Nowadays, it’s natural to expect your article to get covered on other sites because it’s just that good.
Amazing copy and beautiful visuals serve as the driving force behind barrage of content sharing — and they’ve quickly become mainstays on our top posts.
Essentially, you want your content to do “double duty” (and then some) — links, shares, distributed on other publications, etc.
But what’s the best way to ensure your content gets seen, linked, and shared by the maximum amount of your target audience?
Answer: Content syndication.
Search engines track links across the web to help classify content.
The content of pages linking to each other is taken into consideration when pulling it into the search results.
Some of the biggest sites (e.g., The New York Times, CNN) syndicate their content.
Republishing your content:
- Allows you to leverage your content multiple times.
- Is a more scalable version of guest posting.
- Helps you to get a leg up on your competitors, depending on the types of content partnerships you build.
When you’re working out your partnership contract, if you’re starting out, you may want to agree to do a mix of syndicated content and original content to sweeten the deal.
To start, first do a little research on what websites are syndicating content.
If you’re already a bigger site, then you’re going to want a partner that matches your website traffic. Syndicating your content on a smaller channel won’t do any good.
I search for websites that syndicate their content on other sites. For example, I wrote for Career Contessa that syndicates for Refinery29. I also self-syndicate on LinkedIn and Medium.
Check out how I increased my pageviews by 34 percent with content syndication on Medium and Linkedin.
Best practices for content syndication:
- Always make sure the rel=canonical tag is added.
- If you’re syndicating content, add a nofollow tag.
- Publish content to your site first and make sure it gets indexed before syndicating.
Summary
Timeframe: Month 7, then every month
Results detected: 1-3 months
Average articles syndicated per month: 4
Tools:
- Lawyer for partnership agreement
- Manual outreach
Benefits:
- Content syndication can improve your overall website authority if you’re content partner is of equal or greater value than your website.
- Content syndication increases your backlinks to that specific article that’s getting syndicated.
