Content Syndication: How To Increase Your Audience Engagement?

Powerful content marketing isn’t just about content pillars, impacting your social channels or publication schedules. If you’re a content marketer, you need to know how important it is for you to have a variety of B2B marketing strategies up your sleeves. They can help you with generating awareness around your brand, drive more sales leads, expand your reach, and so much more. Syndicating your content does a little bit of all that. So, if you are syndicating your content on third-party websites, you are actually allowing them to share or publish your content on their platform as well. It’s always a smart idea to get your blog posts or content in front of different audiences, who even don’t know it exists.

As an online marketer, what you really want to learn is how to use your content effectively or how you can utilize the same content for the maximum audience reach.

In this expert round-up article I have asked 15 experts to share their valuable insights on the topic “How to Increase your Audience Engagement via Content Syndication?”

 Creating content can take a lot of time, and time is money. Content syndication is a great way to get more eyeballs on a piece than your own blog brings. For many B2B clients, syndicating your content will give you access to a broader audience than your own blog, so it’s worth exploring. There is a potential penalty for SEO for syndicating content, so I recommend that you publish any content first on your website and make sure to get it spidered by Google before sharing it with a 3rd party. For this reason, I also usually rewrite the headline and maybe 20-30% of the content to make any syndicated content original. I’ve expanded the audience to content anywhere from 2X – 20X by syndicating content. If your content is high converting (leads or sales), it also might be a good idea to explore and test paid content syndication opportunities. Companies like Outbrain or Revcontent offer competitively priced placement and use a similar pricing model to Google Adwords.

Rick Ramos is the Chief Marketing Officer at HealthJoy, a health tech venture-backed SaaS startup that’s on a mission to change the healthcare and benefits experience. Prior to HealthJoy, I’ve run marketing for a wide variety of B2B and B2C companies. This includes Adknowledge, the sixth most acquisitive unicorn, according to TechCrunch. Virtumonde/Treeloot, the first CGI scripted dynamic game and 17th largest website in the world. Avalanche who owned MatchMaker.com and Date.com, the first online dating websites on the web. You can connect with him on Twitter.

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When most people think of content syndication, they imagine distributing the same piece of content in its same format to multiple different sites. But if you really want to maximize the benefit of your content as well as engagement with your audience, don’t just syndicate your content — repurpose it.

For example, if you have a blog article titled “10 tips for getting traffic to your website”, create a video by the same title for Youtube, and publish it to your Youtube channel. The script can even be largely similar to the text article. In doing so, you have converted the content to a new medium and expanded your reach to an entirely new audience, as well as a new search engine (did you know Youtube is the world’s second-largest search engine?).

So, don’t just syndicate — repurpose your content to maximize SEO impact as well as audience engagement.

Jayson DeMers is the founder & CEO of EmailAnalytics, a productivity tool that connects to your Gmail or G Suite account and visualizes your email activity — or that of your employees. You can connect with him on Twitter.

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Before we can answer this question we need to agree on what audience engagement really is. Our company, as well as Facebook, has defined content engagement as 15 seconds or longer spent in the active window. According to Chartbeat Analytics, 70% of users consume 80% or more of the content at 15 seconds or higher. The 15-second engagement rule is a good benchmark for our purposes.

Secondly, we need to agree on the definition of content syndication. Our industry defines it, at minimum, three separate ways. For our purpose we’ll keep it simple: syndicating owned content is its distribution on paid and earned channels.

With that out of the way, here’s the answer for paid syndication – use artificial intelligence (AI) to scale the testing of engagement, demographics, channels, devices, interests, etc. AI can do in hours what a team of data scientists need weeks to accomplish.

From an earned syndication perspective, take the lessons learned with paid distribution and apply that to your owned media that might get picked up and syndicated by a publisher.

Chad Pollitt, a decorated veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and former US Army Commander, is the Co-founder of Relevance, the world’s first and only website dedicated to content promotion, news, and insights, and is the VP of Marketing for inPowered.

