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If you haven’t cut your cable yet or if you remember life before streaming, you probably remember watching sitcom reruns in the afternoon. These shows are possible because of content syndication deals. Just like your local media affiliate brought you old episodes of Diff’rent Strokes after school, other third-party websites can showcase your content.
When executed correctly, content syndication puts the content you’ve already worked hard on in front of a new audience. Since your content is being published on a different website, you can find customers who aren’t already in your audience. You get increased brand awareness and more referral traffic without having to post anything new.
Learn more about syndicated web content and how to do it well.
What Is Content Syndication?
Content syndication is a marketing strategy in which a third party posts an existing piece of content. It’s not the same as a guest post, though. For a guest post, you'd collaborate with the third party to create an entirely new video, article, infographic, etc. When a third party syndicates your content, they’re republishing something you’ve already posted while giving you credit and linking back to your site.
With artificial intelligence and voice searches changing the rules of search engine optimization (SEO), content syndication is becoming a proven strategy for generating backlinks and improving your brand authority.
How Content Syndication Works
Publishing high-quality, relevant content can get you noticed online, but most of the time, people approach other companies for content syndication opportunities. You do want to make sure your content is well-researched, engaging, and credible.
Look through your engagement analytics and use a social listening tool to determine your best pieces of content. Then look for potential syndication partners whose existing content and audience align with yours. You have resources for distributing your best content, which we'll cover in the coming sections.
Once you’ve chosen a partner, look through their syndication policies, including how they republish content and how they attribute your company. The website syndicating your content should clearly indicate the original source and include a link back to your site. Many sites will use language such as “republished with permission.”
Types of Content Syndication
There are different ways in which a third party might syndicate your content:
- Full content: Your syndication partner publishes the original blog or video in full.
- Partial content: Your syndication partner only publishes a portion of the content, such as an excerpt or a summary.
- Licensed syndication: Under this model, your syndication partner has to pay a fee to republish your content.
Benefits of a Strategic Syndication Approach
Before jumping into the deep end of content syndication, you need a strategy. Simply throwing out your content to every potential partner can dilute your brand reputation and put you at risk for duplicate content.
Start with a clear goal. Article syndication can improve your brand awareness by introducing you to people who may not have heard of you. Since syndication helps you build backlinks, this strategy can improve your SEO. Better online visibility drives organic traffic to your website. Syndicating bottom-funnel content aimed at making a sale is a great way to reach new people in the decision-making stage.
Having a goal in mind helps you decide which content to syndicate and where to distribute it.
SEO Considerations and Canonical Best Practices
Syndicated content and SEO can be a double-edged sword. When done correctly, you boost your backlinks and enhance your authority with the algorithms. However, this strategy can also put you at risk for being tagged as duplicate content and hidden from searches.
Avoid content syndication SEO issues by properly tagging your blog content before you distribute it. Add canonical tags to each blog URL so Google and other search engines know you’re the original source material. Add a link using rel=”canonical” to your custom URLs, and Google will skip over any duplicate content.
Where and How To Syndicate Content
There are plenty of free and paid resources for syndicating content. If you want to skip the cold calling and outreach, you can syndicate your own content using resources such as Medium, LinkedIn, Flipboard, Quora, and industry publications that support syndication.
Consider your target audience before executing this strategy. For example, if you’re targeting B2B customers, syndicating web content on LinkedIn may be seen as professional, while using Reddit may not. Know where your target audience spends time on the internet and target those sites.
You can also use paid content marketing and syndication platforms that help you choose the right partners and distribute your content.
Trusted Syndication Platforms and Tools
Trying to research and contact potential syndication partners while running your business and making high-quality content for your site is taxing. Use one of these resources to do the heavy lifting.
Outbrain
This paid content distributor promotes your content on various publisher websites based on your content and syndication goals. Outbrain has an extensive network including major news sites and niche websites that cater to your customers.
They use a pay-per-click model, so you pay based on how well your recommended content performs.
Taboola
Another paid content discovery platform, Taboola uses AI algorithms to match you to publishers and other partner websites. This company uses widgets to highlight your content on websites in the “content you may like” section. You can create ad campaigns and bid for better placement.
Since Taboola also uses a pay-per-click model, your budget depends on how well your ad performs.
Scoop.it
Scoop.it is another content curation and discovery platform. Its users can log in and find content that appeals to their interests through filters. Scoop.it presents your content in a magazine format that is visually appealing and easy to share on social media.
This is a great resource for expanding your reach while keeping your content professional. It also offers free and paid options, so it’s perfect if you’re starting out and want to learn without paying a lot of money.
Medium
Medium is a content publishing site with a large, built-in audience. It’s free to create an account and offers built-in promotion tools that connect your content to interested members through keywords and other features.
It’s easy to use, but make sure you’re adding canonical tags to your original content to avoid SEO issues.
Measuring the Success of Syndicated Content
Unless you’re doing DIY syndication through LinkedIn, Medium, or another tool for which you have analytics, tracking your success can be tricky. The easiest way to measure syndication success is through website referrals. Look through your Google Analytics to see if any syndicated sites are sending traffic your way.
Also, assess your backlinks, new leads, and engagement metrics to see if there's an uptick in traffic following a syndicated post.
How To Attribute Leads From Syndicated Content
Including inbound marketing trackers such as lead capture forms and links to campaign-specific landing pages helps you properly track your syndicated content. You can also ask new visitors to indicate how they found your brand.
Make Syndication Work Without Sacrificing Original Content Value
Informative and relevant content that engages your audience will always be more attractive to potential syndication partners. Your first step in a syndication strategy should be to consistently publish high-value content.
Avoid diluting your brand by choosing your partners wisely. Also, don’t syndicate all your content. Save syndication for your best and brightest. If you need help creating syndicated content, Compose.ly has you covered. Our writers offer industry expertise and authority with deep knowledge of SEO.
Contact us today to learn more about how you can get polished content that is perfect for syndication.
