Question: Our company is a B2B that is really working to expand our Content Marketing. We are looking for greater reach beyond the blog on our site. Someone we spoke to recommended syndication. What do you think of syndicating content for greater readership?
This is a great question that provides us with an opportunity to explore a couple of content marketing related topics that are very important.
First, the difference between guest posting and syndication, and second how to create content that is worthy of syndicating.
Syndicating vs. Guest Blogging
The difference between syndicating and guest posting is really quite simple. Syndicating is when you allow another site to share the original content from a site that you own.
For example I syndicate a lot of content from here and from Millennial CEO to Huffington Post, Business 2 Community and SAP.
That means they take the content directly from a feed I provide them and they re-share it to their audience.
When guest posting, generally the idea is that you are providing a site your original content. When first starting out guest posting is a great way to grow reach for your brand or for an individual. The biggest downside to guest blogging is you are giving your original content to another site and therefore they benefit from the content’s SEO value.
If a site is recommending for you to guest post with original content, I recommend you at the very least retain rights to repost the content on your site at a later time.
Overall, I prefer syndication because it allows for me to retain the original rights and SEO to my content all while expanding the reach to the content I create. For the site syndicating, usually their goal is to expand social sharing and engagement which greatly impacts SEO as well.
Creating Content That is Great for Syndicating
If you want to build your earned media through syndicating content, one thing to focus on is creating quality editorial content that isn’t too “Salesy.”
A lot of companies post content on their site that reads very close to advertising. It is tough to syndicate this type of content because many of the sites that do a good job of syndicating are focusing on thought leadership and content that has high social value.
If the posts read like sales sheets or show heavy bias they will often not be of interest to those seeking content.
One thing I do recommend for those syndicating is to focus on your inbound and outbound linking when creating content that will be syndicated.
This helps as content reaches further and further to get your posts shared on bigger and more visited sites.
For example, I allowed SAP to syndicate posts I wrote. They had a syndication agreement with Business 2 Community, which in turn was syndicating content to Yahoo Small Business. So a post that I wrote for my site ended up on Yahoo all through syndication agreements.
Syndication is a great way to expand your reach and get more eyeballs on your content. Just focus on finding outlets that won’t only drive traffic, but will help your brand accomplish what it is setting out to do.
In this short video we discuss syndicating, guest blogging and how to make it work for your business