Have you ever thought about content syndication to broaden the reach of your existing content and distribute it across multiple platforms? This is content syndication. Write your content once, and distribute it across multiple channels for the potential to reach more of your audience and grow your traffic numbers.
This can be an extremely effective way to work smarter, not harder with your content.
Imagine if you wrote a blog post on your content site and it got syndicated on Business Insider, Flipboard, and Google Discover! That one post has the potential to get up to 3X+ more traffic from a single action, publishing on your site.
In this article, we’re talking about how content syndication works. Learn more about what content syndication is, examples, pros and cons, and the best content syndication platforms to start using today.
Let’s get into it!
What Is Content Syndication?
Content syndication is a form of content marketing. It’s the process of distributing your content to third-party platforms to reach a larger audience. It can be done with blog posts, ebooks, infographics, and other content types.
This growth strategy has proven successful for many businesses.
It can include:
- Republishing your entire article to another platform
- Posting a shorter version of the original article or piece of content
- Publishing an excerpt from the original article or piece of content
Web content syndication works because it benefits both parties.
First, for the original author, their work is usually credited to them, so, they get their name posted on another website, which is great for reputation building and growing your brand. Sometimes it can even come with a backlink, which is excellent for SEO!
Next, the company syndicating the content gets free content they can share with their audience!
Win-win!
What Is An Example Of Syndicated Content?
Here’s an example of a Niche Pursuits blog post syndicated to Flipboard.
You can see that it highlights the original content published on Niche Pursuits along with naming the author and original source. This is typically what you’ll see with syndicated content.
Who Is Content Syndication For?
Honestly, it can benefit lots of businesses, from a blog content writer to a content creator, niche website owner, small businesses, and more.
Anybody who has web content can create a content distribution plan to syndicate their content online and reach a wider audience.
5 Best Content Syndication Platforms
Now, here are 5 of the best content syndication platforms to syndicate content online. This is a mix of free and paid platforms you can start using right away to boost your online presence.
LinkedIn is a career-based social network. Companies can set up a profile and have a place online where they can talk about their business:
- Share their company mission and goals
- Make announcements
- Post jobs
- Connect and collaborate with employees and other employers
Career-goers and LinkedIn users use this professional networking platform to connect and collaborate as well.
Your profile serves as a digital resume of sorts. It highlights your professional experience, skills, education, and accomplishments.
It’s one of the top social networks for doing digital networking.
And it’s the perfect syndication platform that many publishers may not be thinking about.
LinkedIn has built-in features to make online networking easy:
- Content sharing
- Job search
- Groups
- Linkedin Learning
How To Syndciate Your Content To LinkedIn?
Use LinkedIn as a content syndication platform in a few different ways. Post a LinkedIn article through copy/paste. You can also share an article in the form of a LinkedIn post or contribute to LinkedIn groups.
Medium
Medium is a free blogging network where writers go to write about and share their stories. Readers visit Medium to read blog posts on various topics, from productivity to passive income, marketing, life, career, and more. Writers can build their platform on the site and make money writing on Medium.
It’s the perfect place for syndicating content!
To make the best use of Medium, contribute on a regular basis. Engage with readers who comment on your Medium stories and make sure to read and comment on other stories from fellow writers.
How To Syndicate Your Content To Medium?
All you have to do is establish a free writer account, set up your profile, and start syndicating your content by copying and pasting it to the Medium platform or importing it.
First, visit Medium and click Write to start a free Writer account.
Next, click Apply to submit your Writer application.
There’s no limit on how much content you can contribute on Medium. Syndicate your content to the platform, write and create new content, monetize using their Medium Partner Program and through other means, and build your reputation! There are a ton of benefits with being on Medium.
Substack
Substack is a newsletter-based platform. You can create a newsletter and offer free and/or paid subscriptions to your audience. The Substack platform is a smart way to create a low-cost subscription business for yourself.
Substack is free for creators and the perfect place for content syndication. Share your content directly in your newsletter. Plus, get the opportunity to monetize in other ways like brand partnerships and affiliate marketing.
Keep your subscribers engaged and craving more content from you by posting your newsletter on a regular basis. You can batch-create newsletters and schedule them for a future date to stay organized and make efficient use of your time.
How Do You Syndicate Your Content On Substack?
Publish your content in the form of a Substack newsletter. Grow an audience, drive subscriptions, and develop your viewership on Substack!
Flipboard is a content aggregator of news, articles, and other content from around the web. Flipboard lets you create a personalized magazine filled with your favorite topics, curated by you.
Select and organize your favorite photos and content on Flipboard and store them in your “magazine.”
Flipboard works well when you create magazines and magazine descriptions with keywords. Title your magazine with a word to describe what users will expect to find, like titling a magazine Blogging for blogging-related content.
