Content Syndication – How To Drive Hordes of Free Traffic to Your Site Without SEO

Content syndication is quickly gaining popularity as one of the blogosphere’s favorite content marketing strategies in 2014 & the years to come, and for good reason. Content syndication is a simple and relatively easy way to drive hordes of traffic to any blog/website without having to invest the time in search engine optimization or the money in paid traffic.

What Is Content Syndication?

In essence, content syndication happens when a blog syndicates content from another blog.

For example, if I was to write a blog post on www.example.com and a fellow blogger duplicated it and posted the content on his blog at www.anotherexample.com with attribution to my original post, that would be a prime example content syndication.

Some website owners may even syndicate the entire RSS feed of another blog, meaning that as soon as any content is published on the syndicated blog, it’s automatically posted on their website as well.

It’s an easily understood concept, and you might have heard it being referred to as “article syndication” or “blog syndication”. The three terms all mean the same thing.

Benefits Of Getting Your Content Syndicated

The foremost and most obvious benefit of content syndication is, of course, the resulting traffic. Providing that you craft a compelling call-to-action at the end of every syndicated post, you can channel the existing traffic of an established website to your own blog — for free.

I know several people who make their entire online living as affiliate marketers solely through the volume traffic they can generate with content syndication.

At the same time, you are also building up your brand visibility and authority. Increasing the number of times each of your blog posts is seen around the blogosphere increases the visibility of your brand, which in turn builds the authority behind your name as a blogger.

How To Find Content Syndication Partners

There are two primary methods to find content syndication partners.

The first category is known as passive syndication. In passive syndication, bloggers publish their blog posts to article directories (Ezine Articles is the most popular). Webmasters looking for free content pick up these blog posts and syndicate them on their own blog. The entire syndication process happens without you having to lift a finger.

As can be expected, passive syndication usually takes much longer periods of time to show real results. When you don’t do anything proactive to get your articles syndicated, chances are that new syndication partners will be few and far between.

On the other hand, you can try active syndication — which is understandably the direct opposite of passive syndication. With active syndication, you constantly e-mail website owners within your niche and ask them if they would like free content for their own blog or e-magazine, in exchange for a “resource box” where you can include a call-to-action and a link.

Even though your e-mails will typically have very low response rates (think 10% or lower), you should be able to send out 50-100 e-mails per day to website owners in your niche, and find at least 1-2 willing syndication partners per day.

The easiest way to find bloggers in your niche to syndicate your content is to use InkyBee. With InkyBee, you can search keywords to find matching blog and find out which blogs carry the most influence and garner the most traffic. It’s a great way to build connections and find potential syndication partners.

The Myth Behind Duplicate Content

A lot of marketers and SEOs assume that duplicate content affects search engine optimization levels negatively. There’s no basis for that assumption whatsoever. In fact, Matt Cutts (head of Google webspam) says that 25%-30% of the web is duplicate content.

Syndicating, or duplicating, content and posting it on your own blog doesn’t hurt your search engine rankings in the least. If you are able to get your content syndicated on relevant blogs, the number of backlinks you have is likely to increase, which positively affects your blog’s SEO.

However, if you duplicate content several times within one website (e.g. have the exact same article posted 3 times to your blog), then Google won’t be too happy with your site.

In essence – duplicate content across the web is no problem. Duplicate content within one website is a problem.

Wrapping Up

In 2013 and before, content syndication wasn’t much of a big deal. In 2014 and the coming years, however, it is sure to create a huge, rippling impact in the content marketing industry and truly redefine marketing your services through content.

For a more in-depth guide on each of the steps involved with content syndication — creating the article, crafting the compelling call-to-action, finding syndication partners and leveraging the resulting traffic, check out this Roojoom I made.