These days, it’s natural to expect your article to be covered on other sites because it’s so good.
Amazing copy and beautiful visuals are the driving force behind the barrage of content sharing – and they’ve quickly become the mainstays of our best posts.
Essentially, you want your content to do “double duty” (and more) – linking, sharing, distributing on other posts, etc.
But what’s the best way to ensure that your content is seen, linked to and shared by as many of your target audience as possible?
Answer: content syndication.
Search engines follow links on the web to help rank content.
The content of the pages linked to each other is taken into consideration when extracting it in the search results.
Some of the biggest sites (eg The New York Times, CNN) syndicate their content.
Republish your content:
- Allows you to leverage your content multiple times.
- Is a more scalable version of guest posting.
- Helps you stay ahead of your competition, depending on the types of content partnerships you create.
When crafting your partnership agreement, if you’re just starting out, you might want to agree to do a mix of syndicated content and original content to sweeten the deal.
To get started, first do a little research on websites that syndicate content.
If you are already a larger site, you will want a partner that matches your website traffic. Syndicating your content to a smaller channel won’t help.
I’m looking for websites that syndicate their content to other sites. For example, I wrote for Career Contessa who syndicates for Refinery29. I also unionize on LinkedIn and Medium.
Find out how I increased my pageviews by 34% through content syndication on Medium and Linkedin.
Best practices for content syndication:
- Always make sure the rel=canonical tag is added.
- If you syndicate content, add a nofollow tag.
- Publish content to your site first and make sure it is indexed before syndication.
Summary
Time range: Month 7, then every month
Results detected: 1-3 months
Average number of articles syndicated per month: 4
Tools:
- Lawyer for partnership agreement
- Manual reach
Benefits:
- Content syndication can improve your website’s overall authority if your content partner’s value is equal to or greater than your website’s.
- Content syndication increases your backlinks to that specific article that is syndicated.