Customized campaigns optimized to target your in-market buyers at any state of the buying cycle, PureB2B’s hands-on approach and buyer-intent data provide you with the sales and marketing pipeline velocity you need.
Content syndication is a great content marketing and SEO strategy that can significantly help you improve your online presence, website traffic, and search engine ranking. But, if it’s carelessly performed, you can get penalized by search engines and even damage your brand reputation.
Google, for instance, has already issued several warnings about duplicate content. Careless content syndication can also result in your original content getting outranked on search engines. Instead of contributing to the increase of your own domain authority.
“Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.” – Google
When you’re just getting started with content syndication, it’s easy to get lost or overwhelmed. Fortunately, there are best practices to help you avoid SEO problems and duplicate content issues. Following these techniques will ensure that you’re maximizing your content syndication endeavors.
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. When users find the syndicated content on SERPs and click on it, they are automatically sent to your original content instead of the syndicated content.
This technique also tells search engine spiders to crawl and index your original content instead of the syndicated versions. This strategy isn’t as common because it doesn’t facilitate good UX.
Defining a canonical page for your original content will tell search engines which one is the original version. Using canonical tags will prevent duplicate content issues, as search engines are pointed to the master copy when the same content appears on several URLs.
So, you need to ensure that the syndicating website places a canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) on the URL of the syndicated versions (version 2, 3, 4, and so forth). This way, the authority and relevance associated with that piece of content rightfully pass to the original.
Using canonical tags is a commonly understood thing. Syndication sites will normally do this as a standard practice. But yes, you should always make sure that a canonical tag or “link to original” is included. This is essentially the best way to avoid search engine penalties.
When the syndicating website does not allow canonical tags, your second best bet is to avoid duplicate content issues is to get them to NoIndex their version. A NoIndex essentially removes the syndicated version out of the search engine index.
Keep in mind, despite not being indexed, backlinks from the syndicated version to your original content will still boost your website’s authority.
Do-Follow links are essentially direct attribution links to your original content that tell search engines that the backlink should be counted as a point to boost your page rank and placement in SERPs.
Some syndicating websites only provide no-follow links but don’t fret. While no-follow links don’t give you any page rank boosts, they still provide other benefits like referral traffic.
What primary keyword is your content trying to rank for? Try to use that keyword as the anchor text for the link to your original content. This will contribute to your SEO and minimize the chance of the syndicated content raking higher than the original.
When it comes to SEO and content marketing, quality always supersedes quantity. In the effort to push content to syndicating websites, domain authority is often forgotten. Be sure to take into consideration the authority of a website in their specific niche, as well as their traffic quality.
This should be at the top of your list. If your content is of poor quality then high-authority sites won’t be interested in syndicating your content.
Furthermore, a combination of human intuition and sophisticated algorithms can now determine the relevance and value of your content. Gone are the days when it was just about keywords, so be sure to provide helpful information.
Before you send your content over, read the fine print of your contract or deal. Have everything in writing! Some syndicating partners don’t offer links to competitors, so double check how the links will be treated.
Consider paid partnerships. In most cases, there’s a minimal cost per link where you’re only asked to pay for the traffic gained. More importantly, many content syndication networks allow you to target specific audience segments to increase your chances of conversions.
Furthermore, most paid syndication partnerships will allow you to gain traffic and engagement visibility on high-authority sites, which is great for brand awareness and trust building.
Some argue that content syndication does not directly contribute to growing your email list or lead generation. But if you’re able to syndicate your content on an authoritative site with a prominent link back, each time a visitor clicks through to your site, chances are, they’ll be a quality lead.
So, make sure you’re using CTAs within your content to drive those reading the syndicated content over to your website and sales funnel.
Avoid 302 redirects at all costs. Essentially, a 302 redirect is a temporary redirect.
When SERPs encounter a 302 redirect, it’s basically telling them to keep the original page in the index (in this case, it’s the syndicated version) and prevents it from passing the page rank to the destination URL (your original content).
Always publish your content before reaching out to syndication websites. When search engines see the published date, it gives them an idea about who published the content first, which then determines what page ranks higher.
Plus, if users see multiple pages with the same content, the post date will indicate that you published it before the others.
