Content syndication is a way of getting your online material to reach a broader audience. You can work with industry influencers, digital publishers or other businesses to promote your content by sharing it on their sites. You can also use syndicated content on your own site.
In some cases, a third-party site will republish an entire page or article, or, it will just be a specific section or a summarised version of the copy. Either way, you’ll be gaining a backlink to your site.
We know that some businesses will be wary of letting another site publish their content – but syndication can bring a host of benefits for your content and SEO strategies. When it’s done right, you’re able to drive brand awareness and boost traffic back to your site through reciprocal links.
What are the benefits?
The main advantage of content syndication is building site authority. The more authority a site has, the higher it will rank on Google. By republishing your existing, high-quality content on an authoritative site – you’re able to expand your reach and drive more valuable traffic.
Determining a site’s authority can help you to decide whether or not you’ll want to share your content with them. Earning backlinks from a reputable, high-quality site is key to SEO.
You can use a tool like SEMrush’s Authority Score to measure the quality and SEO performance of a site before approaching it as a content syndication partner. As long as you’re working with the right sites – you’ll be able to improve your own authority score as a result.
Other benefits include:
- Increase your reach – Place your content in front of more relevant users.
- Improve online reputation –. When your content is syndicated on larger or well-known sites, you could be improving your brand reputation.
- More backlinks -Third-party sites will be linking back to your site, which is great for SEO.
- Repurpose content – Content syndication is a way of making use of your existing content and giving it a new audience and purpose.
- A cost-effective approach to content marketing – Content syndication is a low-cost or usually no-cost way to expand your content and get it seen. It’s a lot cheaper and faster than writing a new post for a third-party site. You can also usually post author’s content on your blog for free.
Different types of content syndication
Using syndication as part of your content marketing strategy could give you a competitive advantage. How you choose to use this method will depend on your budget, industry, goals and target audience.
There are different ways of getting started – but we’ve narrowed it down to three. All of the below methods are cost-effective and straightforward approaches to content syndication.
Syndicate content on your blog
Content syndication can work both ways – in the sense that you can also ask other sites for permission to republish their content on your blog. This is a way of making sure you’re featuring enough helpful content as possible on your site.
There’s probably some big names, known authors or industry experts in your field who you’d like to post on your blog. However, this can generally be tricky as it’s likely they won’t always get back to you or have the time to provide you with consistent content. So, asking to use an author or influencer’s existing post, is a more realistic and time-saving proposal.
Take Wordstream as an example; they often feature posts from relevant authors. They introduced ‘12 Days of Experts’ which features a post from a new expert or author each day. One example is this blog from LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner.
If you’re guest posting on third-party sites, you could also share your post on your own blog. This is a win-win as you’re gaining traffic and broadening your audience while improving the quality of your blog. Be sure to check with the site you write for before republishing the content – they may prefer you to wait a few weeks or for the page to be crawled.
Work with non-competitors
As well as looking for well-known authors names and authors in your industry, it’s always good to work with other blogs and sites. It’s best to find another site with a similar target audience. However, that doesn’t mean working with your competitors.
It’s best to work with someone in your industry but who is targeting a slightly different audience. For example, two digital marketing agencies could benefit from content syndication if they specialise in different channels, i.e. SEO and PPC. Both of these companies will have a similar audience but won’t be competing directly against each other.
When another site publishes your content and links back to your site – you’ll be covering one of the most important factors in SEO ranking – backlinks. Google uses backlinks to determine your sites authority, relevancy and trustworthiness.
Use social media
Social media is a great platform to share your content. It’s straightforward, free and can get your content out there to a much larger audience. It’s likely that you’ve already come across syndicated content on the major platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.
For example, LinkedIn allows you to publish articles on your platform. You can add a photo banner, headline and text:
Once it’s live, followers can like, react, comment and share your content on their feed or sites. This is a simple way of reaching new users by publishing content that is engaging, relevant and shareable.
Publishing your articles on social media can boost its chances of being syndicated. Find out how to create a shareable article for LinkedIn here.
If you have any questions or want to discuss your content marketing – get in touch!