As a marketer, you know how much goes into the content creation process: You conduct research, you develop a great piece of content and you post it throughout all of your available channels. But sometimes, the spectacular article, video or graphic you’ve spent a lot of time and energy on may not garner the results you were hoping for, and you feel as though you’ve exhausted your promotion options.
But that doesn’t have to be the case! One tool you have at your disposal is online content syndication, which is the process of reposting your already-created content to third-party websites. While your company’s site, emails and social posts play an incredibly important role in your marketing strategies, you want to cast your net beyond those platforms. Posting your articles, graphics and videos to more authoritative, reputable outlets gives you more credibility and widens your potential audience, exposing your brand to new prospects who may not have otherwise known about your business.
Not just any old content will do
Content syndication certainly shouldn’t be the main component of your marketing strategy. But it should still be part of the overall plan. And if practiced correctly, it will expand your brand’s visibility.
“When practiced correctly, content syndication will expand your brand’s visibility.”
A study conducted by Curata revealed that syndication makes up 10 percent of the “Ideal Content Marketing Mix,” with 65 percent of created content and 25 percent of curated content filling out the rest. While 10 percent is not a huge piece of the content marketing puzzle, it’s still an important part and allows you to accomplish more of your marketing goals.
But how do you go about successfully syndicating your content? You first need to choose which piece of content you want to share. It could be an article you’ve already written that has been posted on your blog for several months, or it could be a brand new infographic that you anticipate will garner a lot of interest. Whatever piece you choose, make sure it’s one of the best – any old article, video or graphic won’t do in this case. Not only will selecting the best benefit you, but it will also show the third-party sites that your brand provides valuable, engaging content.
You also want to make sure to pay attention to proper SEO practices. As you probably know, Google does not take kindly to duplicate content, and while syndication does not fall under that umbrella, the line between the two can become fuzzy when your piece is displayed over several sites. Search Engine Watch suggested working with your syndication partner on certain coding measures to ensure your brand is receiving the traffic back to your original content.
A meta noindex tag created by the third-party means the syndicated piece will not be indexed on your partner’s webpage, the source stated. Another suggestion is to ask the third-party to implement a rel=canonical tag, which results in your company’s site appearing in the search results.
And not just any old site will do
Once you’ve chosen your best piece to syndicate, you’ll next need to focus on finding the right partner site. But choosing any type of webpage to repost your content isn’t best practice and won’t do you any good. You want to make sure you are reposting your content to trustworthy syndication providers. For that reason, it’s important to focus on which channels are best for doing so.
Most of the time, you will have to pay for syndication services, but you can expect exceptional ROI by utilizing the right partners. Take a look below at some syndication site suggestions from QuickSprout.
- Taboola: This platform has a wide network of publishers, and it works to find the best webpages for your content and where you will see the most success. When using Taboola, your site will garner all the traffic as it brings readers on third-party pages back to the original source of content.
- Zemanta: This syndication partner gives you access to hundreds of thousands of third-party sites, and will work behind the scenes to determine which web pages will be the best hosts for your content. It also gives you analytics on the performance of your articles, which helps inform your future syndication strategies.
- ZergNet: With a substantial client base (with some well-known companies – MTV and AOL among them), you can use ZergNet to find the relevant sites on which to post your content. This puts your brand in front of people you may not have been able to reach previously and brings them back to your site, boosting your lead generation efforts.
Practiced correctly, syndicating your content will become an important component of your marketing operations and will put your brand in front of a wider audience than can be accessed with just your website, email and social media methods. Syndication certainly requires time and effort, but the success that it can add to your marketing goals is well worth the work.
