Step 5: Using Gather Groups: Create, Curate or Both?

I have received a number of terrific messages since I started this series and want to thank everyone who has written. Gather members have shared their ideas and plans to start creating experiences on a wide variety of topics.  A few of my favorites include:

• Container gardening for people living in cities that want to exercise green thumbs without having to find a plot of land
• Pet adoptions/rescue where a different pet is featured each week and members work together to find that pet a home
• A series for Gather moms where they can trade stories about women leaders throughout history that they can then share back with their daughters to inspire them to great things
• Political cartoons that bring perspective on national and international issues

Today, we look at the value of Gather groups as a platform for aggregating experiences and audience.  For those just joining us, this is the fifth in a series for the Earn More Points group on Gather.  You may want to review the rest of this series as well:

• Step 1: Find Something that You Love to Do.  This post suggests finding a subject that you really enjoy as a starting point.  In the conversation, many members reflect on what they already share on Gather and consider what they might share going forward.
• Step 2: Evaluate the Appeal of Your Topic: This post looks at tools that help you to understand how many people are interested in the same things that you are.  Selecting a relatively popular topic can help you increase earnings.
• Step 3: Consider the Competition: This piece helps members determine whether the experience they want to create meets an unmet need (on Gather and on the Internet) or would compete with lots of other solutions online.
• Step 4: Creating a Consistent Experience: Here we examine how to create an experience that will deliver on your readers’ expectations consistently.  Like a boutique magazine may have done last decade (whether on home décor, gardening, skiing, travel, or parenting), what you share on Gather can deliver new and fresh ideas on a theme that your readers enjoy.

Whether your passions include container gardening, pets, women leaders, politics, or something completely different, a Gather group is a perfect place to create an experience for your audience.  Groups allow:

• Customized experiences, that really deliver the experience you want to create.  Your group may contain just photos or just posts or just casual conversation/chats, or whatever combination you think best.  The group experience that you create can be completely different from another on the site, delivering a richer experience by focusing on whatever best delivers on your theme.
  
  • The container gardening group may want to focus on videos that offer how-to demonstrations similar to cooking videos shared on the site.
  • The pet adoption group may wish to feature one animal on top and  photos of other animals beneath that one.  By removing posts from this group, the creator can focus visitors on the sad eyes and sweet faces of the cats and dogs looking for a new home.
  • The group on women’s history may focus on posts, sharing stories and photo essays of women who have struggled to bring positive change in the world.
• A unique look and feel, where you can show the richness of the experience with graphics and background themes that you suggest.  Using photography in the header helps first time visitors to acclimate themselves quickly and understand your experience better.
• Membership.  Your audience members can join your group allowing you to message them to call out new activities or ask for their inspirations on a theme.
• Group contribution: When you bring together a group of people who love the same thing you do, they may have their own inspirations that they want to share.  When you allow them to share quality experiences in your group, you create a richer experience for your audience, which will engage a broader group of people and bring them back more frequently.

After you create a group, you decide whether to focus it on your own content or curate an series created by others (or both).  Are you an author or an author/editor?  If you plan to write regularly (from several times per week so several times each day), focusing on your own content may make sense.

For most of us, who want to share our own content a little less often and also enjoy exploring other’s work, collaborating to create a group experience may make sense.  This collaboration begins when you find a great group of contributors on your topic (on Gather and across the Internet) and invite them to share as part of your experience.   Bringing them into a group helps grow audience for yourself and for the other contributors, bringing real value to everyone involved.  Contributors will benefit from joining your group by having access to a larger audience than they might create for themselves.  They can return the favor by sending invitations to join your group to their own audience and by mentioning your group at the end of their own writing, asking readers to join as well.

Finally, creating a group experience on Gather allows members who enjoy a variety of interests to build separate audiences by creating a group for each experience.  You may enjoy container gardening and pet adoption, but your audience for one might not follow the other.  By creating a group for each, you allow readers to focus on the experiences that create value for them, making it more likely you will attract and retain audience.

Remember, Gather’s points system rewards members that create experiences that other members enjoy.  By finding a niche that many people enjoy, then creating unique experiences that deliver consistent value to those people, you will build a growing audience over time.  That growing audience will grow your earnings on Gather.

For those sharing in groups who do not own/host those groups, a bit of advice as well:  choose your groups thoughtfully.  Very few Gatherers ever visit the unmoderated, “post anything” groups that were created for those just seeking greater reach.  They bring little benefit as a result and they may actually decrease your readership.

Content shared on Gather places well in search engines, increasing unqiue audience to our members.  Search engines like Google and Bing, however, often ignore content that is posted in too many places.  They mistake this content as spam content that disreputable sites post repeatedly to try to manipulate search ranking.  To avoid having your content ignored by the search engines, select the groups you share with carefully.  Join groups that focus on a theme, have active membership, and that are well moderated (where the group owner keeps discussion focused).  Sharing your content in the best of these.  To maximize your search placement, share in just one place (or a handful of places at best).  That way, the search engines will recognize your piece as original.

We have now looked at how to select a topic area, create great content in that area, and assemble your content and perhaps others’ content into a consistent experience.  In the next several posts in this series, we will look at how to promote your experiences, growing your readership by reaching people interested in what you share across the Internet.   Up next: promoting your group in blog search engines across the web.