Syndicated content travels fast. While cooped up only on your website, your content can only be viewed by your audience, but get your content reposted on other sites, and it can really take off.
Although getting your content syndicated by having it posted on other sites will help your own site’s traffic, the biggest benefit is getting your company’s name out on the internet. Your brand can be at the center of discussions on hundreds of websites, all of which will begin to associate your company with authority and relevance when it comes to your subject matter.
Syndicated content (work that’s properly attributed to you) should be sent out far and wide. After all, drawing in a big audience is the whole point of content marketing, and it doesn’t always matter if they’re not seeing your content on your own site initially.
Here are a few tips to developing a greater presence online through content syndication
Content Discovery Networks
There are a lot of platforms designed to help you get your content out onto as many sites as possible. The most powerful and effective networks offer a paid service: for a fee, you’re able to get your content onto a wide network of websites with ease.
You’ve seen a lot of ads that are created by these networks before. Any ‘recommended’ list of articles ‘from the web’ falls into this category. Typically these lists are paid for but designed to blend in seamlessly with the website they’re appearing on.
There are a lot of different services that all provide a slightly different distribution method. While some of them are more popular than others, which one you should use will depend on which service works best for you.
Some discovery networks that are worth checking out include:
Through using these sites, you can get your content out to the widest possible audience and get your content distributed as widely as possible. Bear in mind, though, that to get the maximum exposure from these services, you will have to pay for your success.
LinkedIn is first and foremost a social media designed for the development of career networks.
In addition to this, though, it’s also an excellent avenue for syndication, as it’s filled with regularly posted articles that are written by members of the community. In the past, gaining the opportunity to write or feature an article on LinkedIn was invite-only, but this rule has since been relaxed, meaning that anybody can submit content to the blog.
LinkedIn is particularly useful because its audience is very specific:
- The site’s Sales Navigator/ Slideshare blog gets hundreds of thousands of hits regularly
- The audience is highly focused on business, though, meaning that this is an excellent avenue in particular for B2B marketers.
- The site generates a lot of long-tail traffic, with visitors coming to articles many months after they’ve been initially published.
The trick to getting syndicated content to succeed on LinkedIn’s publishing platform is the same as getting content to succeed anywhere. Make sure it’s high quality and people will be happy to read it, engage with it, and share it with their LinkedIn friends.
Posting content on LinkedIn will naturally lead readers back to your own site, and will help grow your authority in the area that you’re discussing.
Social Bookmarking Sites
There are a lot of communities online that focus on aggregating and collecting the best possible content.
Think of sites like Reddit or Digg as big publishing services for all types of content, carefully arranged by category. When working to syndicate your content, it’s helpful to use these communities to draw in audiences.
Try exploring the communities surrounding the big sites in order to get your content in front of as many people as possible:
Anybody can post content, but there are rules about how much you can post to avoid being accused of spamming.
There are a variety of communities (called ‘subreddits’ on Reddit) which discuss content on specific topics. Some of these are niche, but the more specific you go, the fewer people are regularly checking the sites. Check out our Reddit Marketing Guide for more information.
In order to avoid being accused of posting spam, it’s not enough to simply post up links to your content. These communities exist to discuss content rather than just consume it, so to become a respected part of the community you need to take the time to get involved, comment on other content, and share content from a variety of websites. As you build your reputation, though, these social sites are excellent avenues for syndicating your work as long as they’re used sparingly.
Embed Codes
For syndication to work, you want as many people to reuse and repost your content as possible, as long as they’re rightfully attributing your content back to you. For this reason, it makes sense to make the process of syndicating your content as easy as possible.
Embed codes provide this simplicity: a small piece of code displayed in your content when posted on your site can be copied by a reader and pasted into their site to easily display your content on your site.
This is useful for several reasons. 1. It makes content syndication easy for your audience. 2. You can be sure that your content is appropriately attributed as it’ll appear on their site exactly as it does on your own.
Allowing the embedding of your content is particularly useful for visuals such as infographics which other sites might want to use to add flavour and imagery to their own posts.
RSS Submission
RSS is all about syndication.
It’s literally what RSS stands for – Really Simple Syndication: it’s a tool that’s designed to help syndicate your content for all those who want to get their hands on it, over a variety of convenient platforms.
In order to broaden your syndication opportunities, you can make your RSS feed available to a wider potential audience.