“Flip” your own content to spark engagement and support other content on Flipboard by doing the same, flipping, liking, and commenting. Promote and share your Flipboard profile to grow your followers and get more views on your flips.
How Do You Use Flipboard to Syndicate Your Content?
Link your content to Flipboard using their share feature to Create a Flip.
Pick a Magazine (your previously created or create a New Magazine)
Next, write your message and share a link to the content you’ll be syndicating.
Add it and you’re done!
Flipboard is a good place to connect with your target audience. You can actually drive massive traffic using this site!
Taboola
Taboola is a content discovery and native advertising platform. You can use the site as a content syndication service to serve your original content to your target audience across the internet.
They connect publishers and advertisers.
Publishers use Taboola in a number of ways, including content syndication.
As a syndication partner, you can participate in audience and traffic exchange with 3rd party partners, take advantage of sponsored content opportunities, and acquire, and engage with new audiences to share your great content.
How To Use Taboola For Content Syndication?
Sign up to Taboola as a publisher and follow the steps to get your website set up.
BONUS: Guest Posting
Writing a guest post or doing guest blogging is another way to syndicate your content. This is a b2b content syndication opportunity where you’d partner with a company to provide free content in exchange for a chance to broaden your reach and even potentially gain a backlink with syndication.
Guest blogging works like this:
- Find companies in your niche that have blogs and accept guest posts
- Pitch your content syndication guest post idea in an email
- Wait to hear back, get the approval, and send over the guest post
This is a pretty easy content marketing method you can rinse and repeat to syndicate your content across multiple websites.
The caveat? Some sites may want fresh content only, not syndicated content. So, be prepared to hear some no’s to syndicating your content to other sites, but, not always.
Does Content Syndication Hurt SEO?
Generally, content syndication is not harmful to SEO, but there are some things to consider that may impact SEO:
- Duplicate content: This is when your content is seen in two or more places at once on the web. The avoid this, you just need to use canonical tags.
- Partnering with low-quality sites: Just as partnering with high-quality, authoritative sites can benefit you, syndicating your content on low-quality websites could negatively impact your SEO.
- Providing no value: You want to maintain value-driven content that is relevant, informative, and engaging. If this important piece is missing, your SEO can suffer.
What Are The Goals Of Content Syndication?
The goals behind content syndication are to:
- Increase your reach and brand awareness: You want your syndicated content to drive more traffic. Your site before syndication could drive 100K monthly page views and drive 175K monthly page views after syndication. This is a low-effort, high-impact way of increasing your reach across the internet.
- Drive revenue: More traffic can result in more revenue. This is another goal to reach for when it comes to syndicating your content.
- Develop and improve your brand’s online reputation: There’s no better way to brand build than to try to get your content and brand in as many places as possible on the web.
- Create networking and engagement opportunities: Get the chance to collaborate, network, and engage with others, opening the doors to these awesome opportunities.
Pros And Cons Of Content Syndication
Now, that we’ve covered the best content syndication platforms, let’s go over the pros and cons of syndication itself.
Pros
- Increase your content reach and traffic: Put your content in more places and get more traffic. This can directly translate to increasing the number of leads your business receives, giving you more ways to grow your email list, and increasing your revenue.
- Brand building, networking, and collaboration opportunities: Having your content across various platforms for syndication puts your name out there. It helps you build your brand reputation and enlarge your online digital footprint. It also opens doors to networking and collaboration with peers and clients.
- Increase your revenue: More traffic = more money, usually. You can drive visitors to your website and increase ad earnings, affiliate commissions, and pick up more brand partnerships, as a result of syndicating your content.
Cons
- Time-intensive: We haven’t covered this much but, syndicating your content takes time. Generally, you copy and paste your content onto one or more platforms. Some tools exist that can help you save time on this, like Later or Tailwind for helping you syndicate across social media platforms, or you could hire a virtual assistant to do the work for you. Either way, this will cost you time, money, or both.
- Must be done correctly to avoid SEO issues: If content syndication is done the wrong way, it could impact your SEO. This is why you should follow the tips we shared above to syndicate your content the right way, like using a canonical tag.
Bottom Line on Content Syndication
Content syndication has largely been misunderstood for a while. I feel like only the big players online knew that this existed and understood how to take advantage of it to grow their business through content creation.
But, content syndication can be a solution for publishers of all sizes. There are free and paid ways to run a successful content syndication campaign.
As you can see, there are many ways to do it through a syndication network, social media sites, and other platforms.
And, it can be an incredibly easy and impactful way of helping you drive more traffic to your content and reach your goals.
I hope this article gave you some ideas on some of the best content syndication platforms that exist and what direction to take your business in.
Have you tried content syndication?
What do you like and dislike about it?
