How To Build an Effective Content Syndication Strategy for Your Business

Content creation is the cornerstone of an effective content marketing strategy. Generating and publishing high-quality content consistently plays a critical role in attracting customers, showcasing business expertise, accelerating user engagement, and boosting brand awareness. While creating content that targets one’s ideal audience is a crucial content marketing practice, it’s equally important to ensure the content is viewed and read by the right people. According to HubSpot’s 2022 Marketing Industry Trends Report, 27% of marketers across varied industries consider generating traffic and leads as their top challenge in 2022. 

When it comes to improving website traction, a majority of the companies focus on optimizing content for search engines, but it’s not enough. As a result, many marketers have adopted content syndication as a powerful and effective way to increase inbound traffic and maximize the visibility of existing content on the website. Content syndication refers to the process of republishing a piece of existing digital content such as article, whitepaper, infographic, blog, research reports, e-books, press release, etc., on other websites. It helps businesses reach larger groups of people and continually provide fresh content to readers. Content syndication benefits both the third-party publication republishing the content and the original publisher of the content.

What To Expect From Content Syndication?

Companies can reap a slew of benefits by making content syndication a part of their content marketing plan. Whether it be rapid traffic growth or improved website authority, content syndication serves many purposes. Let’s dive deeper into how content syndication can help optimize a company’s content marketing strategy. 

1. Lead generation – Content syndication is an effective way for companies to derive leads and capture new prospects. By republishing content on third-party websites with the same buyer personas, companies can target a broad set of like-minded audiences and new prospective customers who could not otherwise be introduced to their services. Moreover, syndicating gated content assets such as whitepapers, case studies, research papers, etc., enables companies to gather prospect information through form fills. They can align their marketing activities accordingly to move the lead through the sales funnel for conversion efficiently. When choosing content syndication as a strategy to gain new prospects, companies must ensure they showcase their thought leadership and industry expertise instead of focusing entirely on pitching their products to connect with and attract highly qualified leads.

2. Traffic boost – Companies incorporating content syndication in their content marketing strategy can expect massive growth in website traffic quickly. As companies syndicate their content to high authority publishers, they increase backlinks, redirecting traffic to their website. The more high-quality and legitimate backlinks a website receives, the more reliable it is considered by search engines. This increases the site’s Domain Authority (DA), which improves the chances of ranking high on search engine results pages (SERPs) and brings new and relevant organic traffic to the website

3. Expanded content exposure – Continually creating relevant, high-quality content is challenging and rewarding, so it’s imperative to expose it to a broader audience and maximize its value. Content syndication allows companies to publicise their content to new demographics and a larger group of individuals by republishing it on other websites. It enables them to attract new people interested in their content and build a loyal online readership. Moreover, by syndicating content from other websites with similar target markets, publishers can streamline their content creation strategy and ensure they don’t run short on providing relevant content to their readers.

4. Improved brand positioning and awareness – Content saturation has become a constant challenge for content marketers. Companies must establish themselves as thought leaders in a particular niche or industry to efficiently stand out from others. Companies can position themselves as the subject matter experts in their target market by regularly syndicating their best-performing content on reputed and relevant websites.  However, it’s essential to ensure the content being republished is non-promotional, well-researched, and adds value to the reader. In a nutshell, authoritative backlinks combined with high-quality content featured on leading websites are good ways for a company to grow its credibility and strengthen brand equity.

Best Content Syndication Practices To Follow

Companies can perform content syndication in a variety of ways:

• Republishing existing old content on other websites
• Writing new niche content to publish on a relevant site 
• Repurposing original content before publishing 
• Posting a summary or short excerpt of the original content piece 
• Paying publishers to get content in front of the ideal target market

Irrespective of the type of content syndication, it can help companies seamlessly achieve their content marketing goals when done right. Companies and marketers must follow certain best practices to syndicate content successfully and avoid the common pitfalls associated with the process. Outlined below are some essential practices when syndicating content:

1. SEO-proofing is important – One of the common challenges that marketers face when performing content syndication is content duplication. Despite being the original content source, it’s also not uncommon for companies to get outranked by other more prominent and higher authority publishers. Additionally, companies risk damaging their reputation and hampering their SEO efforts by syndicating content on the wrong and spammy websites. Listed below are some vital SEO best practices companies should follow:

• • Ensure the third-party website republishing the original digital content always implements a rel=canonical Tag. It helps avoid content duplication and penalty-related issues by pointing search engine bots to the original version. This also ensures that the authority and credit for the content is given to the source.
  • In case a rel=canonical tag has not been implemented, adding a NoIndex tag on the third-party website is another way to eliminate content duplication problems as it prevents the syndicated content from getting indexed by search engines and being shown on SERPs.
  • In case the rel=canonical tag and NoIndex tag are missing, the third-party websites must include a backlink pointing to the company’s content source. Search engines consider backlinking from high authority third-party websites a measure of the original website’s popularity and influence, and it will help boost SEO ranking and authority score.
    