He’s also a former Adjunct Professor of Internet Marketing at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and current Adjunct Instructor of Content Marketing at the Rutgers University Business School. Chad is a member of the Advisory Board for blockchain technology companies Swachhcoin, Cryptopal, and AdHive.

You can connect with him on Twitter

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Syndicating your content to other platforms like Medium or event Facebook Notes can be an extremely effective means for reaching your target audience where they are at that moment.

Rather than asking them to leave Facebook or LinkedIn via link, the content is there on the platform to be read and enjoyed. So you’re already at an advantage when it comes to attracting and engaging readers.

Add to that foreknowledge of where the reader is and what they’re doing and you can create a most delicious experience.

By that I mean, if you’re syndicating to LinkedIn, for instance, you know they’re going to be using LinkedIn when they see it, and that they would have been scrolling through their LinkedIn News Feed.

What can you say that would be of interest to someone at that particular moment? What might you ask or suggest that would get them intrigued by you and your article?

That’s the first key. Don’t try to push your content, but rather, strive to start a conversation. Pique someone’s interest by asking them to discuss something that’s important to them.

The second key to successful content syndication is to make sure that you have one or more links with that content to other content you’ve written or published within your own site which can potentially draw that reader into your funnel – your Content Pyramid as I call it – where you take the time to educate them more about their topic of interest and, at the same time, you!

Mike Allton is a Content Marketing Practitioner – a title he invented to represent his holistic approach to content marketing that leverages blogging, social media, email marketing, and SEO to drive traffic, generate leads, and convert those leads into sales. He is an award-winning Blogger, Speaker, and Author, and Brand Evangelist at Agorapulse. You can connect with him on Twitter.

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SEO is one of the most overlooked methods of getting your content syndicated – as well as the backlinks, referral traffic and social sharing opportunities that go along with syndication.

If your content ranks #1 in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant search queries, answers the reader’s question and provides value, you will get cited and syndicated…with basically zero effort.

If you’re using tools like BuzzSumo or Cision to monitor for backlinks and brand mentions, you’ll pick these syndications/mentions up in real-time, and you can leverage these organic mentions across your social networks and to add social proof to your website content.

Typically, the process works like this: you write a blog post that tops the SERPs for a targeted and relevant query. Bloggers and reporters find your content and cite it in their own articles. This triggers a brand monitoring/backlink email alert, which lets you know the syndication has gone live.

To max out audience engagement, you’ll want to follow all complimentary, non-competing brands and experts mentioned in the article across all social networks – and then tag them in the posts you make promoting the article that cites your brand/website. If it’s relevant, promo the post across your social networks at least once per month for three months.

Kari DePhillips is the CEO of The Content Factory, a digital marketing agency that represents several national and international brands. SERPstat named Kari as one of the Top 3 Women in SEO, and she’s also the co-founder of the Sisters in SEO Facebook group, which has grown to become the largest network of women in the industry. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

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Most content fails at engagement as brands take a pray and spray approach to getting their content in front of people. Most bands need to spend time thinking about who the content is for and where do these people spend their time online.

Facebook is always one choice. However, what about looking at Reddit, Quora and other online communities that have a loyal following. 10,000 people who care about your topic will always be better for your business then 100,000 people who are lukewarm about your brand and content. Better content marketing and who you target will lead to more audience engagement.

Duane has been called an international man of mystery and digital nomad by friends. He has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents and visited 40 countries around the world. He uses his curiosity for people and love for people watching to run better marketing campaigns for clients.

After leaving Toronto in 2011 to gain an international view of the world, he has worked for Telstra in Australia and brands including ASOS, Jack Wills, and Mopp (bought Sept. 2014) while in London, UK. He now lives in Montreal, Canada helping eCommerce brands grow through data, CRO and PPC marketing across search & social ad platforms. You can connect with him on Twitter.

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Content Syndication is a great way to get exposure to unique audiences with minimal effort. It’s also a great way to establish and maintain topic authority, your SERPs standings, your keyword rankings, etc. You can syndicate content to access specific publications that have the audiences you want to get in front of with the content you already created! But that means you have to focus on content types that are going to interest these publications.

