Growing your online audience requires diligence and commitment. You need to stick to your content schedule and publish quality material like clockwork. Though time-consuming, churning out valuable content is a fool-proof way to ensure that your quality score remains high. It also establishes thought-leadership and your position as an industry expert worth paying attention to.
Syndicating your content is one of the many ways to boost your reputation and enhance your visibility. However, a great deal of confusion surrounds this practice. It’s often confused with guest posting, or worse, considered to be plagiarism by those who can’t tell the difference.
Guest posting is about publishing content on one third-party website. Additionally, you’re usually not allowed to re-publish the same content on other sites, including your own. Syndication, on the other hand, is the practice of giving permission to re-publish content from your own site onto a third-party website.
Syndicated content can either be a carbon copy of your content, or it can also mean publishing only a portion of it onto another site. Plagiarism, however, is the practice of copying content without permission or trying to pass it off as your own. Needless to say, plagiarism is a terrible practice and should never be tolerated.
Here are a few tips to help maximize the positive results of content syndication.
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Syndicate Your Content for Free
It’s possible to have your content re-published onto a reputable website without having to pay for it. Numerous sites don’t charge anything to repost your content, depending on the industry you belong to. As long as you follow specific guidelines, in most cases, you can easily submit your content to obtain syndication services for free.
Reputable sites typically impose strict quality controls that you must abide by for your content to be published. Others only post content that fits their niche and target audience.
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Pay to Have Your Content Syndicated on Popular Sites
Reputable online publishers such as CNN, Entrepreneur.com, and Forbes are usually an extension of their print counterparts or cable TV media giants. Since they are prominent names in the publishing world, these are excellent sites to re-publish your content and amplify your reach and exposure. They also typically charge you for their syndicated services.
The potential to drive traffic and awareness through these sites is enormous. If your content resonates with their readers, you have the opportunity to get exposure from prospective buyers who might otherwise not have heard of you. These readers could potentially become a regular part of your blog readership, and you’d be increasing your thought leadership with readers who have not heard of your brand yet.
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Syndicate to Sites with Greater Authority Than Yours
The credibility of the site that links to yours has the potential to give a positive boost to your site’s rankings. This is why you should see to it that you target only the best sites in your niche that Google recognizes as having actual authority. That website’s good reputation will help boost your own site’s authority and help increase your search rankings.
This borrowed authority will contribute to improving your SEO, get more people to see your content, and attract a new source of readers to your own site. The more you come up with quality syndicated content that new readers can resonate with, the more it amplifies your exposure, attracting new audiences, building authority and fostering brand trust.
Keep in mind though, when you’re syndicating content on high authority sites, the quality of your content has to match their potentially high standards.
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Select Relevant Content for Syndication
It bears repeating that the content you submit for syndication must match the interests of that website’s audience. So take the time to find out what topics and types of content will truly resonate with the readers that you’re trying to target.
You’re building your reputation with a site that most likely has a higher authority than yours (if you’re doing it right), so you should put your top content forward and syndicate the best you have to offer.
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Don’t Let Search Engines Confuse Your Syndicated Content with Duplicate Content
If you’re not careful, you might make the mistake of creating duplicate content when trying to get your posts syndicated. You should know that search engines penalize websites for having content that isn’t unique and original, so take every precaution to prevent that from happening.
There are three common ways to ensure that your republished work is not regarded as duplicate content:
- Rel=Canonical:
Placing the “rel=canonical” tag on your syndicated content will ensure that it points back to the original post located on your website and attributes all associated authority to the source. This tag tells search engines that you are the original publisher and that the syndicated content is just a copy.
- NoIndex:
Using the “noindex” tag on the syndicated copy tells the search engines that the republished content should be kept out of the directory and that automated bots should avoid indexing the page.
- Direct Attribution Link:
A third option is to get a link back from the syndicated copy directly to the original content on your website. Note that the link should point to the actual article and not just your home page.
Before You Go
If you publish quality content on a consistent basis, don’t let it go to waste by not sharing it through syndication. It is one of the best ways to increase your brand’s online visibility and enhance your reputation. You can opt to syndicate while maintaining a good balance with original content and including curated posts in the mix to sustain engagement and keep visitors interested.
If you’re just starting out, a more aggressive approach might be advantageous so you should take every opportunity for content syndication, targeting high authority sites as much as possible.
If you already have a more established reputation, then you can afford to be more selective about where you’ll be republishing your content.
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