If you’re working as a content curator for your followers, you’ll want to know about this marketing tool.  For those of us that are creating fresh content on a regular basis, we also carefully choose content from other outlets to put in front of our followers as well. We want our following to have access to all sorts of relevant and helpful information.  The problem?  When you link to someone else’s article, you lose that reader down a rabbit hole of someone else’s content.

So, how can you maximize social media efforts? How can you curate great content for your followers, but have your readers stay connected to your business or brand?

There is a free social media tool called “Start A Fire” that helps you to enhance these efforts.

From Start A Fire:

Start A Fire enables you to get the full value from links you share by adding a badge with your content recommendations within any link.

By showing your badge along with your content recommendations to anyone who opens or shares the links you create, Start A Fire will help you grow and expand your content’s audience in a completely seamless way.

Start A Fire is fully integrated with social media tools, such as HubSpot, Buffer, and Oktopost, and supports both desktop and mobile devices.

Essentially, you take the article you’ve found and copy the url.  You shorten the url using “Start A Fire”.  You then use this shortened link to send out in a post you’ve just created or a scheduled Hootsuite post in the future, etc.  Using the “Start A Fire” link allows you to provide links back to specific pages or sections of your website that you want to drive traffic to.  It’s not guaranteed by any means.  But this free tool offers a link back your website at the end of an article on someone else’s site.

It feels like paid advertising. Minus the paid part.  Most people who want to curate others’ content don’t because they are not driving traffic directly to their own site.  It can be extremely beneficial to point to other people’s content though! You are giving your customers a whole wealth of knowledge they may not have had before.  And, with this tool, you can still provide a way to drive traffic back to your own site.  It’s a win win.

As a free tool, it’s worth a shot.  If it generates a few more leads –great.  If not, no loss to you.

Have you tried any tools like “Start A Fire” in the past? What has your experience been? Have you seen an increase in traffic from other sites?  What are your thoughts? Comment below!