In this comprehensive guide, you will learn: 📝
1. The fundamentals of content syndication: Understand what content syndication is and how it can positively impact your business.
2. The advantages of content syndication: Learn how syndicating your content can expand your audience and do so much more.
3. The essential steps to implement content syndication: Selecting your most effective content, finding suitable syndication partners, customizing your content, promoting your syndicated articles, and tracking your performance.
4. The potential drawbacks and solutions: Understanding the risks associated with content syndication and how to address them.
5. The influence of content syndication on SEO: Discover how syndicating your content can boost your search engine rankings.
Content syndication: What is it and what are its benefits? 💻
More than 7 million blog posts were published daily in 2023, and this number keeps increasing. When you post something online, there is a lot of competition when you want to catch the attention of the readers because they have so many choices. It is crucial to make sure that your content is easily readable, looks good on mobile phones, loads quickly, and, most of all, gets to the point without gate-keeping what it is actually trying to convey.
A lot of sources gate-keep information behind a paywall or a subscription service. While it can be a great way to get leads, there are tons of other ways you can get quality leads. That’s where content syndication shines.
Content syndication means making sure existing content is distributed onto third-party websites in order to gain visibility, leads, increased audience reach, better SEO, and spread awareness. Syndication strategy is not something that came to be in the digital age; it has been around for a while. Print media often distributes content from all kinds of sources, such as freelance writers, independent artists, and small publications.
The benefits of content syndication: 💡
1. It gets you a greater audience reach. Your content gets distributed across multiple platforms, which gives you access to a vast audience that may not be familiar with your business. It’s a great way to raise awareness of your business and get it in front of millions of new eyes. The higher your reach, the better your chances of getting more leads.
2. Generates better leads. Not every lead you get is going to convert into a paying client/customer. You need to make sure you syndicate your content in a way that puts it in the hands of a relevant audience. This spells better lead generation. If the people who are seeing your content on third-party sites are interested in what you have to offer, it raises brand awareness, and it also increases your chances of leads converting into paying clients/customers.
3. It guarantees expanded awareness of your brand, especially if you’re open to opting for paid services that will syndicate content for you.
4. Your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness are pivotal when it comes to attracting new leads. Successful content syndication promises to boost your credibility in the industry. A target audience that is impressed with any high-quality content you may have to offer will positively engage with your content, which will further enhance credibility.
5. When you use content syndication correctly, it increases traffic to more and more URLs that are on your domain, which has a positive influence on how you are ranked on a search engine. This attracts organic traffic to your website.
Content syndication vs guest posting: 🧑🏻💻
One of the most significant benefits of content syndication over guest posting is that it is scalable. When you write a blog and publish it on several other blog websites, you leverage the content several times.
Guest blogging/posting allows you to write a blog or an article for a website, and your post just exists in that space. Guest posting does not have the same scalability as your content syndication efforts.
There are some drawbacks that you will have to keep in mind: 🤕
1. Risk of duplicate content: ⚠️
While you may be implementing several content syndication strategies, you’re required to understand that you end up running the risk of duplicate content. Google does not like duplicate content. You need to make sure to publish your original content on your own website first before syndicating it. This will establish your website as the original source and signal search engines that your version is the authoritative one.
To avoid running the risk of duplicate content:
a. Syndication doesn’t promise a carefree outcome. It would be best if you stayed on it. Make use of canonical tags. Implementing canonical tags in your HTML header on both your original and syndicated content tells search engines which URL is the “master version” of your content, and this stops it from affecting SEO negatively.
If doable, you need to ask other sites and platforms, which are your partners, to include these tags, which will point back to the original. (An example of a canonical tag: <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.yoursite.com/original-article” /)
b. Your syndicated content needs to include backlinks to your original content. Make use of certain anchor texts like “Originally posted on (link to your website).” This does two things: it helps with increasing traffic to your website and tells the search engines where the original post lies.
c. Re-formatting your content slightly before it gets syndicated will help search engines differentiate it. You could do this by altering headings, changing the title, and even rephrasing some sections.
d. You should request NoIndex tags from a content distributor partner who may not be able to implement a canonical tag. This will instruct search engines not to index that page, and this also reduces the chances of it competing with your original.
2. Potential loss of control over your content: 🙊
Once your content gets published on another website, you may not have any control over how it is presented or even modified. That is why finding the right syndication partner website is imperative.
You need to find websites that will represent your brand in the right way. The right partners will make sure that your content still conveys your brand’s message and image as originally as possible.
3. There is a slight potential for brand dilution: 😱
If you don’t choose your syndication websites carefully, it will potentially impact you when you want to build credibility. There’s a chance that your content may get posted on low-quality websites or even irrelevant websites (irrelevant to your brand), and this could end up hurting the reputation of your brand. Make sure you choose the top-performing and most relevant partners to eliminate this risk entirely.
