You’ve probably heard a lot about content marketing – but what about content syndication?
You may have heard that this is not a good idea because of the issues surrounding duplicate content. But actually it can be an excellent way to get more people to find your content, and it can drive more people to your website.
Here’s a guide to what you need to know to get started with content syndication.
What Is Content Syndication?
Content syndication is where you republish your existing content on other websites. For example, you may publish a regular blog on your site, and syndication is where you take that existing blog post and publish the same content elsewhere.
Benefits It Can Bring
One of the main reasons for content syndication is that you can get a whole new audience for your content. If you are just starting out, you may not have many readers of your blog, no matter how good the content is. Syndicating that content on a site with a large amount of traffic can get new eyeballs on the content, which could direct more traffic to your website.
It also saves time. Creating content worth reading is a time-consuming activity, and syndication is a way for you to make your content go further with relatively little extra effort.
It is also good for improving brand recognition. You can get your name mentioned in more places and demonstrate your knowledge to more people. Again, it does not take much more effort once you have written the content.
Key Things to Consider
One of the main issues with content syndication surrounds duplicate content. Google is not a fan of duplicate content, and it obviously does not want to show up numerous pages with the same content. As a result, it will only display one version of the content. Clearly, you want that version to be yours.
So it is always essential to publish your content on your own website first. You should then leave it for a few days, and only syndicate that content once it has been indexed by the search engines.
There are also a few other things you can do when syndicating your content to ensure you get recognised as the original author:
- Encourage the syndicating website to place the rel=canonical tag on the page containing your content, which will inform the search engines that you are the original author.
- Ask the publisher to NoIndex the content, which will ensure that you still get the PageRank benefits of any links from the copy.
However you go about it, you should usually only syndicate some of your content and not all of it. Keep some content completely unique to your site, and this will not only help with SEO, but it will give people a reason to visit your website because they will find original content there.
How to Get Started
The best way to get started with content syndication is to choose a few articles that you would like to publish elsewhere. If you have been publishing a blog for a few months, take one or two of your best posts and start with these.
You should then choose a website that accepts syndicated content, and where your content fits the type of content published. A few sites include:
- Medium
- Business 2 Community
- StumbleUpon
There are many more, so choose a few sites where you think your target audience is likely to be present, and start experimenting.
Experiment with Content Syndication
Content syndication is not for everyone, but it is certainly worth considering. If you want to make your existing content go further, and you want to access a new audience and drive more traffic to your site, syndication can be a great way to go about it. So choose some of your best content, and start syndicating to see whether this marketing tactic can work for you.
