The Importance of Content Syndication

Content syndication is a method for distributing Web content to many online sites. Syndication is so important because it generates more traffic, improves SEO rankings, and increases brand awareness.

The easiest way to set up Web content syndication is to create Web feeds that give your subscribers a summary of the Web content that you have added recently. Web feeds allow your visitors to subscribe to and acquire frequent updates that are delivered automatically by either a Web portal, Email or a news reader.

The content that is the most appropriate for syndication includes:

• Articles
• Press releases
• Audio (ie, podcasts and mp3 files)
• Videos
• Forums
• Blog posts

How to get your content published

If you have a website, audio and/or video content or photographs, you can offer an option of a feed of your content. If you wish to do that, you should choose your feed reader (such as Feedburner), set up an account and add a subscription button to the bottom of your Website pages.

Why content syndication is so critical for Internet marketing

When you make content syndication a part of your online marketing strategy, as has already been mentioned, you will increase your brand awareness, improve your rankings in the search engines and generate more traffic to your website. The result of this is that your increased traffic will be more qualified and more targeted, which will eventually convert into sales and high-quality inbound links that lead to other pages on your website and/or blog.

Repurposing your content is also a sensible thing to do at times. That way, you are getting a great deal of value out of your content for the time that it took you to write and publish the content. If you repurpose your content efficiently and on a regular basis, you are making use of a very effective content syndication tool and getting a great deal of mileage out of it.

When people are searching for information online, they are looking for very specific information. They are looking for information that is relevant to them and to their problems. It is usually information that is entertaining, newsworthy or educational. On rare occasions, they are at the point when they actually want to buy something, although that is not typical.

With that in mind, the first objective that you should have when it comes to your marketing strategy is to engage your visitors with meaningful and relevant information that meets their needs and their search criteria. If the visitors like what they read, they will probably take the next step of subscribing to your content so that they can receive ongoing information updates from your business.

The elements of content syndication

The content that you are syndicating must be educational, newsworthy and entertaining. It is important to remember that the majority of people who are seeking information on the Internet are not yet at the point where they are ready to buy a product or service. In most cases, they are doing research in an effort to increase their knowledge and to get answers to their specific questions.

If you write content that is focused on fulfilling the needs of your online visitors, those visitors will probably be willing to buy your products and/or services at some point. If you succeed at delivering content that offers solutions to their problems, you will be creating brand awareness for your offering and you will succeed at holding their attention until your visitors get to the point where they are ready to buy your products and/or services.

Your business objectives should be to nurture your visitors, convert them to becoming your customers and deliver good and/or services that make them become and remain loyal customers.

How to successfully run a content syndication strategy

There are several steps that you should follow when it comes to your content syndication strategy.

• Write non-sales, high-quality content that is educational, newsworthy or entertaining that targets your niche.
• Form a network of people who want to share content
• Syndicate your content to your network of people who want to share your content
• Make it easy for your network to subscribe to your content
• Make sure that your subscribers are always informed of future content that you publish
• Always include a link to your sales page at appropriate intervals in your autoresponder Email sequence.

The best method for writing and publishing your content

If you are serious about writing and syndicating your content, you should have a blog. The following are very compelling reasons for you to set up a blog.

• Driving traffic to your website: Because the content in a blog is changing all of the time, it is very good for search engine optimization (SEO). A regularly updated blog provides keyword-rich, fresh content that search engines love to index. New content will be indexed very quickly and this will cause your website to have a higher ranking when potential customers are searching for your products and/or services, which will drive more traffic to your website.
• Building relationships with customers and potential customers: Your business’s blog gives you the opportunity to communicate with your customers and potential customers by leaving comments. Blog discussions are two-way conversations. Building relationships will help your customers and potential customers to find you credible and trustworthy. It can also help you to turn potential customers into customers eventually.
• Becoming a subject matter expert: The information that you offer in your blog can help you to educate your customers and potential customers. If you share your knowledge and truly believe that you have the capability of increasing knowledge in others, you will be regarded as an expert in your niche and people will trust you and eventually will want to buy what you are selling.
• Testing products or ideas: Because of the informal nature of a blog, people find it easy to give you feedback on your new products and/or services, which serves as early market testing. Additionally, you can use your blog to publish a new idea or concept to see how much interest is generated from it.
• Enhancing your business’s relationship with the Press: Once your blog gets industry recognition, the Press will check on your new content on a regular basis. The positive result is that you and your business will be receiving more and more media coverage.
• Notifying you of issues: A blog has the ability to draw your attention to a problem or issue before it gets out of control because you can receive instant feedback from your readers. You can receive instant feedback on your products and/or services, marketing campaign, customer service, etc.

The most important way to be successful at content syndication is to keep adding a lot of fresh content. If you promote this effectively, it will act as a magnet to your website. New visitors will be drawn to your website every day and the more visitors who visit your website, the more potential you have of their eventually becoming customers.

However, as important as posting large amounts of fresh content is, it is important not to forget that the placement of that content is also critical. The following are some helpful tips.

• Set up a Feedburner account so that your feed can be accessed by others easily.
• Share your feed on your social networks. There are several social media channels that can read and publish your content feeds to your fans, followers and friends. They will appear as a status update on your various social media profiles.
• Submit your content to various social media submission directories.

Building a content syndication process

You want to endure that your content syndication process delivers your content to all of the appropriate social media channels.

• Publish fresh, high-quality content that has nothing to do with sales.
• Syndicate the content to numerous social media channels that have a large number of followers.
• Increase the visibility of those syndications by generating comments on the postings.

A helpful thing to do is to join various social media channels, such as LinkedIn and Facebook and to join groups on those sites that are relevant to your industry. You will engage people online easily if you share common interests with them and you demonstrate to them that what you are offering will benefit them. Once you have shared your content with them, you will see that they will want to share your content with other people with whom they are connected.

Avoiding duplicate content

The search engines don’t like duplicate content. There are some ways to avoid problems with duplicate content.

• Make sure that you always wait until your content is indexed by the search engines before you attempt to syndicate.
• If you had a syndication agreement with a specific website and that agreement is now finished, make sure that you revise the content enough so that the search engines don’t view it as duplicate content.

Conclusion

Content syndication is the way to get your word out to many people at once. The more content you generate and syndicate, the more people will pay attention to you and your business and will begin to regard you as an expert in your industry and a person with credibility and one whom they trust. The light at the end of that tunnel is increased business, which ultimately means increased revenue and greater success for your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.