Content syndication is a win-win situation between you and third-party websites, where your content is re-published by other people. This allows other sites to generate more traffic and showcase a specific piece of information that may be useful to their customers, for free. For you, it means an increase in visitors thanks to the backlinks you get.
Any content can be syndicated: blog posts, articles, infographics, and images.
The effectiveness of content syndication depends on what your business is about and what you want to achieve.
Its benefits include:
Boost brand awareness or follower count on social media. This can be achieved through social media syndication.
Maximize the use of your content. If you have fantastic content but limited traffic, content syndication is a scalable way to gain exposure. Strategically choosing in which websites you want your content syndicated is crucial. Ideally, you would want your content to be on sites more authoritative than yours. That way, when it’s linked back to your website, you can attract more people, generate traffic fast, and get some link juice in the process.
Gain backlinks. And with them, increase your site’s authority and trustworthiness.
Increased lead generation. If you choose carefully where to syndicate your content, you can get a lot more qualified leads.
On paper, this looks like a perfect SEO strategy. However, this is not always the case. Content syndication has a few drawbacks, which include:
Syndicated post outranking your post. This is not necessarily a bad thing; you could still get leads from the links to your site on the third-party site.
Duplicate content issues. Search engines, Google especially, have made it clear that they frown upon content duplication.
Inability to grow your mailing list. Most sites that publish syndicated content don’t allow authors to include a mail opt-in to their website. This means you can gain a lot of exposure through syndication but won’t be able to grow your email list from it.
An essential part of content syndication is establishing communication between you and third parties. Researching about where you should have your content published to gain the most out of it is the first step to a successful strategy. This will allow you to tailor and master your pitching and get your pieces accepted quickly.