Content syndication refers to publishing the same piece of content to one or more different platforms to increase your reach and get new eyes on it. When done right, content syndication is a great way to give your old content new life and continue to leverage it to raise brand awareness. However, if done poorly, content syndication can actually hurt your SEO and the domain authority you’ve worked hard to build on your own website.
Here’s what you need to know about taking a strategic approach to content syndication to make it work for you instead of the other way around.
How to set content syndication goals
Before you throw yourself headlong into content syndication, you need to evaluate how it fits into your marketing mix and what purpose it is fulfilling. Your goals for content syndication might be attracting better-informed leads or recruiting leads from new industries. Whatever those goals are, you need to set them ahead of time and decide on associated KPIs (key performance indicators) that you will use to track them.
High-level KPIs, such as the number of impressions and click-throughs, are useful to know, but you will want to get more granular with specific KPIs, such as lead match with target personas and return response rate. When selecting these KPIS, choose the ones that will align with your marketing goals and help you track how well you are meeting them.
Also Read: 5 Essential Analysis Tips for Content Syndication Lead Nurture Campaigns
What kind of content to create for content syndication
When you think of what type of content to syndicate, blogs are probably the first thing that comes to mind. While blogs are a great option for syndication, you should think outside the box and explore other types of syndication content, including white papers, webinars, ebooks, videos, and more.
By diversifying into other types of content, you will be able to maximize the amount of existing content you can potentially reuse, which creates less work for you. You will also make yourself stand out among other hopeful companies who are only looking to syndicate blog posts, increasing your chances of getting picked up by a trusted syndication partner.
What to look for in content syndication partners
When looking for a content syndication partner, there are several factors you should prioritize: the trustworthiness of their reputation, their reach for both the size and the specific audience, and the ability to link back to the original article.
The best content syndication partners have a greater audience and a higher domain authority than yours, so they should receive your best pieces. You might also find success syndicating old content on sites that have a similar reach and domain authority to yours.
The overall size of the site’s audience doesn’t matter as much as what buyer personas and industries they reach. A website can have a million regular readers, but if none of them are in the market for your product to service, syndicating content there is not going to translate to more qualified leads. Look for syndication partners that are already reaching the audience you are trying to connect with.
Finally, a good content syndication partner should follow best practices for syndication, including linking back to the source website and original page. By following these best practices, you will avoid potential consequences from the Google algorithm for having duplicate content. And don’t forget to tag your own pages with rel=canonical to tell the search engines which page to index.
How often to publish syndicated content
Timing is key when it comes to syndicating content. You want to give your original content a chance to be indexed by search engines first, which can take anywhere from hours to weeks. If you want to wait for your content to actually start ranking, that will take additional weeks or even months. Thus, your syndicated content schedule should be several months behind your original content schedule.
When creating your syndicated content calendar, the key is to start with older content that is already indexed and ranking. Since you’ll be syndicating your content across multiple platforms, we recommend you try to place a piece at each individual partner every two to three weeks. If you are experimenting with paid syndication options like Outbrain and Taboola, your budget will dictate the frequency of your posts.
After a few months have passed, assess your syndication program, and look at which syndication partners are best meeting the content goals that you outlined in step one. Double down on those partners and step up the frequency of your cadence to see if that works. As for the partners that aren’t meeting your goals, tweak one variable of your strategy, such as the type of content you send to them, and keep a close eye on the outcome over the next few syndication attempts. Some syndication partners require trial and error to get right, so don’t give up yet.
Moving forward with content syndication
Ready to engage more potential buyers with content syndication? Last year, TechnologyAdvice connected more than 750,000 technology buyers with the world’s leading vendors through our lead generation solutions, including content syndication. Reach out to us today to learn how our content syndication opportunities might be a fit for your business.