Syndicating Content: Building a Better Content Strategy

Creating content is just the first step in any content marketing campaign. After that, it’s all about getting it in front of your target audience. And content syndication is one approach to doing it. Syndicating content is a great way for businesses to boost their brand awareness and generate a larger audience for their blogs and articles. But finding the right syndication partner can also give businesses other huge benefits in the long run. In this article, we discuss:

• What Is Content Syndication?
• Advantages of Syndicating Content
• How Does Syndicating Content Work?
• Types of Content Syndication Outlets
• How To Improve Your Content Syndication Strategy

What Is Content Syndication?

Image via Pexels by Kampus Production

Content syndication is the act of republishing a piece of content, such as a blog or article, on a different website. These websites often target a similar audience to your own, which creates a mutually beneficial relationship. The other website that syndicates your content boosts its audience relationships by using your expertise, and your website receives some of its traffic by creating a backlink to your site. Essentially, you’re giving another website free content to help build its library while you receive free exposure for your business and brand.

Advantages of Syndicating Content

One of the biggest advantages of syndicating your brand’s content is exposure. Publishing across multiple syndication platforms boosts the chances your content reaches more audiences—resulting in more traffic to your site. Here are several more reasons to syndicate content:

• Increasing brand visibility: First and foremost, content syndication allows you to boost your brand visibility. By sharing your content with other audiences and websites, you have a greater chance of people seeing your content who might not have known you existed previously.
• Generating a larger audience: That increased visibility also helps you generate more audience members and more traffic to your site. That helps to increase your visibility even further and find more opportunities to generate leads and make sales.
• Building backlinks: When you add your content to other sites, you’re also adding backlinks to your own site. This helps you improve your SEO strategy and gives your content a boost on the search engine results page (SERP).
• Creating partnerships: Content syndication allows you to work closely with other businesses in a similar market. These businesses not only make great content partners but potential business partners as well, creating new opportunities for both of you.

Read more about it: Content Syndication: Benefits and Drawbacks

How Does Syndicating Content Work?

Content syndication works by building relationships with other brands. These brands often operate in a similar market to your own but aren’t direct competitors. That allows both of you to build and develop your companies without harming the other’s business. Let’s say a landscaping company was looking for a content syndication partner. A good partner might be a pest or mosquito control business. They both target a similar audience, but they’re not direct competitors and can promote each other’s services and content on their sites.

So in this example, these two companies make great content syndication partners and have the potential to build a lasting business partnership. And that’s an important thing to keep in mind when choosing your own content syndication partner. These partner solutions create excellent, lead-generation opportunities, like joint events and webinars. That’s why, when picking a content syndication partner, you should look for someone who shares similar values with your own company. After all, quality over quantity is what matters most.

Types of Content Syndication Outlets

Tons of options exist for syndicating content. Depending on your business industry, niche audience, and the type of content you want to circulate, you might consider several types of syndication outlets for your strategy:

Syndication Networks

Syndication networks use their connections to distribute content on the business’s behalf. These networks often have relationships and partnerships with authoritative websites, which allow them to publish a business’s content more easily. Authoritative websites often have a larger audience and their authority also gives more weight to backlinks. That means when you earn a backlink from an authoritative website, it can be more beneficial to your SEO compared to a backlink from a site no one’s heard about.

Since we started, CopyPress has been building relationships and partnerships with authoritative websites to create our own network for syndicating content. When you use our content writing services, we not only craft compelling, quality content for your brand, but we can also help you get it seen by the right audience.

Online Communities and Publications

Online communities and publications are places online where businesses can publish or submit articles and blogs for syndication purposes. These communities often allow you to republish your work, and some even let you connect your blog’s RSS feed. That way, whenever you publish an article on your site, it’s automatically published to the community as well. This allows you to build backlinks to your site by including a link in your content and posting it somewhere else on the internet.

This also helps to build your brand awareness because the audience of the community or publisher might differ from your own audience. People can then see your blog and understand what expertise, products, and services your brand has to offer. A great example of a publication like this is Business 2 Community.

Blogging Platforms

Blogging platforms are websites that allow people to create their own blogs, separate from their website’s blog. With this platform, you can create a copy of your website’s blog and generate backlinks to your site from a different one. That can contribute to your SEO efforts and improve your search engine ranking. However, you can also use the blogging platform in more creative ways to target a larger audience.