Content syndication has been around for decades, but a lot of marketers take it for granted. As such, they don’t maximize the SEO benefits it can potentially offer. Other marketers, on the other hand, syndicate their content but fail to follow best practices. As a result, their pages don’t rank on search engines.
If you’re getting started with content syndication, be sure to follow the best practices. They’ll help you avoid issues with duplicate content and help you improve your SEO tactics to drive organic and referral traffic.
If you’re a content marketer, you know how important it is for you to have a variety of B2B marketing tactics up your sleeves. They can help you generate awareness around your brand, expand your reach, drive more sales leads, and so much more.
Syndicating content does a little bit of all that. When you syndicate things you’ve written or created, you’re distributing your content to third-party organizations so that they share or publish it on their platform.
Content syndication can either be free or paid. Some websites and news organizations are more than willing to publish your guest post on their site free of charge. Meanwhile, paid content syndication enables you to republish your content on specific (usually high-authority) domains for a fee.
A content syndication network will help distribute your content on their affiliate sites and charge you each time your content gets clicked by visitors to the publishing site. On the other hand, those who clicked on your link will be taken to your website, where you can further engage them on their content journey.
Here are just some of the reasons why content syndication works as an effective marketing strategy:
Syndicating your content to authoritative sites with large, loyal audiences helps your content gain huge exposure among a larger audience than you might otherwise not have access to. Let’s say your original blog content has a potential reach of 1,000 content consumers, but that reach can go up to as many hundreds of thousands on other sites.
If you have great content that’s giving you good engagement rates, repurposing that content gives you a valuable opportunity to target new audiences and demographics.
If you syndicate content on a regular basis, your brand becomes more visible and accessible digitally. It all starts from offering content that’s relevant and helpful for audiences, and following up with more content pieces that can help nurture your visitors throughout their content consumption journey.
Having a steady online presence can also help you close in on a niche that’s been proving to be a big challenge for your team. You only need to reach out to websites that have already established their authority in your line of business and let them help you showcase what you can offer through your content.
Content syndication goals vary from business to business, but increased website traffic is almost always on the top 3 considerations of marketing teams. Remember, you need to drive traffic to your site before you can generate awareness about your brand.
Content syndication can boost your organic traffic for the simple reason that Google and other search engines equate specific syndicated content with quality and authority. For Google and others, the fact that credible news sites accepted your content means they see it as something that’s informative and valuable for their audience. From there, you can see higher rankings in search results over time.
Once readers click on your content and reach your website, you can use that opportunity to give them more information about your brand or how your products can help solve their problems. Be sure to give them high-quality content where they can get great value in terms of the educational, newsworthiness, and entertainment aspects.
As a general rule, your content should only be 20% promotional. You might want to take note of these top four content types for your content syndication strategy: 85% whitepaper, 60% webcast, 50% infographic, and 35% articles.
Modern content marketing requires a focused strategy. When it comes to generating leads, it’s easier and more effective to find high-quality leads by distributing your content to publishers that target the same buyer personas as your brand. Like-minded audiences are more likely to be interested in your content, and indicates a good customer fit.
Paid content syndication can be especially useful if you want to generate targeted leads, since most platforms usually facilitate audience-filtering options. For example, you can target prospects based on their geographical location, job title or role, company size, and industry type.
Another benefit of syndicated content is that it helps you establish your brand or site’s identity as a subject matter expert.
When things get too crowded in your niche market, as they do very often nowadays, content syndication can help you differentiate your brand from other companies as you lock in your role as a thought leader—one who can inform and delight your audience as you talk about your brand, product, or service in a way that’s relevant and relatable to your desired audience.
As you can see, content syndication can give your marketing strategy a lot of mileage. It generates all of the good stuff in marketing—from brand recognition, audience engagement, leads, potential sales, industry leadership, and more.
So yes, content syndication is and will always be an effective marketing strategy. The key is that there should always be a clear value proposition behind your content offering to gain maximum results.
For more on you can win with content syndication, read our blog post on “How to Get Started with Content Syndication” today!
If you’re not already syndicating your content in one way or another, you really should be. The online world is a big and cluttered place, so it isn’t reasonable to think that you can limit the distribution of your content solely to your own blog. It’s always a good idea to get your blog posts in front of a different audience, who would otherwise not even know it exists.