There are plenty of RSS aggregation sites online which are designed to combine and collect a wide range of RSS content to put it in front of the people who’ll want to see it.
Submitting your RSS feed to these sites means that your content will appear alongside other work on a wider range of collected RSS feeds.
- This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get a lot of extra traffic per RSS feed – your content will be mixed in with a lot of other work, so it won’t get a huge amount of attention
- By submitting to as many RSS directories as possible, though, you’ll see your efforts add up to a solid increase in traffic.
Through getting your content syndicated in a variety of RSS directories, you’ll get an increase in traffic from putting your content in front of a lot of new viewers.
Blog Communities
The more places your content is syndicated, the further it will travel.
This means that you shouldn’t overlook any place to post or mirror your content – especially high profile online communities filled with personal blogs. Sites like Hubpages, Scribd and Medium let anyone start their own blog on the site. You can create your own blog on these sites and repost all of your content from your site.
The communities surrounding these blogs are tight-knit and appreciate new content so long as you’re willing to engage with other community members.
Make sure you do engage, though – small blogging communities online are a great opportunity to develop a reputation as an expert in your field. It doesn’t take much extra energy to create a mirror site on open blog platforms, but it can provide a nice boost to traffic as you syndicate your content on other sites.
Social Media Outlets
Social media is a natural choice for syndicating content, particularly anything visual. You can get your content in front of specifically targeted people by buying ads on social platforms. Good quality content will be shared by online communities, reaching further.
I’ve already spoken about the usefulness of LinkedIn for syndication, but there are ways of using many social sites for spreading your content. Visual or video content works particularly well as it can be shared widely with ease and catches the eye easily. Don’t use links – post your content directly into social media to help it become more accessible and sharable.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all welcoming of content in a variety of forms, and there are plenty of visual-only social media tools such as Instagram or Pinterest that will help your content travel further.
Don’t worry if you don’t see a huge boost in traffic: getting your brand’s persona out to audiences is the most useful thing you can achieve from these posts.
Big Name Sites That Accept Submissions
A lot of big, powerful sites are very happy to receive syndicated content.
They’re so happy, in fact, that sites like Mashable, Huffington Post and Business 2 Community all welcome content submissions. These sites and others like them are an excellent place to get your content syndicated: You’ll benefit from their very large readership and the exposure that comes along with that. Picking the right site can mean targeting a specific audience that’s going to be interested to hear what your business has to say.
Of course, considering the popularity of these websites, they receive a lot of submissions regularly. That means that they only choose the best content to syndicate, and you’re up against some stiff competition to gain their attention.
To make sure your content is exactly what they’re looking for:
- Make sure your content is appropriate to the site you’re pitching to – if your work doesn’t match their tone, style, or focus, it’ll be rejected.
- Submit only the highest quality content – they want to see your best work.
- Don’t submit too much content – but be bold and try repeatedly if rejected to find the perfect piece of work for their site.
Through making use of popular outlets, you can make sure your syndicated content reaches the widest possible relevant audience.
Reach Out to Prime Sites Directly
Plenty of big websites readily and openly syndicated submissions to help supplement their regular content.
Just because a site doesn’t advertise a need for syndicated content, though, it doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to accept submissions.
For many sites, the idea of opening the floodgates to submissions would mean bringing huge waves of content upon themselves. Instead they choose a closed-door approach, reaching out to creators privately or only syndicating content when approached directly by creators.
To get your content on other sites, often all that’s needed is a friendly email. Send a message to the site’s content editor, explaining who you are, why you’re an authority on your subject, and offering your content for syndication. Alternatively, many sites have an email address you can contact to share story tips – wherever possible, though, try to talk directly to a person.
The syndication opportunities that come out of this will be rare but beautiful. You won’t be fighting any competition for attention, meaning your syndicated content will have a large audience’s full attention. You’ll also be able to build a useful relationship with the editor of a popular site, meaning that you’ll be developing ties with influencers in your industry.
Making more personal, private contact to ask sites to syndicate your content will provide fantastic results as long as you’re persistent and polite throughout.
Getting Your Content Everywhere
Syndication is an incredibly useful arrow in your content marketing quiver.
Through using the tools at your disposal to get your content in front of a wide audience, you can develop your reputation, build a strong following, and increase the traffic to your site.
This article originally appeared in Louder Online. This article was written by Aaron Agius from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