2. Choose the publications carefully – Companies can have different goals that they aim to achieve with content syndication. Whether it’s traffic growth, greater content exposure, or lead conversion, companies should choose the right publication that meets their needs and is open to content syndication. For instance, if a company wants to spread brand awareness, content should be syndicated on leading publications with massive following and viewership. On the other hand, if a company aims to target a niche audience, choosing websites that focus on those topics and demographics is a good way. It’s also essential to ensure the third-party website is relevant to the company’s target market and that its tonality fits well with its brand. Other factors to keep in mind include the third-party website’s rank, authority, editorial guidelines, and SEO practices. Moreover, always consider multiple relevant third-party websites to syndicate content for greater organic reach and visibility. 

3. Spend time creating insightful content – One of the most critical factors for successfully syndicating content is creating quality original content with a well-defined purpose, good depth, high relevance, and unique perspectives that resonate with the target audience. To make the content more attention-worthy, marketers can visually present key takeaways, insights, and statistics via infographics, memes, diagrams, charts, gifs, etc. Poor quality or thin content that’s either wholly promotional or doesn’t offer anything new prevents users from engaging with content and performs poorly on search engines. Moreover, websites and prominent publishers receive a storm of content syndication requests from big and small companies. The only way to stand out is by creating top-notch content that aligns with their standards, guidelines, and viewers. Another good practice for effective content syndication is to keep a mix of syndicated and original content on one’s website to ensure a company’s standing as a quality content creator remains intact. This will help maintain the domain authority and improve the overall brand image.

4. Don’t forget to self-syndicate – While many third-party websites are receptive to republishing content, companies can also republish their content on other platforms and websites themselves. This is where self-syndication comes into the picture. There are multiple free platforms where companies can republish their original content, including videos, blog posts, slideshows, infographics, etc., to tap into new audiences. Companies can either publish a short excerpt from their content linking to their website or entirely republish the existing content. Companies should also syndicate content from other websites and publishers to provide readers with something new and avoid content saturation. Another essential tip to remember when practising content syndication is to keep a time gap between posting original content and syndicating it to other websites. This will help marketers gauge the original post’s organic performance and then ultimately accelerate its popularity and traffic through syndication.

5. Consider paid content syndication – Paid content syndication refers to the approach where marketers or companies pay to push their content to their target market. Paid content syndication works similar to the pay-per-click (PPC) model of Google Ads. Businesses can advertise and place their content on prominent websites by defining a fixed budget, cost-per-click (CPC), and target market. It ensures that businesses of all sizes and types can get their content featured on websites such as CNN, People, Reuters, ESPN, Wall Street Journal, etc., without paying a hefty amount of money. Additionally, companies can partner with a content syndication service provider that takes care of their complete content distribution strategy, including content creation, syndication, advertising, and lead generation.

6. Leverage the right tools and platforms – Modern marketers can leverage a wide range of content syndication tools to promote content and increase engagement. Depending on the requirements and business goals, companies can choose from free or paid content syndication tools and platforms to maximize their content reach. Each of these tools comes with its own set of features and capabilities. Some popular paid content syndication tools include Taboola, Outbrain, nRelate, and Zemanta. Similarly, there are many free platforms where companies can promote and republish their content, such as Medium, SlideShare, LinkedIn, Quora, Pinterest, and Reddit. Companies can use other tools for content syndication, including RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for amplified traffic and content exposure, Google Analytics to keep track of their content performance, and dlvr.it for auto-sharing content from RSS feeds on social media websites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, etc.

Conclusion

Content syndication is a powerful way to amp up a company’s content marketing efforts. By implementing it the right way and targeting the right people, companies can unlock massive advantages, including enhanced organic discovery and high-quality website traffic, lead generation, optimized SEO performance, and improved credibility and trust. Companies can efficiently chalk out a winning content syndication strategy by considering their unique business goals and specific best practices, avoiding common mistakes, and adopting the right tools. 

Connect with our marketing experts if you are interested in learning more about how content syndication can help level up your content marketing strategy.