:

• Pick a good name for your newspaper, nothing overly wacky, but nothing too dull either. You need a title that reflects your brand and content and should be highly relevant to your industry and what you do
• You can create up to 10 newspapers for free using paper.li – anymore and you’ll need to pay, although the fee includes some other benefits too, such as customising your adverts
• You can use analytics from paper.li to see number of click-throughs and so on; as ever, analysis of all your social media efforts is vital to ensure that you’re getting the best out of the platform

Influencing others

If you’re keen to influence and lead people’s thoughts and opinions, paper.li is a great way of doing so. Pick your topic, then find some thought leaders across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and G+ – be sure to include your own sources, especially if you publish your own content.

Creating and circulating this paper will help signpost you as a worthwhile source of industry knowledge, increasing your respect, followers, impact and reputation. Remember to use paper.li’s ‘editor’s note’ section to add a link back to your own website too.

Promoting yourself

Of course, you can also use paper.li to blow your own trumpet. Simply set the website to pull in your own social media and website content, some of which can be specifically written with the paper.li format in mind.

Something to bear in mind is when to publish your paper. Take a look at your analytics and see when most of your followers are active on social media and set paper.li to publish your paper then for maximum impact. You can publish daily, but doing so would involve ensuring you can produce enough quality content and could (potentially) come across as spamming – once or twice a week is generally sufficient.

Monitoring competition

You can also use paper.li to monitor your competition – simply draw in content from their social media and produce your very own newspaper, detailing exactly what your competitors are up to.  You’ll be able to pick up on their marketing techniques, keywords, and so on, all in a very easily digestible format.

You’re probably best making sure not to share this particular paper with others, though. Oh, and you can also use this technique to monitor any mentions your competitors – and your customers, of course – may have given you. It’s a great way to check brand awareness and reputation.

Go Pro

It’s not hugely expensive to use the pro version of paper.li at $9 per month or $99 per year and it’s certainly worth thinking about if you produce a lot of content or work with clients that do, as it can add an extra dimension to your marketing. Curating useful content from Twitter and so on from others in your industry is likely to increase the amount of retweets your paper receives and so raises your profile too.

Going pro means that you can add your own branding, ensuring that you continue to strengthen your brand across all of your platforms and can really help your marketing efforts.

More than this, it can help you to build all-important relationships with both potential customers and other thought leaders in your niche. Give it a try, the only thing you have to lose is a little time and whilst this of course means money, the ROI could very well be worth it to your business and brand.