That said, I recommend publishing a unique study, an expert round-up, or a list-type article (trends, tips, etc.) while including a great summarizing infographic to feature in the post. The content itself is going to generally authoritative, leveraging insights that aren’t just your own. Then, the infographic is a neat visual, it’s easy to absorb and retain, it’s engaging and attractive, and highly likely to get shares. Sites that like to syndicate content know this about infographics and will be more open to accept your content.

So create authoritative content that you can design infographics around and pitch that! You’ll broaden your audience, increase organic traffic and referral traffic with very little effort.

I’m a content marketer at Venngage, the leading infographic design tool. I love creating content that engages and converts, getting to know the audiences I write for, writing stories, telling jokes and wondering whether I left the oven on. You can connect with him on Twitter.

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Any piece of content you create has multiple opportunities to drive audience engagement.

One article can lead to posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Quora and Medium to name a few – each with a different angle and approach to get the best engagement.

Asking questions within the post status, reformatting the post to be image led rather than text, even recording an audio version, gives one piece of content huge syndication reach and the potential for audiences to engage with their favourite platform.

Laura is the owner of Birmingham based digital marketing agency JellyBean. She’s been in the industry for almost a decade, with a love of SEO, PPC and all things Digital PR. You can connect with her on Twitter.

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Syndicating content offers an opportunity to reach a new audience. It’s not the size that counts, but the relevance. The type of audience targeted by the publishing platform should be in line with your target audience. It’s difficult to get any sort of engagement without that affinity.

It goes without saying that a canonical URL should be set to your original post. This is the safest route to consolidating page ranking for that of your URL as opposed to the publisher.

Internal links in your original post offer a wonderful opportunity to increase engagement. Once the post is live on the publisher’s site, these links point back to pages on your domain. Ideally, readers will be motivated to click on any of these links to learn more. Editorially relevant links with anchor text that encourage clickthroughs are ideal.

Just avoid any hard sell. From the publisher’s point of view, they are external links. They will scrutinize these and may modify or remove them in order to preserve editorial integrity.

Stephen Jeske is a content strategist at MarketMuse, the AI platform that lets marketing teams build high-quality content at scale. Craft content that improves organic search rankings, drives expertise in your industry and impacts revenue. You can connect with him on Twitter.

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From my experience, to extract the maximum benefits from content syndication, you need to:

-attack as many publications as possible,

do it consistently,

ensure a great user experience on every publication/platform you target.

Every publication (where you can syndicate) has certain native features for which users like to visit it. So tailor your content for every platform to keep the new audiences happy. For instance, Medium users like a well-formatted reading experience that’s driven by storytelling. You need to modify your post titles from the likes of “How to run a successful B2B startup” to a more personal one like, “Here’s what I learned in my two years of running a $5M B2B startup.”

Occasional syndication will only improve your backlinks counter and maybe lead to a trickle of visitors on your website. So commit to ensuring an awesome user experience on every platform that your brand touches and commit to it at a regular cadence. That’s the way to keep the readers happy (which might also turn into loyal customers down the line!)

I’m content marketer specializing in B2B and SaaS niche. You can connect with him on Twitter.

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The approach to content syndication will inevitably depend on your content, your goals/objectives and the audience, so there is no exact science. First, ensure you create thought-provoking and informative content that offers insight and value. In other words, ensure you create content that people actually want to engage with.

Ensure the content speaks to all audiences or create a different angle for each persona. The audience on Facebook, for example, is likely to be very different from the audience on LinkedIn, so ensure you think of the correct angle to engage different audience types.

In addition to the angle, consider the format. People often think of content syndication as syndicating a single piece of content on various channels, but this can be done cleverly through the use of different content formats. For example, if you are primarily marketing a written piece of content, consider syndicating an audio version via a podcast or a graphic version via an infographic – even video. Depending on the target audience(s), such an approach may appeal to different personas and facilitate wider content reach and engagement.

Also, consider how you can further extend reach the content. Posting on different channels via different formats is one route, but also consider the pros and cons of paid promotion, such as Boosted Posts on Facebook, Promoted Tweets via Twitter or Promoted Posts via LinkedIn (to name but a few). You could even consider Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising and various forms of remarketing to engage users with additional/similar content.

