Posted by Are you publishing high-quality articles (or blogs) on your site; still, you don’t receive views as expected?
Well, that’s the most prevalent issue faced by marketers nowadays.
Now, you might be wondering, “How to get more views and subscribers with my content masterpiece?”
With the help of Content Syndication!
Content syndication is a process of republishing the same piece of content on various third-party websites and platforms.
In this guide, we’ll see how you can run content syndication campaigns effectively and reach a larger audience.
Getting Started with Content Syndication
As a fact, you should use content syndication when you’ve got a great piece of content, but it isn’t reaching a larger audience.
Along with content visibility, you will also get backlinks from authoritative websites indicating your content as high-quality content.
Before we move ahead with content syndication campaigns, you first need to keep in mind that content syndication is different from guest posting.
In the guest posting, you’ve to write a new piece of content for only a single publication, whereas, in content syndication, you’ve to republish the same content on other websites.
The primary issue that arises with syndication is content duplication, and to overcome it, the publication gives credit to the original author.
Source: Lifehacker
Run Effective Content Syndication Campaigns
If you don’t plan and execute content syndication campaigns appropriately, you’ll end up wasting your resources and marketing efforts.
It’s essential to follow the best practices to run content syndication campaigns effectively.
Set Goals and Define your Audience
The first step is to define your goals or the purpose of the campaign. From brand awareness to lead generation, your goal should be clearly defined.
Once you set the goals, the next step is to determine your audience to whom you want to reach your content.
It will help you attract quality leads by gaining your audience’s pain points, which will lead to an effective campaign.
Additionally, reaching a larger audience is crucial, but the most important thing is you reach the right people.
Therefore, you should use content syndication on websites where you think your target audience resides.
Choose Relevant Content and Content-Type for Syndication
Wherever you’ll submit your article for syndication, you must check the interests of that website’s audience.
Because targeting an audience without appropriate content will lead you nowhere.
Probably, you’ll republish your content on a website that has higher authority than yours, so you should consider putting out your masterpiece.
If you’re out of new ideas for the content, you can try content marketing trends to acquire new readers.
Another method you can choose for content is to go ahead with non-competitors, which means you’ll cross-syndicate each other’s content.
Once you’ve finalized your content for syndication, the next step is to choose the content type.
The content type can be anything, such as:
- Blog Posts: Engaging and valuable blog posts can educate your audience on a specific topic. You can publish articles related to guides, strategies, tips, and tricks, etc.
- Infographics: Many publications consider infographics as easy to understand, and the websites only need to embed a shortcode in their webpage to publish the infographic.
- Videos: Create and promote videos mentioning all the essential points of your topic. For video content syndication, you can head over to YouTube or Instagram.
And many more.
Even your content type may vary depending on the content marketing you’re using to reach a larger audience.
Optimize for Content Syndication SEO
Content syndication is a very effective strategy; however, it comes with some risks as well, one of them is duplicate content.
If a search engine finds your syndicated pages as duplicate content, they will not index your pages.
That’s why, whenever you work with content syndication, you should always provide the source with the original link of republished content.
And, Google will understand the piece of content is syndicated content, and hence, it won’t consider it as duplicate.
Now, the question arises, “What happens if Google does not consider your site as relevant compared to the site where you’re syndicating?”
To avoid the above situation, you can either use the canonical tag or noindex tag.
- Canonical Tag: Whenever you’re republishing your content, ask the partner sites to include a rel=canonical tag. It will let Google know which one is the original piece of content and show it to the visitors.
- Noindex Tag: Ask the partner sites to use the noindex tag whenever republishing your content. This will prevent search engines from indexing the syndicated content page.
As discussed earlier, you can ask the publisher to add the original link of the republished content at the end of the article.
Find Appropriate Content Syndication Partners
Now you’re ready with your content to be syndicated. But, the important part is how to find the right content syndication partners?
To maximize your content syndication campaign, you’ve to find the appropriate websites for your content strategy.
And, to do so, follow the tips below.
List out publications that serve the same audience as yours
Republishing your content to the sites which share the same target audience will help you attract readers quickly.
I suggest using Alexa’s Audience Overlap Tool to find and reach the sites that serve your target audience.
Search for Websites that accept Content Syndication
If you’re able to find the sites that accept syndicated content, then there’s a high chance of closure when you contact them.
The simplest method to find those sites is to search “originally published in” or “originally appeared on” directly on the search engine.
If you want to be specific with your content niche, add inurl:[topic] to your search. For example, search for “originally published in” inurl:marketing.
Now, you’ll have to select the publications. However, I recommend looking for
- Higher domain authority sites
- Websites that serve the same targeted audience
- Publications ready to include canonical tags in the syndicated content
Whether you search on Google or find any other source for content syndication partners, I’d like to suggest you ask the questions below.
- How does the publisher distribute syndicated content?
- Does the website have a real audience?
- How will your content be displayed?
- Do the publications validate their results after republishing your content?
- Do websites fulfill content syndication on their own, or they outsource it?
If you run a campaign without considering the above factors, you won’t know the exact reasons for the campaign’s failure.
So, it’s better to track all the activities prior.
In case you’re unable to find the content syndication partners or aren’t approving your content, you can start with social networks.
The best way to syndicate content on social media is through Facebook’s Instant Articles and LinkedIn’s Post/Articles.
Pro Tip: When the publisher sends you how the republished content will look, I suggest checking all the things and informing them of the necessary changes (if required).
Measure the Performance of your Campaign
Once you’ve decided on your content syndication partner and republished your content on their websites.
It’s time to measure the results based on ROI, lead generation, engagement rate, increase in website traffic, and more.
However, the performance of your campaign will primarily depend on the goals you set initially.
For example, if your goal is to generate more leads for your website.
Then, you have to track the sources of traffic to your site. You’ve to analyze which syndicate partner is generating the most and least number of leads.
Or which content type (blog, video, infographic, ebook, etc.) brings you the maximum and minimum leads.
Depending on the above metrics, you can optimize or completely change the content type and syndicate partner.
Let’s take one step further; after generating leads, you can create a customer email list and regularly send them valuable emails.
With the help of an email newsletter, you can improve and drive results for your campaign goals.
Wrapping Up
Content syndication is one of the best marketing strategies that let you increase brand awareness, generate leads, and reach new readers.
If you want to put your content in front of thousands of readers, then you’ve to reach out to as many potential partners as you can.
It’s your turn to run a content syndication campaign and check whether you reach out to new readers.
You can also syndicate other publishers’ content on your site to deliver valuable and engaging content to your audience.
Have you ever created a content syndication campaign? Or did you syndicate other publisher’s content? Tell us in the comment section below.
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