What Is Content Syndication and How to Do It Well

Among the many ways your brand can promote your content and reach larger audiences, content syndication is a big-picture strategy that allows you to go beyond your own website and the other channels your brand owns. It’s also a strong way to build credibility and establish your brand as an authority in a particular industry. Plus content syndication generates leads and drives conversion.

What Is Content Syndication? 

Content syndication is a powerful strategy for expanding the reach and visibility of your digital content. It involves distributing your content to trusted partners who then publish it on their websites or other channels, exposing it to a wider audience. The key? The key is to find reputable partners and platforms that align with your goals and messaging and to ensure that your content is high-quality, engaging, and informative.

The idea behind content syndication is to reach as many people as possible, because the more eyes on your content, the better. Content syndication can be a cost-effective way to expand your reach and promote your content, as it allows you to leverage the audience of other organizations.

The Benefits of Content Syndication

Content syndication is a powerful way to amplify the impact of your online content. Here are some of the major benefits:

1. 1. Syndicating your content to other websites will generate quality links back to your own website, which can improve your search engine ranking and bring more visitors to your site.
   2. By sharing your content on reputable and authoritative websites, you can increase the overall authority of your own website.
   3. It can lead to more website traffic as more people are exposed to your content, leading to increased brand awareness and reach.
   4. Content syndication can also be an effective lead generation strategy, helping you attract new customers and build your business. 

How to Syndicate Content

Ready to get started? Here is a step-by-step guide on how to syndicate your content. 

1. If you don’t already have a blog with some traction, you can start by guest blogging to establish yourself as a thought leader in your field.

If you already have an established blog, skip to step number two. 

If you are looking to reap the benefits of content syndication but do not yet have an established blog, you can begin by guest blogging on other reputable sites and then syndicating that content on your own website or popular content syndication platforms such as LinkedIn or Medium. 

This approach can help you establish yourself as a writer, gain exposure, and generate traffic to your website even without a large following or established audience. By leveraging the credibility and reach of established platforms, you can effectively boost the visibility of your content and expand your online presence making your content more appealing to bigger publications. 

Once you have your content published on a couple of sites with authority, you reap the benefits of a big audience that wouldn’t have otherwise known about your blog. Once you have your own blog, you can also use your guest blogging content to showcase your writing abilities to other web content syndication partners that may publish your blog content in the future.

2. Find web content syndication partners and providers in your niche.

Google is your best friend (always) but especially when it comes to finding content syndication partners. With Google’s exact match, you can use specific phrases that help it to search for syndicated content. How? When providers syndicate content, they usually use messaging, such as: “this article was originally posted on [casted.us/blog 1] but has been reposted here with permission,” “first published on [casted.us/blog 2], or “published with permission from [casted.us/blog 3]”.  This is a great search method for finding websites that share syndicated content as opposed to simply searching for “content syndication partners for B2B marketing” which often leads to informational articles such as this one. 

When looking for these partners, you’ll also need to determine which of the following strategies you would like to begin with.

1. Syndicate your content to sites with bigger audiences — Having your content published on platforms with bigger readerships will help to amplify your reach and increase brand awareness. However, it is unlikely that this strategy will gain you much website traffic because when a huge publication posts your content, it is unlikely that the reader will head over to the original site. Why? Because readers feel that they can get everything they need on the bigger site, and often, more authoritative sites do not feel the need to provide links back to smaller websites. 
2. Syndicate your content to sites with a similar size audience — Posting to a site with a similar-sized readership to yours is a great way to attract potential customers and build readership. In particular, smaller sites offer an opportunity to include links back to the original content, allowing you to redirect readers to your blog and generate new leads seamlessly.
3. Focus on creating content valuable enough to get picked up and re-posted by websites without your request — A highly effective way to build backlinks and drive traffic to your website is by having your articles or excerpts re-shared by various publications that give credit to the original source. To successfully employ this tactic, it's crucial that you regularly create and publish high-quality, informative, and relevant content on your blog that other publications will find useful and worth sharing.

There are also a number of popular content syndication providers such as LinkedIn, Quora, Medium, etc. that allow you to syndicate content without permission from an editor. These providers are a great addition to your full strategy but shouldn’t be your sole content providers.

A bigger list of these providers can be found here.

3. Reach out to the above partners.

Now that you’ve established your content syndication strategy and determined a list of partners, here are a couple of tips on how to approach potential syndication partners and ask them to repost your content. Remember, when done properly, credit should be given to the original creator (or publishing location), but syndication benefits both parties. The syndicate gets new content, and the creator gets to tap into a new set of potential customers. 

When reaching out to potential syndication partners, it's important to be professional and personal. Start by introducing yourself and your content, and explain why you think your content would be a good fit for their audience. Be sure to highlight the unique value that your content provides, and why it's different from other content that's already available on their site. You can also offer to provide additional information or answer any questions they might have.

It's also a good idea to make it as easy as possible for potential syndication partners to repost your content. Consider including a link to the specific piece of content you'd like them to repost, along with any relevant images or multimedia that would enhance the piece. You might also want to suggest a specific headline or angle that they can use when reposting the content.

Remember that when syndicating content, these platforms can republish your work in its entirety, edit it to a short piece, or post just a small portion of the original post. 

4. The fear of duplicate content and how to eliminate this risk. 

It is no secret that Google discourages duplicate content, and although they don’t penalize you for it, it isn’t something they love. And, because content syndication often entails taking an entire blog post and republishing it on third-party sites, duplicate content issues can arise — in particular with bigger publishers who are less likely to take the steps to ensure that Google knows that you are the original author/source. If Google does find multiple websites with the same content, its search bots will decide which one to rank and omit the other results. 

So, to eliminate the risk of Google ranking the content on the site that is syndicating your content, we looked to the Search Hustle Digital Marketing podcast for tips. 

1. Ask your content syndication partner for a canonical tag. A canonical tag is a way to tell Google that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page and prevents problems caused by duplicate content appearing on multiple URLs.
2. Ask them to implement a no-index tag. With a no-index tag, Google will only show the original version and not the re-published version. 
3. Ask them to link back to your post. This (a) gets you backlinks and (b) helps to create a link graph showing Google where the content is coming from.

5. Establish long-term relationships with syndication partners.

Once you’ve established relationships with third-party sites willing to syndicate your content, look to build an ongoing partnership. This drastically benefits both parties involved as you will be continually getting more eyes on your content and your partner will be getting tons of fresh content.

6. Opt for the paid option. 

There are a number of paid platforms such as Taboola, Outbrain, and Scoop that provide content placement to top sites. Many of these platforms operate on a PPC basis and eliminate having to find and reach out to potential partners. They also help to eliminate potential duplicate content issues. 

Add Content Syndication to Your Digital Content Strategy

Content syndication is a powerful way to amplify the reach and impact of your online content. With Casted’s marketing platform, transcribe any podcast and easily add content syndication to your marketing strategy. By using Casted’s centralized platform to syndicate your content, you can maximize the reach of your podcast. Plus, the platform offers robust analytics and tracking to help you measure the impact of your syndicated content and adjust your strategy accordingly.