For instance, a company’s CEO or business owner might develop a personal blog on this type of platform. Using it, they can talk about their experiences, skill set, and the history of their business. This kind of blog casts a wider net when attracting a target audience and the business can then use it to syndicate its own content as well. That way, the blog offers something unique to readers outside of being a carbon copy of the company’s blog.

Social Networks

Social networks are great for content syndication in a few ways. For one, when you share content on your social media profile, it’s more easily shareable for your followers. If they find it interesting, they can quickly share it with their own followers, helping you generate more brand awareness.

However, some social networks also have other options to publish your content directly to the platform. Facebook and LinkedIn both have services that allow content creators to publish and syndicate their content directly to the site. This helps you not only generate brand awareness but also include backlinks to help your SEO strategy.

Influencers

When you hear “influencers” your mind probably jumps right to social media. And there’s nothing wrong with that because partnering with social media influencers can have a huge effect on your content syndication campaign. They can share your content with their followers and even promote your brand, inviting their audience to check out your website and content.

However, working with influencers can take other forms, like contracts with popular bloggers or SEO writers. These influencers often have their own websites where they publish content and already have a large audience who follows them. Contacting these influencers and seeing if they’d be willing to host some of your content can help you develop effective partnerships and get your blogs in front of a larger audience.

Related reading: How To Find Content Syndication Providers

How To Improve Your Content Syndication Strategy

No matter where you choose to syndicate content, there are some approaches you’ll want to take to ensure you’re getting the most out of your strategy. Here are some steps you can take to improve the success of syndicating content:

1. Define Your Goals

Like any marketing campaign, it’s important to understand what it is you’re trying to accomplish and how syndicating your content can help with that. Are you trying to boost your traffic? Are you trying to improve your search engine ranking or website authority? Or maybe your content syndication is just another step in your overall content campaign. Whatever the case, having a clear understanding of your content marketing goals can help you make the smartest and most effective decisions.

For example, suppose your goal is to improve brand awareness and audience outreach. It might be better for your company to syndicate its content with multiple businesses and websites to cast a wider net compared to just one or two websites. This can help you reach your goal more quickly and ensure your syndication strategy is as effective as possible.

2. Syndicate Others’ Content

If you’re having trouble finding a syndication partner, start by offering to syndicate their content first. Offering a place on your website for someone else’s content can help you start and develop a strong relationship with other brands and businesses. Show them the benefits of hosting content on a different website. Then, ask if you can create a mutually beneficial situation between the two of you. Once you have a relationship with a business or website, you’ll often find that creating a partnership is a lot easier.

3. Look for More Than Syndication

As mentioned previously, syndication partners are great, but they can open the door for even more business opportunities. That’s why it’s important to look for more than just a syndication partner in third-party websites and brands. For example, let’s say a business that sells video game equipment, like gaming PCs and keyboards, partners with an indie video game company.

Sure, they could easily just be syndication partners, hosting each other’s content on their websites. But they might also use their partnership to promote each other’s products, offer different promotions or sales, or even develop new, joint products together. When done right, syndication partnerships have the opportunity to do more than just promote content. That’s why it’s important to look for a business or brand that you can build a relationship with that might extend outside of content marketing.

4. Understand How It Affects SEO

If you’re enacting your content syndication campaign by yourself, you need to perform the right SEO practices to ensure your campaign is successful. The most important thing to remember is to tell search engines where to find the original piece of content on your site. When third-party websites post copied content, search engines might flag it as duplicate and lower its search engine ranking, creating the opposite effect of what you intended. In order to avoid this, companies need to use a canonical attribute.

It’s actually quite simple to perform, even for novice coders or web developers. Each syndicated article should have a backlink that leads readers to the original article. Then, in the HTML of the link, the business should add the code rel=”canonical”. This not only stops search engines from flagging your duplicate content, but it also requests that the original content be ranked higher than the copies.

5. Check Your Content Quality

As you choose which content to syndicate, make sure it’s top quality. If you try to promote low-quality or uncompelling content, it’s really not going to do what you hope. That’s why it’s so crucial to make sure your content is informative and engaging to your readers. A question your audience will always ask themselves is: “What’s in it for me?” You want to make sure that your blogs and articles provide them with some sort of value they can’t find anywhere else.

If you’re looking for a way to improve your content strategy, schedule a call with CopyPress. We’ll help analyze and improve your current approaches to develop a plan that achieves your content marketing goals.

Ed Pronley

CopyPress writer

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