Also called republishing, content syndication involves permitting other websites to republish your content in part or in full to help you reach more audiences outside of your circle of followers. By syndicating your content, you’re gaining a whole new set of audience to whom you can market your brand.
However, that doesn’t mean that you should go on a syndication spree and let random sites do the work of promoting all your blog posts (or any other content type for that matter) for you.
For one, not all sites allow content syndication. Neither should you send all your great content pieces to syndication services since you’d also want to have exclusive control over some of your more valuable content.
First, you need to check if the site you’re looking at accepts republished content. Ideally, you should cater your content to the target publisher’s audience. Otherwise, its readers won’t find your content relevant.
Authoritative syndication networks can also up your content syndication game, as they can place your content on influential websites with high traffic. In turn, this could establish your status as an equally authoritative figure on the subject matter and drive targeted visitors to your website.
You can publish your content such as blog posts, articles, videos, images, and podcasts, among others on other sites through any of these methods:
Content syndication networks are basically services that help you distribute your content across innumerable news and blog sites on their network. Here are some of your options if you’re looking to syndicate your content and how they may be good (or not-so-good) for your business goals:
Outbrain is a popular content discovery and marketing platform that helps your readers find out about your content by recommending it to top media outfits like CNN, Time, and ESPN.
On its website, Outbrain states it’s reaching an audience of more than 550 million online users and serving them about 200 billion content recommendations per month. That’s how far your content could go on the Outbrain network. Outbrain also has features that let you track reader engagement so that you know which part or version of your content resonates well with your audience.
The downside with Outbrain, however, is that it doesn’t allow publishers to qualify for its revenue sharing program unless the site it’s publishing advertised content or has more than 10 million article page views. So if you’re a small- to medium-sized enterprise that aims to generate earnings from your blog posts, Outbrain might not be the best syndication network for you.
SlideShare is a LinkedIn affiliate network and free platform that allows anybody to upload their content in a slideshow format, which visitors can then view at their own convenience. Often, these visitors come from targeted search, so you can be more confident that your content is engaging the right kind of audience.
However, since it’s a free-for-all platform, there are really no guidelines that publishers have to follow. This could mean that even content with inferior quality can get published and distributed, which isn’t helpful for businesses that are aiming for brand authority.
SimpleReach is a content analytics and insights platform that helps marketers understand and improve the impact of their articles and video on brand lift, engagement, and conversions.
It complements content syndication networks you work with by helping you understand which channels (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Outbrain, Taboola, etc) are generating the most ROI and where to increase or decrease your paid distribution spend.
ARC is part of PR Newswire’s press release service, which spreads your content across a wide network of blog, news, and social media sites all at once for publication.
While ARC is not specifically useful for your SEO campaigns, it can help you generate traffic for your site and awareness or interest in your brand.
The Taboola network mostly serves high-end publishers including The NY Times, NBC, and CBS. Its content engine helps you determine which sites will give you the best engagement for your posts.
As of late, Taboola seems to be experiencing great success in marketing video content, so it’s best to consider the service if you see your brand doing more video content marketing in the near future.
If you want to syndicate your own content, Medium can be one of your best options. It’s an online community that allows you to start your blog (if you haven’t any) right on the Medium site so that you get to share your content with interested people or organizations in its audience.
Many startups and brands who run their own blog also prefer to republish their content on Medium, as they find the site’s platform easy to use and link to their social profiles.
To sum up, content syndication helps you bring your content across the web so that you can reach a wider audience and gain significantly more exposure for your brand’s online content.
With the variety of content syndication networks to choose from, you should choose the platform that best supports your business’ core objectives, whether it’s to drive awareness, engagement, or brand authority.
If you don’t have the time and/or resources to implement content syndication yourself, there’s always the option of leaving it to the experts. PureB2B’s wide range of content syndication technology options allows you to reach in-market technology buyers and align your sales leads to your organization’s needs.
Download our FREE whitepaper on “Content Marketing as an Effective Tactic for B2B Lead Generation” today to find out more about using content to drive customer acquisition.
