The key to sharing your content is learning about syndication. Put simply, content syndication pushes your blog posts, audio or video podcasts out to third-party sites, either in full, or as a snippet, link, or thumbnail.
The idea behind syndication is to get people to read your articles, listen to or view your podcasts, then interact by commenting or sharing – a process commonly known in the business as engagement. It’s the technique of plugging your content into related digital contexts, e.g. social media, either to boost traffic to your website or just to get exposure for your brand, key personalities or products.
Syndication should be part of a complete content marketing strategy, but even if you don’t have a formal content marketing effort, you probably have content – web pages, blog posts, videos – that could be syndicated.
Syndication Strategy
Some brands struggle with what they want to accomplish from syndication.
- Is the goal to drive traffic to the main website similar to SEO or paid search?
- Is the goal to build awareness of your products or services?
- Is the goal something else entirely?
The first phase of content syndication is, as with most things, definition: establishing goals that match your business model.
- Example: if you’re trying to build traffic to your blog to capture leads, syndicating full article content out to partners might not be the best approach.
- As an alternative, syndicating a headline, the first paragraph, and a link back to the blog, might make better sense.
- If you’re mainly trying to build awareness of your product or brand in a broad sense, syndication of all forms may be in order.
Once you know what your goal is, think about the kind of content you’ve got and where you’d like to send it.
- Map out content distribution partners, what their requirements are, and your content and infrastructure (software) capability.
- Many syndication partners require custom RSS feeds, custom selected URLs, thumbnail images, snippets, titles, or paragraph excerpts.
Plan ahead for syndication. During a site redesign or launch, or when setting up your content strategy, content structure (think metadata schemas and content types) and content management systems, it’s worth thinking about how to craft auto-generated feeds flexibly and without a lot of manual work.
Syndication Partners
Simple content syndication in the form of RSS feeds has been around for years.
- RSS made it easy for individuals and websites to grab your content using automation.
- With the rise of social networks and sharing, RSS usage has diminished among end users, though it still has an important role.
Beyond RSS, however, a plethora of new syndication options has emerged – both paid and non-paid.
Paid Content Syndication
Paid syndication engines typically charge the advertiser or content promoter per click and then share revenue with the publisher if they are large enough. It’s an alternative to “traditional” AdWord or PPC campaigns. Costs are low, starting for some vendors at around $0.10 per click and going up to $0.30 or more. The two major players in this field are Outbrain and Taboola.
- Outbrain describes itself as a content recommendation system, providing links to related content on major publication sites including Time, CNN, and the Washington Post. Outbrain has a self-service interface with costs set on a per-click bid model. It’s easy for a small business to set up and also scales to large businesses and enterprises.
- Taboola powers recommended content links on major publication sites. Unlike Outbrain, however, Taboola requires each link to have an associated thumbnail image. This may help to boost clicks to your content, but could require more work on your part or that of your developer. Taboola’s engine may also be used to promote internal related content.
Non-Paid Syndication
There are several syndication opportunities that don’t require a big spend.
- Example: financial businesses can have their thought leaders syndicate their content to sites like SeekingAlpha.com free of charge.
Related industry sites and blogs are always looking for good content and they tend to want it for free.
- Find out which sites have an audience in your industry and ask them if they’re interested in receiving an RSS feed of original content.
- Syndication partners typically want unique content and at least some sort of delay before the content is published on your own site.
- This goes beyond the practice of guest posting, as there is a long-term relationship and the value is more than a backlink (though it doesn’t hurt to ask for that, too).
Manual Syndication
Many new and emerging sites are tempting places to distribute or cross-post content.
- Reddit (pick the right sub-reddit for your content).
- Medium (the long-form content site from Twitter).
Good content, created as part of a larger content marketing effort, should be able to stand on its own on these earned platforms.
Conclusion
There’s always more to discuss regarding content syndication:
- How to optimise content for cost-effective syndication.
- How to track and report syndication efforts and make sure they are managed effectively.
- How to allocate budgets across syndication and other types of content promotion efforts (social network promotion, paid search, ad exchanges, etc).
These basic principles should stand you in good stead to starting thinking about and planning your own syndication strategy to get your content noticed by your target audience.
Edward Solomon has over 30 years’ experience in project management, technical education, computer networking, web design and development and is a Digital Business Consultant for PENNInk Productions Ltd.
