5 Tips to Create a Solid Content Syndication Strategy

“Our online words are our emissaries; they tell the world who we are.” – Ann Handley

Modern marketers know the superpower of great content.

So you’ve got the right keywords and you’ve woven them to create your content masterpiece, what’s next? How do you get your masterpiece in front of the right eyes? Or any eyes for that matter?

That’s where content syndication can be your ally. It can help you get your content in front of the right audience.

In this blog post, we’ll understand what is content syndication and how you can harness its power to get the spotlight.

What is Content Syndication?

Content syndication is when you republish your content on third-party platforms as opposed to your own website. This helps you share your content with new audiences. These third-party platforms can host your eBooks, blog posts, webinars, articles, case studies, or whitepapers on their site. You get a lot more eyes on you, your third-party platform gets fresh content without putting in resources, creating a win-win situation for all.

Syndicating your content can help you:

• Grow your reach
• Build brand awareness
• Bolster brand image
• Improve SEO rankings
• Generate new leads

5 Tips to Create a Solid Content Syndication Strategy

Executing content syndication can seem a bit tricky but if done well, it can boost your lead generation efforts. We’ve broken down 5 steps to begin with or revamp your content syndication strategy. Here’s how.

1. Establish Your Goals

Like any marketing campaign, your journey must begin with a goal in mind. Before launching a syndication campaign, it’s important to see where you are now, where you’d like to be, and how content syndication can help you get there. Create a specific, measurable, and realistic goal first, then get to work.

2. Choose Your Target Audience

Identify your target audience by understanding who you actually want as your customer. To start, take a look at your existing customers and analyze this data to identify which personas work best for you.

3. Identify Your Content Unicorn

A good marketing strategy begins with good content. Review your content chest to find your top-of-the-funnel, highest quality content piece or unicorn, if you will. This should be a content asset that aligns with your goals, is inherently helpful, has worked well with your target audience, and has exclusive value. These are the golden qualities that will motivate prospects to share their contact information.

4. Find a Syndicate Partner

One of the most important things to consider when coming up with a content syndication strategy is to find your syndicate partner, that is the third-party website you’d like for your content to be published on. You must research:

• Where does your target audience spend time?
• Who is the target audience of your syndicate partner?
• What are the preferred content type, content style, and tone of your syndicate partner?
• What are their editorial guidelines for syndicated content?
• What is the rank of their website?
• How will your content be displayed?

To find syndicate partners, you can begin with a simple Google search, try using keywords like ‘originally published on’, ‘republished from’, or you can also use BuzzSumo, Moz, or SEMRush, to discover relevant websites and run a backlink and content analysis to see if they are open to content syndication opportunities. If you want to have multiple syndication partners set a timeline to distribute your content across multiple platforms effectively. Avoid partners with spammy outbound links or unclear editorial guidelines.

You can also self-syndicate. Here are a few paid options:

• Outbrain
• Taboola
• Zemanta

Here are a few free options:

• Medium
• Quora
• LinkedIn

5. Measure and Analyze

As you run content syndication campaigns, be sure to track their results. Measure your lead cost, lead volume, and lead quality as well as the traffic to your website. See how your new leads or subscribers meet your expectations and how they progress down the funnel, which platform works the best, and how your content is performing with your new audiences. This will help you improve your marketing efforts across low-performing metrics as well.

Content Syndication Best Practices to Keep in Mind

To ensure that your content syndication efforts don’t go in vain, here are some best practices that you must keep in mind:

1. Consider syndicating your content on platforms with the same or higher Domain Authority and a similar target audience as yours.

2. Guest-post on high-authority websites and then syndicate that content to your websites or publishing platforms like Medium or LinkedIn.

3. It’s best not to put all your cards on one third-party publishing table, syndicate on multiple platforms.

4. Create a unique and educative piece of content so that it is pitch-perfect and would make a top publication want to syndicate it.

5. Ensure your syndicated content remains SEO-friendly and your syndicate partner implements the rel=canonical tag on their sites. This helps the SERPs know which is the original content and only that should be indexed. Adding a meta no index tag to a page serves a similar function.

Content syndication is useful for amateur content marketers as well as content veterans who want their brand to be associated with thought leadership. When done well, content syndication can go a long way than just brand exposure and fuel your lead generation efforts.

Want to ace your content syndication game? Talk to us!