Some businesses think that slow returns and stagnant revenue are due to not having enough leads. But in reality, poor lead management is often the true culprit.
According to a recent study, more than 80% of generated leads are lost, discarded, or ignored. Now, that’s a lot of potential revenue out the window simply because of poor lead management strategies.
For B2B companies, this magnitude of loss is even bigger. Just think – you’ve spent a considerable amount of time and resources generating and capturing leads, and yet your efforts all go to waste. Not all leads acquired are ready to purchase, meaning that these leads need to be nurtured to push them further down the sales funnel.
That’s exactly what lead management does. Lead management is the complete process by which prospects are tracked from generation to acquisition, to nurturing, to conversion.
Some prospects need more time and information before purchasing, which leads to delayed conversion and a longer sales cycle. But, by sticking to the fundamental principles of lead management, you can maximize ROI and make the most of the leads you generate.
Lead management helps businesses and organizations determine where their leads are coming from and which lead generation source is generating more conversions. This will help you track sources with a higher chance of conversion so you can focus your efforts and resources appropriately.
Businesses can also track a customer’s complete history of interactions and engagement. This allows you to analyze data and determine how a person was converted from prospect to lead, and eventually, to a customer. The result is a better understanding of how to manage your leads.
Implementing a proper lead management system can significantly impact your revenue. Not only will you be providing a better customer experience, but this also lets you better engage with and maintain relationships with your audience.
Fancy learning about the ins and outs of effective lead management? Have a look at our FREE Lead Management 101 Whitepaper!
Content syndication is a great way to improve your lead generation efforts because it amplifies your reach, allowing you to tap into an audience you might not have been able to reach otherwise. This helps you optimize returns and put your content in front of a relevant demographic with high buying potential, so you’re not restricted to your immediate audience of subscribers and loyal followers.
After all, you put a lot of time and effort into creating high-quality content, so it’s only natural that you’d want to expand your reach so that more prospects can benefit from your offer. This is where effective content syndication works like a charm.
On top of that, sharing your content improves your search engine performance through relevant backlinks and enhanced credibility. It also positions you as a thought leader in your industry. Ultimately, higher search placements help generate more traffic that could potentially result in more qualified leads.
Publishing and delivering your content to a number of social media networks and third-party sites at the right time and in the right way can lead to a notable increase in quality traffic for your blog. But, most importantly, it will give you an idea of what types of content work best for specific communities.
If you think you can win the game of content marketing simply based the volume of content published, then it’s time to think again. While it’s true that posting an ample amount of quality content can increase your organic traffic, it’s equally necessary to figure out a way to reach your audience whenever you have new content to share.
Let’s face it, considering the mass of content published daily on the web, capturing your target audience’s attention can be a frustrating ordeal. The more clutter there is, the harder it is to stand out from the crowd.
Co-marketing is when two companies collaborate on promotional efforts for a co-branded offer. Both companies promote a piece of content, which can be in the form of an ebook, whitepaper, research study, or any other gated content. Users are directed to a landing page where they can access the content upon providing their contact details. The resulting leads are then shared between the two companies.
This technique is sometimes called “content swapping” and involves two brands agreeing to promote each other’s content on their own social media channels. This is a fairly simple and easy-to-implement strategy because sharing content on social media doesn’t take much effort. However, the opportunity for enhanced exposure makes this tactic hard to ignore.
Press releases distributed to various online media outlets, in some cases for free, and in other cases for a nominal fee. This content works best when your company has a new product available or some other piece of company news that your audience might find interest. It is written as a news-style article that links back to your brand’s website. Optimize press releases for lead generation by including links to an appropriate landing page where you can collect user contact information.
A guest blog is when an author creates unique content to be published exclusively on another brand’s website. It’s a great way to build backlinks and enhances your search placement online as well. Having said this, your main objective for guest blogging should be to drive relevant traffic and to build trust and authority for your brand. Backlinks should be acknowledged as a nice bonus.
For a fee, you can partner with a content syndication service to advertise or push your branded content onto specific sites. The service can also recommend your content on relevant websites that fit the demographic you want to target. Popular syndication networks include Outbrain, Zemanta, and Taboola.