Chris Ainsworth is Head of Search at Footprint Digital, the leading UK based digital marketing agency. With over 10 years of industry experience, Chris has a deep technical knowledge of SEO and search marketing.You can connect with him on Twitter.

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Content syndication is a great way to give new life to an old content. Just stick to some basic rules like: wait six months after you first published the content. You want to do that because you want to get all the links, shares and mentions to your site.

After 6 months you can syndicate it but still make sure you link back to the original content using rel=canonical element in your link. You can syndicate your old content to platforms like Linkedin and Medium right now but for some better results you should reach out to online magazines in your niche.

Georgi Todorov is a digital marketing specialist at Green Park Content and All Things Hair. He recently started his own blog about digital marketing called DigitalNovas. Georgi is the creator of The Actionable Link Building Training. Hit him up on Twitter anytime.

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Given that content syndication helps you reach a broader audience and increase brand awareness, it’s also an excellent opportunity to build links that will drive more traffic to your original content piece.

Syndicating your content on such powerful resources like Growth Hackers, you engage a different audience who didn’t even know about your website before. So, to get the most out of content syndication techniques, try the following:

– Republish it on Medium and LinkedIn with the link to your original piece. Result? You reach a wider audience and get links.

– Pitch it to partners so they would republish your content at their websites.

– Pitch original content to top-notch websites that syndicate their content too: Inc., Business Insider, Time, Slate, and others. Getting published there, you win not only juicy backlinks but also more trust and engagement from your audience.

– Publish syndicated content from others from time to time. It will save your time on writing, provide your audience with fresh content, allow you to publish content more often, and therefore influence their engagement by far.

Lesley Vos is a professional copywriter and guest contributor, currently blogging at Bid4Papers, a platform that helps students and authors with writing solutions. Specializing in data research, web text writing, and content promotion, she is in love with words, non-fiction literature, and jazz. You can connect with her on Twitter.

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A Social Media Marketing Industry Report estimated that 60% of marketers are finding innovative ways to present content visually using memes, photos, infographics, etc. in their marketing, while highlighting authentic information about the brand. Content syndication allows us to down the time you would require to share information across diverse platforms while reaching a bigger audience with minimal effort. Time and attention span are precious in this world of constant information exchange, and successful content syndication requires smart content to cut through a busy online world adding value for audiences everywhere.

Marissa Pick is the founder of Marissa Pick Consulting LLC. where she provides strategic consulting focused around Digital Transformation, Content Marketing, Social Media Strategy, Personal Branding and more.

Prior to founding her own business, she was the global director of social media and digital marketing at the CFA Institute where she oversaw efforts to reach journalists, legislators, policymakers, and investment professionals who play essential roles in shaping the direction of the financial services industry.

Marissa holds a Master of Public Administration from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she graduated with Pi Alpha Alpha Honors. She received her B.A. in American Studies from Brandeis University where she was a starter on the Brandeis University softball team.Check out the Marissa Pick website at marissapick.com. You can connect with her on Twitter.

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If you are new to the web the biggest risk you face is almost certainly perpetual obscurity.

Quality of content, originality of thought, structure … anything which differentiates you exists in a vacuum until you have an audience.

All traffic channels which drive large streams of traffic have financial incentives to increasingly shift traffic share over toward paid ads.

A secondary approach many of the major traffic channels consider is that most new pages/websites / things are unneeded duplication or low-quality spam. If you wait for people to find out how great you are you will be waiting for many years.

Alternatively, you can reach out to the sorts of websites Google & other internet platform companies are promoting and publish content on them.

Aaron Wall founded SEObook.com in 2013. He blogs periodically about search algorithms and online publishing. You can connect with him on Twitter.

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As you can see, syndicating your content gives your marketing strategy a lot of mileage. Ultimately, content syndication is a fantastic chance to reach a new crowd and potentially convert those readers into leads. Additionally, if you syndicate other publication’s content on your site, you’re ready to serve your readers valuable and significant content without expecting them to leave your site and discover it somewhere else.