What is Content Syndication?
By Melissa | Oct 13, 2021 (5 min read)
For most business owners, when you start doing marketing, you usually will share new content on your website and social media accounts.
While posting new content on your blog will help to grow your website rankings, there is a lower chance that many people will discover it, especially in the early days. Finding a good syndication partner is essential to reach a wider audience.
Regardless of how good the content you create is, there must be a way for people to find it, engage with it, and share it.
Getting More Attention For Your Content
Like most businesses, the center of your content marketing strategy is probably your own company’s blog, your social media posts.
But if you’re starting your content marketing program, zero people are visiting that blog on their own. To increase demand generation, you must start to get your existing content to a wider audience.
This situation is where content syndication can be a dramatic help. Syndicated content not only increases your audience reach and brand awareness, but it also builds more backlinks and drives more traffic to your website.
How Does Content Syndication Work?
Content syndication sounds like a very technical thing. However, it is simply a method of republishing your existing content (blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts) on other sites to reach a broader audience. This is sometimes called web syndication or syndicated content.
A simple example of syndicating your blog content is by republishing your content to Medium. Another example would be publishing your video content on YouTube or Vimeo. These are free options and can be a very effective content syndication partner.
Of course, there are more significant ways to take advantage of content syndication and find syndication opportunites.
Publications of all sizes take advantage of content syndication because it’s a chance to be published by top industry sites. By allowing your content to be syndicated and setting up a partnership with other websites in your industry or niche, you can begin to leverage content syndication and tap into a larger audience.
For example, if you contribute guest blog posts to third-party websites with a similar audience to yours, you can potentially republish those same articles on your website. Some publishers may ask for a period of exclusivity for new content pieces, usually lasting a few weeks or longer.
Why Is Content Syndication Important?
The online world today is vast. It’s not realistic to think that all the people you want to reach will discover your content just because you published it on your blog or social media channels.
Syndicating your content gets your blog posts, videos, infographics, or podcasts in front of a different audience who otherwise would have never known it existed.
Content syndication is a very low-cost (and usually no-cost) way to make your content go further. Plus, it’s much quicker (and less costly) than writing a new blog post for a third-party website because you can repurpose (or rework) content you’ve already created.
Content Syndication Vs. SEO
A lot of people have concerns that syndicating content might lead Google to see it as duplicate content. The reality is that the Google algorithm won’t penalize you for syndicating content on other websites. At worst, any identical versions of your written articles might be filtered out of the search results. But if you are creating great content, you will also gain new followers and fans along the way.
It’s important to understand that content syndication isn’t about SEO. It’s a content marketing tactic. Which means the focus is on getting more humans to see it sooner. SEO, by contrast, is about increasing the topical authority of your website over time.
How Does Content Syndication Help B2B Marketing?
B2B content syndication is when businesses create digital content such as whitepapers, blogs, and videos are republished to third-party websites. You see this type of content on sites such as Forbes, Inc, Search Engine Journal, TechMeme, TechCrunch, and many others. Guest blogging and guest posting is an excellent way to boost your profile as a content creator.
The core aim of B2B content syndication is to generate new leads from prospective customer accounts.
B2B marketers generally make agreements with content syndication vendors about the number of leads they want to generate from a content syndication campaign.
The content is typically gated somehow, which means that it requires a person to give their email address before they can access the content piece.
While this can be a valuable B2B marketing strategy, keep in mind that leads generated from content syndication campaigns will almost always be cold leads. You need to have an email nurture campaign in place that helps to warm up the leads before handing them over to your sales team.
Position Yourself as an Authority
The key benefit of content syndication is that you gain additional visibility for your business that wouldn’t be possible by solely hosting it on your website.
By selecting the right content vendors, you can position yourself or a company as a thought leader. Especially on some sites such as Forbes, you can even use the fact you have been published on the platform as a way to grow your credibility.
By simply republishing blogs, videos, and other content to third-party vendors, you increase the total maximum exposure and grow your industry influence.
In conclusion, there is a considerable need online for fresh, valuable ideas. As a marketer, if you can share them with other websites and agree to let them syndicate what you create, you will gain a lot more attention than simply keeping them on your website.