This is where brands approach relevant syndication sites to republish their content. It can either be done through an entire article, part of an article or an RSS feed. Popular marketing syndication sites include Business2Community, SocialMediaToday, and Mashable. There are also paid content syndication networks that can help distribute your content to a wide range of relevant websites.
It’s already a given that you’re using content syndication to generate more leads by putting your content in front of a wider audience. But, it’s not enough to know that. You need to define the specifics of what exactly you’re aiming for. It’s best to identify your objectives down to the most granular level.
For example, are you looking for top of the funnel leads who will come from a more general audience or those who have already been identified as belonging to the middle of the sales funnel? Or is this a follow-up campaign directed toward Marketing Qualified Leads?
Drill down to what your goal is to help you decide on what your next steps will be, as well as what metrics you need to track and measure.
Knowing what your prospects require depending on which stage of the sales funnel they’re in will help inform the type of content you’ll want to utilize. For example, someone who’s in the later stages might be looking to make comparisons between their possible options so an educated decision can be reached.
In this case, a pricing or features comparison study would be appropriate and will get the best response. Those in the earlier stages of the funnel would most likely prefer topics that introduce a problem and discuss possible solutions.
Social media has long been hyped as the next big thing in content marketing reach. Social media makes it easier for current customers and potential prospects to interact with and share content. Given this, more and more often first touch is occurring on third party websites. This is great because if you’re savvy in your use of content syndication channels you can bring in prospects you might not have even known you could reach.
Always come up with high-quality content that is crafted to resonate with your target audience and to help them in tangible ways. Provide something valuable and make it as informative, entertaining, and easy to digest as possible. Remember that your primary goals are to build authority and drive relevant traffic, so the quality of your syndicated content is critical.
Your audience craves story. Narrative weaves its way through most of pop culture and marketers would do well to take note of this and to incorporate it into your marketing efforts. Customer success stories, testimonials, and case studies are all content that is on the rise as these stories bring in prospects and generate sales. If you bring a prospect along through a well-told marketing story, you’ll be able to keep them turning pages until they finally come to the last page: the sale.
If your content is accessible online, make sure that you can capture contact details and other relevant prospect information where possible. You can achieve this by linking your syndicated content to your gated content that requires prospects to provide contact details in order to access it.
Most readers generally prefer the following formats: e-books, case studies, research reports, webinars, whitepapers, worksheet templates, and checklists.
Long-form communication, while not precisely a dying art, is certainly something that must be used carefully. Much of the groundwork of B2B marketing and content syndication is being laid through brief, engaging and easily remembered short-form communications that lead to previously unknown levels of lead generation.
If you’re not careful, you might make the mistake of creating duplicate content when trying to get your posts syndicated. You should know that search engines penalize websites for having content that isn’t unique and original, so take every precaution to prevent that from happening.
There are three common ways to ensure that your republished work is not regarded as duplicate content:
Placing the “rel=canonical” tag on your syndicated content will ensure that it points back to the original post located on your website and attributes all associated authority to the source. This tag tells search engines that you are the original publisher and that the syndicated content is just a copy.
Using the “noindex” tag on the syndicated copy tells the search engines that the republished content should be kept out of the directory and that automated bots should avoid indexing the page.
A third option is to get a link back from the syndicated copy directly to the original content on your website. Note that the link should point to the actual article and not just your home page.
B2B marketing companies on the cutting edge of content marketing are constantly seeking out new avenues for syndication and are pushing the envelope on discovering the where, when, why, and how of effective content syndication. Partnering with one of these forward-thinking companies will expand your marketing horizons and allow your company to achieve groundbreaking levels of lead generation.
Companies and publishers with good reputations are always a safe bet when choosing which online platforms to push syndicated content to. While a large audience is helpful, it’s more important to go with a partner with theright type of audience that aligns with your brand.
If your publisher can segment their audience in a way that allows your content to reach specific target markets, all the better.
Using content syndication as a lead generation strategy is an excellent way to improve your search engine rankings, establish thought leadership, and widen your reach through demand generation marketing. It’s important to continue nurturing the relationship you started by following up with new leads. Keep them engaged by sending more relevant content their way to drive them along the sales funnel.
