Creating fantastic content is not enough. You need to ensure it reaches massive audiences who are likely to be interested in your products/services and brand. One of the ideal ways to do that is to use content syndication.
This content distribution strategy is the process of getting the content republished by third-party networks and sites to obtain more exposure and leads for your business. Before we tell you the steps for great content syndication, let’s talk about what it is and why it matters to you.
What is content syndication?
Although the term seems a bit technical, it implies republishing a blog post – originally published on your site – on another website. After you write a piece of content, you’d need to look for a syndication partner or another site where you can republish it for a fee or for free.
Paid syndication is an arrangement in which a third-party site asks for payment in return for publishing the content on their website. Your content might get more priority on a webpage by paying the requested fee, and you might have a better chance of getting traffic back to your site.
The most effective paid content syndication providers are Taboola, Outbrain, and Zemanta.
Meanwhile, unpaid syndication is self-explanatory: a third-party site that doesn’t charge for republishing your content on their site. Some free content syndication providers are Quora, Medium, and SlideShare.
Remember, you can syndicate the entirety of the content or a portion of it — like a summary or a particularly intriguing quote. Republishing enables brands to recycle old content while also receiving added organic traffic to their site.
The use of syndication to distribute information to a wider audience has been expanding. Today it includes different forms of web media – from online publishing companies, to commercial sites, blogging sites, and newspapers whose goal is to spread their content across other types of media.
The difference between content syndication, content repurposing, and guest posting
What exactly is the difference between content syndication, content repurposing, and guest posting? Well, here’s the short answer to that.
Content repurposing occurs when you find a new use for your existing content. For instance, you might like to convert a video you made into a blog post or vice versa. On the other hand, guest posting usually means making a completely new piece of content for a particular website.
Content syndication is more of a distribution method than anything else. You publish content on your site, and it gets republished word for word elsewhere. With content syndication, you won’t need to spend time rewriting or repurposing content to reach a new audience.
How content syndication affects SEO
As you are already aware, Google dislikes duplicate content. It will not instantly penalize a site for duplicate content but may harm its overall SEO performance.
Fortunately, syndicated content is not synonymous with duplicate content. Even the search engine giant thinks it is okay to syndicate content as long as you do it responsibly and make it clear to readers and search engines that what they are looking at is syndicated content. You can achieve that by presenting a link to the original content and acquiring a canonical link from a third-party publisher.
Normally, the publisher will dictate how you add the canonical link. If the process is not clear, it is vital to deal with the editor from the beginning.
In short, you should not utilize content syndication for replacing SEO strategies. Instead, if used properly, it can work with SEO to produce added traffic to your content and build awareness of your brand and its services.
With that in mind, you must be careful about using content syndication to your web materials. Google only recognizes one link to be indexed in their algorithm. That indicates that search engines give credit to one of two sites sharing the same content, which makes one website show higher up in the search engine results than the other.
Remember that duplicated content can confuse Google technology and assign credibility to the republishing site instead of the original site. Thus, you must know how to index syndicated content.
Different types of content syndication
Below are some of the best content types you can use for content syndication.
1. Blog content syndication
Insightful blogs that inform users or help them enhance their skills are simple to syndicate. Nonetheless, there are a few essential recommendations you should follow in order to succeed:
- Always publish the original post on your site first.
- Ask syndication sites to use a canonical URL that points back to the original content on your site.
- Syndicate your content on websites with higher domain authority than yours.
- Syndicate your content exclusively on sites relevant to your target audience.
2. Infographic content syndication
Infographics can be easily syndicated as well. By visualizing huge chunks of data, it is much easier to convey important information to your targeted audience and build emotional connections. A great reason to share it outside your website, right?
Directing readers to visit your website should not be the sole reason for syndicating your infographics. Make sure to give them something more that’ll draw them to you – e.g. your infographic could be a tool for presenting your newly conducted survey.
3. Video content syndication
Make videos featuring your services and products and syndicate them to get your content in front of a new, diverse audience. It will help you drive traffic to your site.
Some of the common video syndication sites you can add are Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. If your videos are informative or entertaining enough, they can get more shares and reshares, boosting their reach ten times.
4. Audio content syndication
You can also record podcast episodes and interviews as audio clips and syndicate them to boost their reach. In order to make podcast syndication successful, you’ll need an RSS feed – the link that contains information about your podcasts. The biggest benefit of this link is that you won’t need to update your content across each channel that syndicates your podcasts – you’ll do it just once, on your RSS feed.
The perfect platforms for audio syndication are SoundCloud, Spotify, and iTunes.
5. Email content syndication
As a relatively universal tool in business today, email remains one of the best options for marketers in reaching their audience. Email is a marketing channel that has proven to have a higher return on investment than other marketing channels.
Part of that has to do with the level of customization available, as well as being far less intrusive than a telemarketing call. With email, your receiver can read and view your content at their convenience.
You can use automation tools to distribute content via email with automated email drip campaigns.
The steps to successful content syndication
To get the most out of your content syndication efforts, make sure to follow the steps below.
1. Make a great piece of content
Publications make money from marketing. Simply put, more page views indicate more marketing revenue. Syndication enables them to maximize content that’s proven to draw in eyeballs or enables them to take a bet on a writer who can.
You need to lay the groundwork and make appealing content to get it syndicated.
How to make it appealing you ask?
- Adapt the content to the website – tweak the title, subheadings, add a new image or embed the video, etc.
- Add a call to action and a related link.
- Avoid the promotion of your product pages – make the content educational, not salesy.
2. Look for potential syndicates
After you have a decent reputation for making evergreen content, you will need to find platforms enthusiastic about republishing it. Simply Google terms like “republished with permission”, “originally appeared on” + topic or keyword, and similar.
If websites have syndicated content from others, then they are more likely to be responsive to republishing content from you.
3. Reach out and make a deal
Look for the name and email address of the editor or the site owner and reach out to them. To do this, you can use free extensions like Snov.io Email Finder or Hunter.io.
After finding contacts, ask them if they would be open to syndicating your content.
For instance:
Bear in mind that giant websites have various journalists for different subjects. You need to perform your research first and reach out to the ideal person.
Make the most out of content syndication
To sum up, content syndication is surely a valuable strategy that increases the reach of each content piece on your blog. If you continuously concentrate on providing value through your posts, syndicating to established and authoritative websites increases your brand awareness.
You can also utilize self-syndication platforms to increase your subscription list. When we talk about SEO, syndication enables you to benefit from a massive website’s domain authority.
Syndication helps you make the most out of your content creation efforts and establish your brand. However, it also presents the risk of duplication – but you can avoid that by using the correct tags for syndicated content, and linking back to its original version on your blog.
Now it is your turn to begin creating and syndicating your content for enhanced exposure. Make it a part of your strategy and watch as it brings your website to new heights. We wish you the best of luck on your journey!
Yulia Zubova, an Outreach Specialist from Snov.io.
