Are you tired of publishing content on your website, only to discover that it’s not generating views?
The number of views a piece of content generates is a direct measurement of its success.
You can meticulously craft the perfect article or blog post, but it’s all for nothing unless users view it.
Rather than allowing your website’s content to fall into the digital abyss, though, you can syndicate it to drive more views.
What Is Content Syndication?
Content syndication is an online marketing strategy that involves republishing your website’s content on external channels.
When you syndicate a piece of content that’s currently on your website, you republish it — either partly or entirely — elsewhere.
As a result, more users will view the content.
Your website’s own visitors may view it, or visitors of the syndication channels may view it.
Some of the most popular channels for content syndication include:
- Medium
- Tumblr
- Blogger
- Third-party websites and blogs
While this online marketing strategy can drive more views, you shouldn’t blindly syndicate your website’s content.
You’ll achieve greater syndication success by following a few basic tips.
How To Syndicate Blog Content
Now that we’ve covered the basics of content syndication, let’s now take a look at how you can syndicate the new and existing content on your blog.
Video Overview:
1. Publish on Your Website First
Always publish content on your website before syndicating it on external channels.
Otherwise, you’ll dilute its search engine optimization (SEO) performance.
When published on an external channel first, search engines will typically rank that version of the content while ignoring all other subsequent versions.
Search engines don’t punish websites for syndicated content, but they’ll usually only rank a single version of any given piece of content.
If you publish a piece of content on an external channel before publishing it on your website, they’ll rank the former version. The external channel will essentially outrank your website for keywords related to the content.
Therefore, if you’re planning to syndicate a piece of content, publish it on your website before any external channels.
2. Link Back to Your Website
You should link back to your website from the external channels on which you syndicate your content.
Most syndication channels, including third-party websites and social media networks, allow content creators to include links in their content.
If allowed, you should add at least one link pointing to the page on your website where you first published the content.
At the bottom of a piece of syndicated content, for instance, you can say, “This article was originally published on example.com/title-of-article.”
With a link in your syndicated content, your website’s traffic will increase.
After viewing your syndicated content on an external channel, visitors may click the link to see what other content your website offers.
3. Canonicalize Syndicated Content
In addition to linking back to your website, you should canonicalize your syndicated content.
Canonicalization is technically a form of linking, but it’s designed for search engines rather than human visitors.
Canonicalization prevents indexing and ranking problems posed by duplicate content by telling search engines where a piece of content was first published.
To canonicalize a piece of syndicated content, you’ll need to add a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) snippet, known as a canonical element or tag, to the page where it’s syndicated.
In the canonical element, you can specify the page on your website where you first published the content.
Visitors won’t see the canonical element, but search engines will see and process it when they crawl your syndicated content.
4. Choose Highly Engaging Content
You shouldn’t syndicate all of your website’s content. Instead, choose the highest-quality and most engaging pieces of content to syndicate.
If a piece of content performs poorly on your website, republishing it elsewhere won’t change anything.
It will continue to perform poorly, regardless of which external channels you use to syndicate it.
When planning your content syndication strategy, search your website for pieces of content that generate strong engagement among visitors.
A piece of content doesn’t necessarily need to generate thousands of views for it to be engaging.
You can identify engaging content based on metrics such as average time on page, social media shares and backlinks.
5. Target the Right Syndication Channels
Some channels are more effective for content syndication than others.
If you’ve already cultivated a large following on Medium, you can use it to effectively syndicate your content.
Upon syndicating a new piece of content on Medium, your followers will see it.
With few to no followers, on the other hand, you’ll have a harder time generating views for your syndicated content.
You can still syndicate your content on an external channel with a low number of followers, but you won’t get many views until you’ve convinced users to follow your account.
Third-party websites and blogs are usually the most effective for content syndication.
Unlike Medium and other user-generated blogging platforms, third-party websites and blogs have a specific audience.
Some of them cater to tech enthusiasts, whereas others attract C-suite executives and business owners.
Regardless, you can search for third-party websites and blogs with the same audience as your site that allow syndicated content.
6. Set Up an RSS Feed
Many syndication channels support the use of a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed.
With an RSS feed, you can automatically provide these channels with your website’s content.
They can pull your website’s content from its RSS feed for republishing.
RSS feeds use the Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 specification.
Setting up an RSS feed is quite easy.
If you used WordPress to build your website, it will already have an RSS feed.
WordPress generates an RSS feed automatically, which you can access by appending “feed” to your domain.
Visiting example.com/feed, for example, should reveal your website’s RSS feed with all its posts.
If your website doesn’t use WordPress, you can generate an RSS feed for it using a free service like feedity.com or fetchrss.com.
Once generated, upload the RSS file to your website.
To make sure it works, visit the RSS feed’s location in your web browser.
Wrapping Up
You don’t have to publish new pieces of content exclusively on your website.
You can republish them on external channels.
Syndication will expose your content to a larger audience while increasing your website’s traffic in the process.
