The guess is that if you’re reading this, you have content to share.
But, how do you get your content from your blog into other blogs and websites? How do you syndicate it into their RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, and Pinterest boards?
To share priceless information with your readers would be an unending reward in itself. To share the same content across the Web, allowing it to reach new readers and markets, is: priceless.
This is where content syndication comes in.
What is Content Syndication?
Content syndication, also called content repurposing, is the practice of publishing your original digital content on other third-party sites.
It will give your blog, video, or infographic a second life, extending its reach and adding more eyeballs to its viewership.
Syndication is a valuable traffic generation tactic that can also help you take back control of your content from all the intrusive spammy directories that have devalued it.
Easy peasy.
Think of content syndication as bartering for digital content.
The third party gets some great content on their site while keeping their audience engaged. You get free exposure, good backlinks to your own website, and organic traffic.
Win-win!
According to Salesbox, 65% of B2B marketers use content syndication as their strategy for lead generation.
Image source: Salesbox
What Is So Awesome About Content Syndication?
In the past, people have been arguing whether or not it´s a good idea to syndicate content from your blog. The majority of them believe that it´s duplicate content, and therefore, the Google bots might penalize you for it.
However, this is no longer true. Publishers add a link directing the Google bots back to the site where the post was originally published.
The reality is that content syndication is one of the simplest ways to scale your content marketing efforts. As long as you don’t duplicate your content, Google search engines would appreciate your efforts to publish it again and share it with a wider community.
This blogroll traffic is a great way to reach new audiences who may not otherwise ever find out about your blog or website. What could be better than re-engaging with the people who are already familiar with your brand?
Sounds great, right? It gets even better.
Here are some essential benefits as to why every company needs a sound content syndication strategy now.
- It is a way to get high-quality backlinks without actually having to do any work at all for them.
- Content syndication opens up demand generation campaigns to achieve greater scale, reach and impact. By deploying content across multiple channels, you can improve your chances of success. Syndication maximizes the volume, diversity, and frequency of touchpoints with your target audience.
- As you gain more links, search engines will notice your website’s ratings will improve. So, content syndication is generally used for building authority over time.
- It is an excellent cost-effective way of gaining exposure for your brand, product, or service.
- For thought leaders and brands, content syndication is a great way to stimulate dialogue and build relationships. You can create storylines and themes to tell stories and promote new content over time across multiple media channels.
- It also accelerates the total number of marketing leads on your site.
- Since you are running the same content on more than one platform like Medium, LinkedIn Pulse, SlideShare, Scribd, Ezine Articles, etc., you end up with high volumes of referral traffic.
- Content syndication is a two-way street: if done well, it can build brand equity and distribution at the same time.
How to Syndicate Your Content?
You have a lot of options when it comes to content syndication—and there are no “best” choices for everyone. To figure out which program is right for your business, you can consider any of the following:
Inbound Options
Guest blogging
Guest blogging is the practice of writing an article for someone else’s website using content you’ve already created. This may be an interview, a Q&A, or a review, but most frequently, it’s a new article that’s been commissioned as a piece of content in its own right.
In exchange for your writing the new piece, the host website will link back to your site as part of their new page, which will push up your search engine rankings.
Co-marketing
One of the most common lead generation strategies is co-marketing, where two or more brands publish or promote a content asset (such as white paper or e-book) and share the resulting leads.
The logic behind multiple brands publishing and promoting a single asset is that it creates additional touchpoints with the customer and increases awareness.
It’s also a great way for brands to increase their existing traffic and also help the third-party website enhance its traffic via co-marketing.
Social syndication
It is a way for brands, publications, and influencers to collaborate on content marketing campaigns. It’s essentially a form of cross-promotion that pairs two brands together to promote each other’s social media through tweets, re-blogs, pins, etc.
Pay-per-click promotion
It involves paying a service to put your asset on relevant pages on their site. These can be a set of web pages, a blog, a newsfeed, or search engine results.
This is very similar to PPC advertising on Google, except it’s great for getting your product’s name out there because of the large number of pages it can appear on.
Outbound Options
Telemarketing
Telemarketing is when you pay a company to promote your content over the phone to people who are more likely to be interested in it.
The biggest benefit of telemarketing is that it puts your message in front of people who may not be actively looking for it. When done right, this can lead to significant increases in customer acquisition.
Press release
Press releases are great ‘news-style’ content that can be placed on commercial sites. You can use them as a means to build backlinks pointing to a content asset, for example, a ‘view complete study’ page on your website.
The following infographic by Izooto will further help you kickstart your content syndication journey.
Image source: Izooto
How Content Syndication Comes to Terms With SEO?
If you’re a content marketer, you’ll want to make sure that your content appears on one website. Overleveraging your content with multiple syndication partners can actually hurt your SEO, not help it. Google would index one version of your content and ignore the rest. The version that gets indexed will be the version on a larger, high-traffic website.
Therefore, some marketers argue that there’s no point wasting time syndicating your content, only to see it cannibalized by search engines and sent to the bottom of the pile.
But then, if you can play your cards right, you can make your syndicated content surprisingly SEO-friendly. Here are a few ideas how:
- The ideal way to re-share content is with a tag referencing the original source and with a link back to the original.
