You’ve just worked incredibly hard on a killer piece of content. We’re talking 8-10 hours when you consider the research, the writing, and the custom illustrated graphics (and add an hour for the sourcing of the perfect GIFs).

You publish it and… crickets.

You want to get more eyeballs on your hard work – for your business and for your own personal gratification. How can you do it? The keyword is probably too competitive to get it ranking… Ads are too expensive for an informational piece of content…

Enter: Content Syndication

In this post we’re going to walk you through:

The basics of content syndication
The best strategies for syndication
The best platforms for content syndication

What is Content Syndication?

Content syndication refers to publishing a piece of content you own on one or multiple different websites. Content syndication can be a really helpful content marketing tactic within your content strategy. It helps expand your reach and grow your audience without having to publish unique content on those sites.

Another popular strategy for getting new eyeballs on your content is guest posting. With guest posting, you create a brand new, original piece of content (usually a blog post) and pitch it to a single site.

While this is also a great strategy, it requires a lot of work. Someone has to research an article, write it, pitch it, potentially make edits, etc…

With content syndication, you write a single post and then “syndicate” it across the web so that it appears on multiple sites in the same way it appears on yours.

There’s often a publication mark like “Originally appeared on [original site]” or “This article appeared in [Original publication + Link] and has been published here with permission.”

Benefits of Content Syndication

Content syndication has a plethora of great benefits. It’s one of the best ways to repurpose great content:

Receive exponentially more views
Get your content in front of new audiences who wouldn’t have found it otherwise
Solidify yourself as an authority in the industry through content marketing
Increased website traffic (depending on which strategy you employ)
Some SEO benefit (more on this below)

Image credit: Izooto

Content Syndication and SEO

Does content syndication help SEO? This debate has been raging for as long as the debate over whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich. Most people believe there’s a solid benefit, but others are more skeptical.

When you syndicate content, you’re publishing the exact (or a portion of it) same article that exists on your site on other sites. Most people’s first thought is, “Isn’t that going to result in a duplicate content penalty?”

It’s possible – but not if you use a canonical link back to the original article. Most well-known publishers will do this.

A canonical link tells search engines that this is intentionally duplicate content, and it alerts them to the original piece of content.

Moz

Some people claim any backlinks found within the article receive typical treatment by search engines, while others believe the backlink’s value is diminished due to it being syndicated content.

All that said, there’s a really good chance there is some SEO value to content syndication – just not as much as if you had published unique guest posts on every site that posts your article. An SEO agency can always help if you’re unsure how to approach it.

How to Do Content Syndication Successfully

There are a number of popular strategies for content syndication. Some are good, some probably aren’t all that helpful. If you’re unsure how to approach content syndication, get in touch with a content marketing agency for direction.

Let’s look at three popular syndication strategies:

Use a Content Syndication Platform

There are plenty of content syndication platforms and services that syndicate your content without you having to do much work. Some of these platforms don’t post full articles on other sites, but they will get your content featured elsewhere.

The top platforms for this kind of syndication are:

Outbrain
Taboola
RevContent

They will typically charge on cost per click or cost basis and your content will appear at the bottom of a post. You’ve likely seen this kind of content at the bottom of articles on sites like CNN.

Then there are some platforms that will syndicate your content fully onto other websites – often news sites. Some of these platforms include:

The Hoth
FATJOE

Publish on a Site that Naturally Syndicates Content

Another option is to guest post onto a site that naturally syndicates their content to expand your content marketing efforts.

For example, sites like Business2Community already push their content out to other publishers for syndication. So if you were to publish a guest blog post on B2C, within a few days, you’d find that article published on anywhere from 10 – 100 other sites.

Other sites that naturally syndicate their content include Forbes, Inc, Business Insider, Slate, Thrive Global, and TIME. We realize getting published on a site like this is easier said than done – but it is possible! More and more services are emerging that help you contribute to these large scale sites, and B2C and Thrive Global have community contribution opportunities.

This is a solid strategy, but here are a few things to keep in mind:

Do your research before publishing on a site like this. Look to see what other sites pick up their posts by searching the title of the article in Google. If your post is only going to be picked up by small, low authority sites with little traffic – it might not be worth it.
Make sure they follow best SEO practices. As you evaluate other sites that pick up their articles, look to see if they use proper canonical tags. If not, you run the potential risk of being penalized or simply struggling to rank due to the post being all over the web.

Publishing on a site like this can be a great way to really establish a piece of pillar content.

Syndicate Your Own Content

Another great strategy is to syndicate your own content on your site. This means you would first publish your content on a high authority site like Medium, LinkedIn, or maybe Pinterest. Then, after some time, you’d syndicate the content on your site – citing the original site as the original publisher.

This is a great strategy to put your thought leadership in front of a large audience, while still being able to own the content and push it on your own site and social channels. A professional digital marketing agency in Singapore can help you with achieving this task.

Consider Help from a Content Marketing Agency

Content syndication can help you expand your reach, get in front of new audiences, and ultimately grow your business. Here are some final takeaways to keep in mind:

Ensure your content is worth syndicating. Commit to only publishing and pushing valuable, unique content.
Keep your audience in mind. ’s probably not worth it to syndicate to random websites no one will ever see. You should also consider what stage of the buyer’s journey the article speaks to.
Follow SEO best practices. Make sure to double check for those canonicals.