Day: May 7, 2014

The last time you visited CNN.com or some other authoritative website, you probably noticed a few links with thumbnails under the heading ‘From around the web’. These links direct you to websites that are not part of the CNN network. In other words, it is pretty evident that CNN syndicates these links for a certain amount of money, helping those syndicated websites to receive the massive traffic that CNN usually enjoys. By paying a certain amount of money to content syndication companies like Outbrain or Taboola, companies and businesses can get their blogs, articles and columns featured or syndicated on authoritative websites like Huffington Post, CNN or just about any important online publication out there. Content syndication has slowly come to be one of the most important steps in content marketing. You might be having a lot of content that has been published in all these years. However, if you are not marketing your content on all the available platforms, it is probably going unnoticed from the larger targeted web traffic. With that in mind, we strive to explain not only the importance of content syndication in content marketing, but also give you a brief overview about how best to do it. Let us take a look at 5 important reasons why content syndication is important as part of content marketing: • Visibility on authoritative websites It is not always that you get to make your content available on a highly authoritative website. When you choose a content syndication service, your content, which could probably never get a mention in mainstream media, can find a place on of the most important websites. No matter how relatively unknown your own content is, letting your content appear on a more authoritative website will make you visible. • Increase lead generation Content syndication helps targeted people to click on your links, after they probably read a related article on the publisher’s site. Usually, content syndication takes into account the demographics, psychographics and browsing patterns before making your link appear down below. This leads to a targeted lead generation as those who click on your link tend to be more or less interested in what you offer. • Increase revenue When your blogs, articles, columns and even landing pages are syndicated on a third party website, chances are, more people will end up buying your product or service. If you are involved in monetizing your content, content syndication directly helps you to increase your revenue. This is one of the better ways to increase revenue with existing content. • Accidental discovery A number of people who arrive at web pages do so accidentally. When they click on syndicated links accidentally, they might turn out to be leads or even prospects. This helps you to make yourself be discovered accidentally. It is a great way to make sure that your content is being discovered by audiences that you earlier had no access to. • Increase and sustain traffic Any form of content syndication leads people to click on your links. That increases traffic to your website. When you continue to be a part of content syndication programs, you will be able to sustain your increased traffic over a period of time; and that is very important for traffic generation and sustenance. While content syndication can be amazingly good for your traffic, certain myths still lurk around. In this section, we dispel 3 myths that are doing rounds across content marketing departments. Myth #1: Syndication reduces traffic This is one of the biggest myths around when it comes to content syndication. Many people believe that if their content is published elsewhere, people will begin to look for it elsewhere. That is really not the case. The fact that you are trying to syndicate your content on some other website shows that you need more traffic. Content syndication is done in order to increase traffic and thus, reduction in traffic is a rather absurd idea. Myth #2: Syndication is not good for SEO Many SEO professionals mistakenly believe that content syndication is not good for SEO. SEO professionals believe rightly when they say that content duplication is bad for SEO. However, content syndication is a process by which you are only letting your thumbnail, title and an excerpt be visible on a third party website for a price; and that is allowed by Google. Thus, content syndication is not bad for SEO at all. Myth #3: Paid distribution makes you look desperate A number of companies believe they will look spammy and even desperate when they let their blogs, articles and other content be visible on third party websites. In reality, it just makes you look more authoritative because your content is visible on a more authoritative website. Nothing could be father than this from the truth. Planning a syndication strategy In order to benefit the most from content syndication, you need to know what you are trying to achieve. Some of the goals could be increasing traffic to the website, making you more visible and building awareness of your products or something else that is a priority. No matter what it is, you need to first describe the motive behind content syndication. If you are trying to build traffic, you will probably want to just leave a text link to your blog post or at the most, a thumbnail, excerpt and the title at the bottom of the page. However, if you are looking to build awareness of your product, you might want to consider other forms of syndication. No matter what, you need to know what you are trying to achieve and why you need content syndication in the first place. Choose the right content syndication partner There are paid and unpaid content syndication partners. Paid ones include Outbrain, Zemanta, Taboola and others. Unpaid content syndication platforms include certain websites which are open to linking your content from their websites. Choosing a paid service is infinitely better because you will be able to track and analyze the