- When people see your original content, you want them to know that they are not on the third-party site. This is why you should set up a canonical tag.
- Get proper link backs. If you’re not careful, search engines might mistake the syndicated content for the original. To reduce this risk, make sure there are link backs to your original website.
- No index. By tagging your blog post as “NoIndex,” you no longer have to worry about them showing up in Google search results.
3 Tips for Content Syndication Without Disturbing SEO
Content syndication can give you a wide reach and great SEO benefits if done right. Basically, it’s all about having other websites talking about your content. You can achieve this in a number of different ways without even disturbing SEO.
1. Guest Posting.
Why guest posting? Guest posting is a powerful link-building tactic without spending a dime.
It can also be a great way to build relationships with people who are important in your industry and raise your domain authority, both short-term and long-term.
There are a few things you need to keep in mind while approaching guest sites. For example, they should be writing in the same niche as you. You can use helpful keyword strings like:
- “write for us”
- “guest post”
- “submit a guest post”
- “contribute to our site”
- “contributing writer”
- “contributor guidelines”
- “guest posts wanted”
- “writers wanted”
- “This is a guest post by”
- “guest posting guidelines”
- “suggest a post”
2. Check if the website publishes syndicated content.
Checking a blog for syndicated content is as important as going through a site map. You don’t want to be that marketer who pitches a guest post or a piece of content without checking whether the site publishes syndicated content.
Make sure you check whether your target website syndicates its content. Simply open the articles and look for the phrase “originally published at” (at the end of the article).
Image source: securityboulevard
3. Publish first.
Before publishing your content to social networks, consider sharing it first on your own website. This will allow you to establish your site as the original source, increasing your backlinks and social sharing.
Next, instead of showing the full text on their site, ask your partners to show only a part of the article without giving too much away. When the reader clicks to view more, they go directly to your website.
How to Create a Robust Content Syndication Strategy
If done correctly, content syndication is one of the most valuable sales tools your company can use. Here’s how to make sure that when you go down this road, you don’t end up in the ditch when you go down this road.
Set your goals straight.
Ask yourself why you want to syndicate content and what tactics you will use to achieve those goals.
For example, decide if you want a lead for a workshop or a free seminar. Do you want a lead for a drip-email campaign or a phone call?
Choose your target audience.
Your target audience is your most promising buyer. So think of your ideal customer, work through their buying process, and discover where they hang out.
Choose the content asset you want to promote.
It is best to choose content that indicates interest and intent at specific stages of the sales funnel. For example, case studies or pricing/feature comparisons usually suggest that someone is in the decision stage. If the asset will be made available online, then always use landing pages to capture details like the prospect’s email address and other contact information.
The following are a few content types that you can consider:
- Whitepaper
- Ebook
- Guide
- Datasheet
- Webinar
- Case Study
- Infographic
Identify your highest quality content.
Start your next content marketing kick-off meeting by reviewing your content chest to determine if any items shine as a top-of-the-funnel, unicorn content piece.
Sometimes, the best things are the simplest. The same goes for your marketing strategy. A successful strategy begins with an outstanding piece of content that works well with your target audience, is inherently helpful, and can be easily shared.
Choose a syndication partner.
So, where do you go to get leads? There are many content syndication providers that promise they’ll deliver high-quality leads that match your needs. Before partnering with anyone, though, you’ll need to research their track record, customer satisfaction, and accessibility.
You can also start by asking the following questions:
- What are the places where your target audience spends their time?
- Who is your syndicate partner’s target market?
- What are your syndicate partner’s preferred content types, styles, and tones?
- What editing policies do they have in place for syndicated content?
- What is their website’s ranking?
- What format will your content be displayed in?
Measure and analyze metrics.
As you acquire new leads and subscribers, examine what stage in the buying cycle they are in. Measure how well your content is performing with these new audiences.
If your content isn’t performing, don’t be afraid to tweak it or remove it from circulation. Content is meant to be shared, but the response you get in return may not be right for your current goals.
Is Content Syndication Right for You? The Possible Downsides
Content syndication can help you to tap into audiences that your site might not normally reach. But it does have some potential downsides to consider before you jump in.
- Duplicity: The biggest fear of content marketers when they want to try content syndication is that Google will see the republished articles as duplicate content and penalize them. But no, that’s not the case. However, Google does not encourage it either.
But the main risk of duplicate content is that it reduces traffic. Basically, if you publish the same content on two different sites and get traffic from both, you get to keep none of it.
- You might outrank your own content: If your blog post gets syndicated on some other site, there’s a chance that Google may show the third-party version of it before yours.
- You cannot collect prospect data: You cannot add email opt-in widgets to big publications. So, what is the point of all the hard work you put into creating valuable content if you can’t get people to subscribe?
Before starting content syndication, here is a list of things that you should do and what you should avoid.
Image Source: Brafton
Getting Your Content Syndicated Starts with the Right Knowledge
If you want to succeed in content syndication, make sure your content is well researched and perfectly written. Think of syndication as a tool for content marketing.
Anywhere your article is syndicated gets you exposure and generates new visitors for you. That is why Content Syndication is one of the most effective ways to grow traffic.
Is there anything else that we skipped? Leave a comment below.