Jul

Content Syndication: What It Is and Why You Should Care

By Sid

content syndication I reviewed a colleague’s new blog yesterday. It looked like a bad FrontPage web site out of 1997… faded colors… flush left… canned header image… and an unusable linking structure.

I told him what I thought.

His response?

“I don’t care, as long as it gets plenty of traffic and makes me money.”

This may seem a bit off the topic of content syndication, but all will become clear in a few seconds, so bear with me…

He pointed me to another out-dated web site (he called it a “blog”, but it wasn’t) with a bunch of poems. He claimed that this site was getting around 426,000 visitors a month, and sure enough it has an Alexa rank of just over 43,000.

It’s ‘just’ poems for crying out loud. The site isn’t “optimized” and, like my friend’s new site, it’s not all that great looking.

What’s it got that gives it so much traffic?

Their poems have been posted all over the web… THOUSANDS of links back to their five-year-old poetry site.

That, my friend, is Content Syndication.

What is Content Syndication?

There are three primary ways to get traffic to your web site or blog online:

Advertising
Search engines
Social networking

The second two options are “free” (except for your time and labor). The first can cost you your business if you’re not careful.

Content syndication is (in my humble opinion) the best method for improving your search engine ranking and for driving traffic to your site through the social networks.

If it’s not already obvious to you, content syndication is simply the syndication (or distribution) of your content to the world wide web.

Your content consists of articles, videos, audios, and even poetry. The more desirable your content is, the more it will be distributed, read, and re-distributed.

I, for one, have used clip art from a guy who just asks that you include a link back to his site if you display one of his images. He probably makes thousands of dollars from Google Adsense alone on his site from the traffic he gets.

Content can be anything that others might display on their web sites. You simply require that they provide a link (preferably using “anchor text” – see below) to your web site.

How do You Syndicate Content?

Clearly the best method of content syndication is word of mouth. Like our poetry-loving friends, you create content that other people WANT to post on their web sites. You give them permission, and off they go.

However, that’s not always possible, and it can take some time. The poetry site (Poem Source) did a good job of naming their URL and their poem categories. That, combined with all the back links to the site give them number one ranking for many poetry-related keyword phrases.

Anchor text is exactly what I used above for the link to Poem Source. You “anchor” the hyperlink to a text phrase, preferably your primary keyword phrase. This associates that keyword phrase with your web site.

You might not be as creative as they, but you’d still like to get your stuff syndicated.

So, let’s talk syndication…

Article Syndication

One method of spreading the love is to post your article content onto various article directory sites. The top site is at Ezine Articles. While there are many article directories, I strongly suggest that you focus most of your attention on Ezine Articles.

Post an original version of your content on your blog. Create a variation for Ezine articles and wait until it has been approved. Then, post variations of the article on the other article directories.

Why variations? If Google discovers identical content on various sites, word on the street has it that this may make those additional links meaningless. I’ve heard so many variations of the “duplicate content” story that the only theory I follow is the one that works.

There ARE tools available to help you syndicate your content. The main problem with these tools is that they come and go so often that they don’t keep up with the changes in the article directories.

Two tools I’ve used successfully in the past include:

Content Composer – Great for quickly creating variations of your primary article. The output from this feeds directly into Article Announcer.

Article Announcer – This software has been around for years, and it still works. It automates most of the task of submitting your article variations to the article directories.

A new tool can be found at: http://www.netmarketingrevolution.com/. I have yet to try this tool, but supposedly it helps to automate the syndication of articles, video AND audio, all in one program.

Video Syndication

As mentioned above, the new tool from Ross Goldberg at http://www.netmarketingrevolution.com/ will syndicate your video and audio content.

The best tool I’ve found is called “Video Submit Wizard“. It works like a charm, is constantly updated to ensure that it works, and the price is extremely reasonable.

Their main competitors can’t hold a candle to their price and features (and ease of use).

Social Networking Syndication

This is new… and it’s hotter than asphalt on a summer’s day.

The general idea behind social networking syndication is to spread the word about your content to the social sphere. That is, you create social buzz.

Over at Social Media Science, they’ve got this down to, well, a ’science’. They have a highly informative report on Social Media Syndication that you should read before venturing into the world of content syndication.

The report tells you how to set up your web site or blog for syndication.

What’s great about their approach is that they focus on adding VALUE through your content. It’s NOT just about having content and using tools to spread it virally. If your content isn’t good, it won’t spread, and no tool will fix that.

They teach you what works, and what doesn’t. Then, you learn HOW to syndicate your content through social media spheres to get the most buzz.

Plus, they have a nifty tool that automates much of the process of syndication to social networking sites, as well as providing meaningful blog comments to YOUR blog.

Imagine having a team of people consistently providing buzz for your blog posts and videos on social bookmarking sites, AND adding helpful comments to your blog to keep it active… That’s what what happens with their Synnd program. It’s beyond cool.

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