6 Tips to Build a Winning Content Syndication Strategy

To win, you have to be a bit different. Olympians don’t get the gold by doing the same thing every other athlete does—they do it better. 

The same goes for your content strategy. 

Don’t fall into a routine with your content, especially your blog! Why would you punish your loyal subscribers or prospects by being boring!? Do us all a favor, and don’t get complacent. There are so many things you can do to spice up your marketing moves that will drive conversion and provide intriguing value.

Blogging as We Know It

Your blog should be the center of your content marketing strategy. The fact is, all marketing efforts should lead back to your blog, website, or a conversion point of some sort. 

When starting out, it’s worth noting one thing: It will take more than publishing some content on your own site to increase traffic. So ramp up and bolster your blogging efforts with a content syndication strategy to get you off to the races. 

Fair warning, though: Content syndication alone does not negate the benefits of other efforts such as search engine optimization (SEO), content promotion, or utilizing a targeted paid media strategy. (That last tactic will throw serious starter fuel on your content fire if you have even a little budget to back it. Alas, that is a topic for another blog post.) 

Strategic blogging tactics will produce results. However, because users produce an average of around 70 million new posts each month, you just need to keep a few thoughts top of mind:

• Create content with purpose: Have a keyword and audience in mind.
• Be patient: Organic search takes time, so don’t sign up for a short duration partnership.
• Be honest in your efforts: No keyword stuffing! This makes Google and your readers despise and distrust you quickly.

What Is Content Syndication?

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, my friends. Content syndication is when you republish your content on third-party platforms, as opposed to your own website, to reach a new or broader audience. It can be any type of digital content, from blog posts to case studies, videos, and more.

You can do this via a few different methods, including:

• Entering a partnership
• Paying for these efforts
• Trading out services
• Sometimes if you are lucky and very charismatic, it’s free 

Syndicating content helps your company share specifically targeted content with new and relevant audiences. These third-party partners should be credible and host trustworthy platforms. They can promote and host your content on their site for an agreed-upon duration of time (or indefinitely, if you play your cards right). 

Content Syndication and SEO

Now you might be thinking, hold your horses, doesn't Google hate multiple versions of the same content?

Don’t worry! Syndicated content isn’t quite the same as duplicate content, and you can make it SEO-friendly. To do this, you just need to be sure it’s indexed correctly on your site and your content syndication partner’s site. 

This means implementing the “rel=canonical” tag. This canonical tag helps the search engine result pages (SERPs) know which is the original content that should be indexed. Adding a meta “noindex” tag to a page serves a similar function.

What Are the Competitive Benefits of a Content Syndication Strategy?

When done with SMART goals in mind, a content syndication strategy is a win-win situation for all parties involved. 

How so, you might ask? Here are the top five benefits, boiled down:

• Gain a new and diverse audience’s eyes on the prize. 
• Repurpose existing content that gives fresh information to your content syndication partner’s readers.
• Track freshly generated and qualified leads.
• Build up thought leadership, readers’ perception about your brand, and your own site authority.
• Syndicate yourself and foster momentum.

Winning Content Syndication Trade Tips

You 100 percent need to syndicate your content. You'd be silly not to.

In fact, most of the biggest and most influential sites on the web feature syndicated content, including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and CNN.

The web is so big and noisy and full of folks catching onto the benefits of a content syndication strategy, but most of the time they are uneducated in their approach. They don’t know how to win at it—but you do. Well, you will after you finish reading the next few paragraphs: 

1. Stay humble.

Eliminate your pride. It is unreasonable to think that your audience will read your story just because you published it on your own blog. You need friends in higher domain authority places.

2. Consider your aim.

Syndicate your content with third-party sites and platforms that possess the same or higher domain authority and a similar target audience.

3. Spread the word.

When you guest post on high-authority websites, ensure you syndicate that content to your website or share it via platforms like LinkedIn to generate that buzz.

4. Diversify.

Syndicate on multiple platforms. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

5. Quality is key.

Create quality content that would make a top publication want to syndicate it! There’s no sense in wasting your efforts on boring, generic content garbage. Readers want that spice, remember? Find or create that unicorn content! 

6. Keep SEO in mind. 

Again, ensure your syndicated content remains SEO optimized and that search engines know it’s a syndicated piece. Using a canonical tag tells a search engine which page it should display in search results.

Go for the Gold! 

You’re playing the game, so why not play to win? 

Obviously, you can now weigh the benefits of content syndication listed above, take all my tips into account, and partner it with fun, down-to-earth marketers!

At SmartBug^®, our inbound team specializes in creating content by learning your business, defining your audiences, researching syndication partnerships, highlighting your go-to-market strategy opportunities, and optimizing your overall conversion journey. 

Learn more about mapping content for different buyer personas, and while you’re at it, get to know our team firsthand.

This blog was originally published on September 2021 and has been updated since.