When you send a follow-up email, make sure that you reference the content that was downloaded. Cap things off with another call to action that inspires loyalty and brand ambassadorship.
As an additional step, get back to your syndication partner and have them share metrics about your content. Look at bounce rates, click-throughs, and other results to help refine your next strategy and improve your syndicated content in the future.
There is no “best” way to syndicate your content. Try different strategies to discover what works best for your brand and your particular target audience. Keep track of referral lead quantity and quantity to determine the best performing tactics to focus on.
For more information on content syndication, be sure to check out our FREE whitepaper!
Augmenting your original content through syndication, aggregation, and curation are crucial strategies marketers use to increase their target audience reach, as well as boost demand generation. While these terms are so closely related that they’re often interchanged, it’s important to note that each one is quite distinct.
Content syndication is the process of promoting your content on third-party websites as full articles, snippets, links, or thumbnails. The idea is to gain exposure and drive engagement by plugging your content into as many related digital contexts as possible.
Content aggregation, on the other hand, is the process of collecting content from different online sources for the purpose of reuse or resale. This can be done by a real person or via automated software, as the results are organized systematically based on various characteristics.
Content curation is similar to aggregation in terms of gathering content. However, it is different in that the content can also be original and the curation process is always executed using a person’s editorial skills and expertise.
Content syndication is one of the most effective ways of amplifying your content and increasing traffic to your website. If done properly, it can improve your brand reputation. But if done poorly, it can potentially hurt your brand image. Here are a few mistakes to avoid.
Make sure that you take a close look at any syndication agreements you enter into with publishers. Remember that not all websites are reputable. Look for those that not only have a good reputation and online presence but a well-established content syndication program in place.
Apps and software tools such as Hootsuite and Spout Social are easy to use, and help you amplify your syndicated content to reach as many readers as possible. If you’re still doing it manually via multiple online platforms, you’re missing out on the ease and convenience that these readily available tools bring to the table. They’ll also save you from endless hours of searching for syndication opportunities.
If your syndicated content manages to drive prospects towards your sales funnel, you should act quickly. As the saying goes, you must strike while the iron is still hot! See to it that you institute a timely lead follow-up strategy after capturing those leads.
Every one of them should immediately receive a welcome email after they appear on your prospect list. This is to ensure that leads are acknowledged, and there are no missed opportunities for turning a lead into a paying customer.
It’s not enough to just share product features and upcoming events. Come up with a syndication strategy for content that resonates with your target audience and encourages engagement.
If what you share doesn’t grab their attention and keep them interested, your audience will tune out. Take time to define your messaging strategy. If it doesn’t pull at their heartstrings, entertain them, or convince them to take the next step, perhaps it’s time to review your storytelling approach.
In this case, the more, the merrier. The more content you syndicate, the higher your potential lead volume. This, in turn, improves your ability to meet lead targets at a more efficient rate. Just make sure that you’re keeping enough unique content to publish on your website. Otherwise users won’t have a good reason to visit.
The only additional cost for providing more syndicated content is the time spent creating the content to syndicate. Explore which types of content get the best reception from different channels. Whether its eBooks, videos, webinars, infographics, or white papers, pay attention to which types of content generate the most leads and decide what to focus on from there.
An abstract is typically about 200 words long and is used to describe the content you’ve shared on a website. Many fall into the trap of writing abstracts in an uninspired manner, which is a great strategy if you want readers to ignore the great content you’ve created.
To encourage clicks, you should write an abstract that inspires whoever reads it. You can do this by describing the value of the content and perhaps some key selling points. Use action words like “learn” or “find out more” to ensure that readers know exactly what to do next.
One of the biggest issues with syndicating content is the potential for creating duplicate content and hurting your SEO. Thankfully, there are a few ways to ensure that search engines handle it correctly.
Conclusion
Indeed, if executed correctly, content syndication can provide a host of benefits to improve your brand reputation. The increased exposure will bring more awareness to the particular niche market you are targeting. Also, greater brand awareness will help boost trust and your level of authority within your industry.
As much as possible, try to avoid the blunders mentioned above, and you’ll be well on your way toward reaping the rewards afforded by a sound, well-executed content syndication strategy.
Learn how you can kick-start your content syndication campaign with our FREE whitepaper!