How can I use Sources to support my content strategy?
Our Content Sources feature is a great way to monitor what your competitors are writing about, and what is currently trending in your industry.
To access our Sources feature, click Sources on the left sidebar of your dashboard. Once you're on the new page, you'll find three headers:
- Topics: keywords you want to hear the latest news on
- Sites: news sites and publications you're a fan of
- Competitors: who you're competing against
All three of these sections are designed to provide you with real-time monitoring what is currently happening in your industry, so you can publish relevant and insightful content (and save you hours each day with Google Searches).
In order to update these three sections, follow these steps:
- Topics: Click Add Topic Feed to create your first cluster. Then, create a title of your feed (example: marketing), followed by the keywords that fall under that topic (example: marketing, marketing strategy, content marketing). Then click Save. You can add as many topics as you want.
- Sites: Click Add Site Feed, then title the feed (example: HubSpot marketing blog), and then pull the RSS feed for that blog (see directions on RSS feed below)
- Competitors: Click Add a Competitor, then title the feed with the company name and pull the RSS feed for the blog (directions on RSS feed below)
Follow these steps to find the RSS link:
If you're unsure how to find the RSS feed, please follow these steps:
- Visit the www address of the blog you want to track (e.g. www.ndash.co/blog)
- Right-click on the page and select “View page source”
- Search the page for a link that contains “feed”, “rss” or “xml”
- Copy-paste that link and hit Save
How to Request Ideas and Start Assignment from Content Sources
Once your Content Sources are set up, you’re then able to request ideas and start assignments utilizing the URLs that are of interest to you, from any of the tabs. To do so, find a link that you’re interested in, and click on the blue box to the right of the URL.
Once you click, you’ll be greeted with a pop-up where you can choose:
- If you’d like to start an assignment: meaning you already have the blog idea in mind and you’re excited to send it to a writer of your choice
- If you want a content idea based off of the URL: meaning that you love the reference material, but you’re looking for a few abstracts that reference the source material before you get started