4. Time-consuming: ⏳
The process of sourcing the right websites to syndicate your content, convey your brand’s image and message appropriately, modifying the content for different kinds of audiences, managing relations with all partner websites can be quite resource-intensive and could take up a lot of your time. That doesn’t mean it is not worth it.
Steps to implement content syndication: 🌟
1. Identify content: 🧐
Creating content that will do well when syndicated on publishing sites is important. You need to select some of the best and high-performing content from your existing library of content on your website.
This can include articles, videos, graphics, etc., that have generated good traffic and engagement. This will make sure that you are syndicating content originally received well by consumers.
2. Choose the right partners: 🔍
It is important to identify potential syndication partners that properly align with your industry and your niche. This is also where you identify a target audience and make sure that you syndicate content that is going to be good for engagement with said audience.
a. Their audience needs to overlap with yours to a certain degree so that there is some relevance.
b. You need to check if they accept syndicated content. You can do this by searching for phrases like “originally posted on” that will appear in some of their articles.
c. It is important that you target websites that have a higher domain authority compared to yours. This is an excellent way to expand the reach of your content.
3. Modify and tailor content: ✏️
Modifying and tailoring your content to suit a specific audience set for each syndication partner you may have will be beneficial.
– You can do this by adjusting your style and tone to match any editorial guidelines the partner may expect.
– For some partner websites, you will have to re-format longer pieces of content like long-from articles into shorter, more digestible formats.
4. Promote the syndicated content: ⤴️
Once your content has been successfully posted onto third-party websites, you need to share it across all of your social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter) so that it will increase the reach to a wider audience.
This will drive inbound traffic back to the syndicated article, enhance visibility, and increase brand awareness for both your website and the syndication network of partner websites.
5. Measure and track performance: 📊
This is a very important step a lot of people don’t spend resources on. After you syndicate your content, it is very important to track key performance indicators, like engagement rate, conversions, referral traffic, and more metrics.
You can make use of tools like Google Analytics to keep track of and analyze how well your content is doing out there. You can then adjust your strategy according to how it is performing.
A significant number of content creators make use of Google analytics as it is a very powerful tracking tool.
6. Foster long-term partnerships: 🤝🏻
One of the benefits of syndicating content is that you end up forming long-term partnerships. You need to always prioritize maintaining these relationships.
You can do this by maintaining open communication and regularly providing these third-party websites with good-quality content. This will lead to more consistent opportunities for you in the future.
7. Consider paid content syndication: 💰
If you have a budget that allows, consider services like Outbrain and Taboola. I have prepared a list of some great content syndication platforms that you should take a look at. These services will offer you immediate visibility on platforms that are highly reputable.
SEO impacts: 👩🏻💻
SEO is essential no matter what kind of digital business you have, as long as you’re interested in reaching as many consumers as possible. It is a way to build on many things you hope to accomplish for your content marketing strategy. SEO provides many additional benefits when it comes to content syndication.
1. Referral traffic and backlinks: 🖇️
A backlink is a link that is created when a website links to another. One of the biggest benefits of content syndication is the potential to have backlinks from highly reputable websites.
Tip: When you pursue syndication of your content, it often includes a link to the original website. This acts as a vote of confidence in the content. This boosts credibility and drives referral traffic. In the eyes of search engines, it enhances the authority of the website.
2. Better domain authority: ⚡️
As more and more websites start linking back to your original content, you will start seeing an increase in domain authority. Search engines usually interpret backlinks as endorsements, which improves ranking in search results pages (SERPs).
Tip: When you syndicate to high-authority websites that align with your particular niche, it will enhance the quality of backlinks.
3. Increase in organic traffic: 🆙
With effective content syndication, your website would receive more organic traffic as new consumers discover your content. The increased visibility will result in higher click-through rates (CTR) and will potentially give you more conversions.
Tip: Optimise your content for search engines by including meta descriptions and keywords that are relevant to your content. This will improve its visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Here’s a Reddit discussion that might interest you:
FAQs 🙋🏻♂️
1. How much does content syndication cost?
Content syndication costs can vary depending on the platform. Paid services typically range from $20 to $100 per lead. Flat fee campaigns can cost between $1,500 to $5,000, depending on the scope and the business. Additional charges may apply based on clicks, generally ranging from $0.25 to $5 per click.
2. Are content syndication and guest blogging the same thing?
No, content syndication and guest blogging are not the same. Content syndication means republishing existing content across multiple platforms, allowing for broader reach without creating new content. In contrast, guest blogging requires you to write original content specifically for another website, which is then published there. Both strategies aim to enhance online presence; content syndication is more scalable and efficient because it leverages previously created content, whereas guest blogging focuses on building authority and relationships with the help of unique contributions.
