Content Syndication
Contents
Definition
Content syndication is the process of republishing a piece of content on one of your company’s online channels, which is identical to a piece of content that has already been published on another website. Alternatively, you may wish to permit external, third party sites to republish a piece of content that you have created.
Content syndication enables online publications to provide their visitors with a larger amount of new content. This form of growth marketing also benefits the original creator of the content, as it means that they are able to get their brand in front of a wider audience.
This duplicate content could be text, an article, a blog post, or a piece of multimedia content, such as an infographic, diagram or a video.
This technique is used by a huge number of companies in order to boost their sites and the traffic that their online content generates. Content syndication could be either a paid or unpaid form of marketing.
How to syndicate content
Content syndication involves creating an agreement between the original creator of the content and the platform that wishes to re-publish it. The two parties will need to outline on what platforms the content will be re-published, when the syndicated content will be published, whether it will be free or paid, and how much of the content will be duplicated.
There are multiple types and strategies of content syndication. These include:
- Republishing content from your blog site directly onto other social media channels, such as in an Instagram post.
- Republishing syndicated content from a third party website.
- Providing your content to a third party website, which they have permission to republish.
- Creating content for a website that publishes syndicated content. This would involve guest-posting on a content site, then later syndicating that content back to your own site. For this option, it is essential that you choose a website that is relevant to your industry.
If you are providing your content to an external website, they may wish to publish the whole piece of content in full, or extract a portion of it and publish a smaller version of the original content.
If a publication features syndicated content, it must clearly state that the content has been republished. It will also need to provide an external link to the owner of the asset, to declare where the content originally came from.
This declaration could look like this example:
“This blog post was originally published on Name of Company. You can read the original post here [add hyperlink to website].”
The difference between guest blogging and content syndication lies in the fact that guest blogging requires the creation of a unique piece of content, created from scratch, for the publication that is paying the creator. In comparison, content syndication utilizes content that has been created previously, for a different original purpose.
Permission for content syndication could be granted without charge. This is normally arranged if the original creator of the content would get significant benefits from this deal - for example, if the external website has a significantly larger audience.
Alternatively, a company may wish to use a paid platform to get a piece of content republished. Websites that offer this service include the likes of Medium, Tumblr, Reddit or Taboola. Those that operate as paid content syndicators typically charge on a pay per click or CTR basis.
The benefits and risks of content syndication
If you created the piece of content, content syndication is a great way to extract more value from the time, effort and expense that you invested into this asset. For businesses who are producing high quality online content, but have not yet achieved the desired outreach, content syndication can provide significant benefits.
By sharing this piece of content with a wider audience - including a number of individuals who may not be subscribing to materials that your company produces - companies can build up their brand awareness, and generate more traffic for their website. In this way, it also has the potential to improve the search engine ranking of your site.
Content syndication is a comparatively highly affordable method of increasing website traffic.
As you can see, content syndication acts as a mutually beneficial form of cross-promotion for two sites.
However, it is important to note that there are some risks associated with content syndication, most notably, the risk of damaging your website’s SEO. Google tends to penalize websites that use duplicate content, but the search engine is accepting of syndicated content where canonical links are used. So it is imperative that you include these tags alongside any syndicated content that you use.
Importance for online marketing
The best way to ensure that content syndication creates the maximum possible level of success for your company is to partner with a relevant website. Consider the target market and audience that the website has, and assess whether it aligns with that of your company.
Content syndication is an intuitive method of content marketing which can build your website traffic, potentially without incurring any costs.
If your content is syndicated by a trustworthy website with an established reputation, consumers will also view your website as a reputable resource. This will increase the number of leads and the amount of both organic and referral traffic that your website gains. As a result, your company’s online presence will continue to expand.
From the perspective of a company wishing to re-publish content from another website, this can benefit your site by enabling you to fill your website with new content for your audience to view, without having to spend considerable time creating it. Furthermore you can identify a piece of content which is high quality and is likely to engage your audience, and then contact the website with your request to syndicate it.
Related links
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/content-syndication-impact-original-content-performance/378695/
- https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-content-marketing/content-promotion
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/tips-to-boost-blogs-organic-ranking
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