Breaking ground on a new website or blog is difficult. Even once you start creating content and planting the seeds, it takes months or even years for those seeds to develop into full-fledged plants that can start bearing fruit.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t water the seeds. Content promotion and SEO are important tools, but they are slow.
Content syndication is like fertilizer and grow lights for your blog. Instead of only feeding your blog and content program with what comes in organically, you begin to push that content out in front of the eyes of others.
Content syndication is when third parties republish or share your content. You can either publish on a third-party platform, or a partner publishes on your behalf. This gets it in front of a whole new set of eyes, which accelerates the growth process.
What does content syndication look like?
Content syndication can occur in many forms. This includes:
- Blog/SEO – this looks like a guest post, but it can either be original or reposted content from your website.
- Email – have a larger lead magnet you want to get to a large audience? A case study, an ebook, or a classic white paper can be a good fit for email.
- Social – Platforms like Quora, Medium, Reddit, and LinkedIn are technically places where you redistribute content. This is often self-syndication, but bigger publications on Medium might republish your content.
Consider creating a content syndication strategy that includes all of these elements. A blend will get your content and blog in front of the audience you need it to.
What is the goal?
Content syndication aims to get the fertilizer that will cause your brand to grow. It widens the funnel so you can gain that much more demand, attention, and leads to fill your funnel.
It’s great for all-sized companies looking to break into new markets or expand their audience within those markets. Here is a quick breakdown of some of the goals to be accomplished with content syndication:
- Increased online presence
- Boost website traffic
- Reach a wider audience
- Improve lead and demand generation
- Create thought leadership
- Receive validation from search engines
- Build links
Small businesses can use content syndication to start a blog. Large companies can use content syndication to widen the reach of a new campaign.
Are there hazards to content syndication?
It depends. Although content syndication can expand your reach by using other brands’ audiences as a launching board, there can be perils to intertwining your brand with another. Here are some of the concerns you face.
- List quality – This applies mostly to the email space. Does the brand send out your content on your behalf and have a quality list? Do they have an engaged audience of willing readers? Do they clean and hygiene their list properly?
- Duplicate content penalties – there are some SEO penalties for having duplicate content on more than one website. Often, this effect is nominal and worth the exchange to gain access to another brand’s audience. There are ways to avoid this. You can delist your brand’s version of the post to keep yourself in the clear. Or you can do content syndication.
- Referral traffic – Because readers can consume your content without ever being on your website, it isn’t the best source of referral traffic. Try not to think of syndication as a source of direct website traffic. It’s a better tool for brand awareness, thought leadership, content visibility, etc.
How should you choose who redistributes your content?
Make sure the organization that you select to republish your content meets the following requirements:
- Audience – your content syndication partner should either specialize in reaching the audience you’re targeting or can tailor their distribution to match your target audience.
- Reputation – content syndication can be synonymous with spam. Make sure the one redistributing your content has a good reputation with their audience. Otherwise, content syndication will be useless.
- Consider starting small – especially if you’re a smaller organization, consider partnering with other smaller organizations. They have a niche, engaged audience that will serve your organizations better.
Pitch or Pay?
There are a couple of different methods you can use to add content syndication to your strategy. These include:
- Pitch – Find an article/asset you want to use for syndication. Then compile a list of businesses to offer your content to. Practice your pitch and tailor each rendition of it for the brand/individual you reach within the organization.
- Pay – It’s often worthwhile to pay a brand that specializes in content syndication to distribute your content. Do your research before you hand over that hard-earned marketing budget, though. Look into the process, pitch, and distribution methods of the company you’re looking to pay.
B2B marketing requires reaching out to niche audiences and cutting through the clutter of other brands trying to reach those very same audiences. As many as 2/3 of B2B marketers used content syndication in their strategy. That’s because it works, especially in a market where nearly all B2B attention is digital.
Give your content program the extra light and fertilizer it needs to get established in the market. Content syndication can help.
This post was originally written by Acadia Otlowski on November 19, 2020.
Let us know what you think:
- Have you tried content syndication?
- What kind was it?
- What sort of content do you use for content syndication?
