Go Viral with Content Syndication!

What is all of this talk about content syndication? Have you ever wondered how so many blogs get shared all over the internet? Have you just accepted the fact that your content will never gain the recognition that others do? You should no longer feel hopeless. There is a way to get your awesome blogs shared across the net. Thanks to content syndication you too can become internet famous!

Let’s talk first about what content syndication is.

Content syndication is when your content from a blog, post, or article is featured on a well-known site which is related to your niche. It seems impossible with all of the competition out there, but it is do-able.

The end goal for your content syndication strategy is to lead your audience to your site. The strategy is to basically leave a trail of breadcrumbs for your audience to follow. With this idea in mind there are steps to take that will improve this outcome and engage your audience along the way.

Step 1: Define your Goals

Before you get started it is important to determine what you want from this strategy. Do you want to drive traffic to your site? – Obviously. Are you trying to raise your brand awareness? – Most likely. Would you like to keep your audience aware about deals or new products? – Perhaps. Defining your goals will give you a clear and defined path of how you will go about this syndication journey.

Step 2: Learn About your Target Audience

It is very important that you get to know the people you are trying to attract. As a business owner you probably already know this. If not, it is a good thing you are reading this now. Learning about your audience will make it much easier to catch their attention and also allow you to build rapport with your customers. This will intern help get you referrals as they become loyal customers of your business – but that is a whole other conversation for another time.

When getting to know your audience you want to determine: who are they? What are they looking for? What are their interests? Where do they spend their time on the internet?

Step 3: Beef Up your Website

Since you are trying to direct people to your site, you must make sure that it is worth visiting. Use what you have learned about your audience to cater your site to them.  Make it eye-catching, easy to navigate, properly branded, and have a good amount of already written, quality content ready to go on your site and publish often. This will help you become established in your niche. You are the expert of your trade, make sure that your site reflects that.

Step 4: Get on Social Media

If you haven’t noticed, this is the age of social media. Where are most people spending their time? According to the marketing charts online about 1 in 5 minutes of total online time is spent on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. This is a vital step to take in getting recognized online as you can begin to build relationships with your audience.

Once you have set up your business profiles, make them awesome just like your website. Brand them and post often. You can also boost posts to reach more of your target audience. When you are posting be aware that what may work well on one site, may not work as well on another. Use your best judgement.

Step 5: Create Quality Content

When you are writing content keep in mind that this is a blogger’s world and it is highly competitive.

It all starts with the title.

Make sure that your content includes an engaging title that will attract your audience. Always keep them in mind – What are they searching for? What questions do they have? Here are 7 ideas to help create an engaging title:

• Make it attention grabbing
• Include a keyword
• Keep it short and sweet
• Be controversial once in a while
• Use lists – (“Top 10”, “7 Reasons”, “5 Things to do”, etc.)
• Use Power Words
• Use Emotional Triggers

Here is a more in depth discussion about how to use these rules in creating good titles.

Use gentle optimization.

It is no longer acceptable to just write a blog and stuff it with keywords to boost your SEO (search engine optimization) ranking. Your content must be relevant and quality. When creating content you must think about your readers. Keywords are important when it comes to ranking, but you must think through how you will place them within your content. If it feels forced, it will leave a bad taste in your reader’s mouth. Feeling fake and “salesy” is just not attractive. Just think about the tons of terrible blogs on the net that are being passed over for more real and genuine content every day. Don’t be one of those content stuffers, you are better than that!

A couple ways you can ensure that you aren’t stuffing your content with awkward keywords is to use relevant phrases and brand terms where it makes sense.

Make sure your blogs have social sharing buttons.

After all of that hard work writing great blogs, what is the point if they cannot be shared easily? If a reader likes what you have to say they will be more inclined to share your content. They are even more likely to share if they see the share icon for their favorite social channel. It is all about efficiency in today’s world. If we want other people to help us out, we need to make sure that it’s simple to do so.

Step 6: Target Sites to Syndicate your Content

Now that you have all of the basics covered you can begin the search for sites you wish to syndicate for you. There are many different ways to go about this. No, you don’t necessarily have to call up all of the bigshots and ask them to share your content. Here are 5 ways to go about getting your content published:

• Free Content Publishing Networks
  

  Hubpages, Infobarrel and Instructables are popular examples of free content networks in which anyone can submit content to. You may also choose to syndicate just a portion of the content and include a link for our audience to read more.

• Paid Content Discovery Platforms
  

  Sites such as Outbrain, and SimpleReach use the method of paid advertising to promote content on several superior websites.

• Social Bookmarking
  

  Social bookmarking sites like Reddit, and StumbleUpon are fast and easy to use. Simply throw a link out with a snippet and let interest readers flock to your blog.

• Personal Networks
  

  Friends, family, colleagues, etc. People you know can be the easiest boost for your content. Simply ask them to like and share your content. Sometimes it is all about who you know. Use it to your advantage!

• The Skyscraper Technique
  

  This technique is a bit more work but quite effective. Be on the look out and do your research on your competitors. See what works and what doesn’t. Create similar but better content and reach out to the sites who syndicated their content and simply ask them to do the same for yours.

Content syndication is extremely helpful in getting your name out there. With all of the competition these days it isn’t enough to just have good content. While that is increasingly important, it can be very difficult to get noticed without syndication. Just think of all the great content out there that you are missing simply because it wasn’t backed by a good syndication strategy. Content syndication will expose your brand to a new audience and help drive lots of new traffic toward your site. You will begin to establish your brand as the expert and receive quality links to improve your rankings. Before you know it, you won’t even need to seek it out.

For some inspiration, check out this case study about how using a highly searched phrase (Game of Thrones) helped get more than 100 links through a traveling website.

If you have any questions about how to begin your content syndication strategy give Frontier Marketing LLC a call at (847) 254-0837. Our focus is to give businesses like yours the solutions of tomorrow, today!

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