What Is Content Syndication, and How Can It Help Your Marketing?

One of the things you are doing as part of your marketing strategy is creating content, from blog posts to whitepapers, to demonstrate your expertise, build thought leadership and generate leads. Instead of sitting on all of that valuable content, put it to work for you –monetize it.

You can do this through content syndication, a content-sharing strategy in which your content is reused by other websites and online media outlets.  (This strategy applies to images and videos too – and you see it in newspapers all the time.)  Because this is a strategy I am definitely interested in myself, I did some research and found 3 main benefits to content syndication:

1. Greater reach – If you want to increase visibility for your company, products, or services, I really can’t think of a better way to reach more people at once with little effort on your part.
2. Earn extra money – While you will not make a living from content syndication (unless that is all you do! – think advice columns and Dave Barry), you can certainly make some extra money, always a good thing.
3. Generate leads – When someone engages with your content, they are most likely in need of the product or service you offer.  Reach out to them simply by asking if they have any questions.

Before getting started, be sure to ask the content syndicator the following:

• How long have you been in business?
• Will you republish my content, or repurpose it? If you are going to repurpose it, how will you do so?
• What other websites will my content appear on?
• Where will my name and company be listed? Will they be hyperlinked to my website?
• Will the content link back to the original on my site?

Once you get established with a content syndicator (or two) and find it beneficial to your bottom line and sales funnel, ask if they would be interested in an ongoing agreement, in which you provide content regularly.

2 highly regarded content syndicators include:

Mochila – an online media marketplace for both content buyers and sellers.

NewsCred – their syndication platform uses an API to make it easy for publishers to find your content, and then you can track and analyze your content on 3rd party sites so you can see what’s working.  Best part – they let you stay in control of the entire process.

If you have syndicated content, what was your experience like? If you haven’t syndicated content, would you try it?  Leave a comment below!

Image courtesy of aisquared.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012 at 9:00 am and is filed under Marketing, Thought Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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