Should You Let Others Syndicate Your Blog Content?
When you publish great content on your blog, others will want to share it with their communities. They may even ask if they can syndicate some or all of your posts to their blogs.
However, as a marketer, do you want your company’s posts on someone else’s blog?
Syndicating your content has a number of pros and cons. The biggest pro is that your blog content will get distributed to a wider audience. However, you can also end up in a situation where your audience only sees your content on other blogs and never links it back to you (even if the site syndicating your posts gives you attribution).
Here are five things to consider when someone asks if they can syndicate your content:
1. Exposure
Can the site that wants to syndicate your blog posts give you increased exposure to your target audience? If not, I see little reason for allowing them to reprint your posts. If so, how big is their readership and how influential is their blog? If their reach within your target audience is greater than yours, then you may want to consider syndication.
2. Partnerships
Would you like to form a partnership with the blog that wants to syndicate your posts? If so, you may find it beneficial to establish a presence on their blog. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean allowing them to syndicate your posts – especially if their target audience doesn’t match yours. Instead, you can offer to write guest posts for their blog or arrange a partnership where you agree to share each other’s content via social media.
3. SEO
As part of my research for this article, I wanted to test the theory that Google gives better rankings to the site that publishes a blog post first. To do this, I typed the titles of six of my blog posts into Google to see what ranked higher – the posts on my site or the posts on a site that syndicates my content. The site that syndicates my posts has a much higher readership than my blog. The results were split 50/50 with my blog coming in at #1 on Google half of the time and the bigger blog taking #1 spot in the other cases. If you decide to let another blog syndicate your posts, require them to wait a certain amount of time before they republish your content. Depending on how newsworthy your posts are, you can ask them to wait anywhere from a day to two weeks. Also be sure that your posts’ title and meta tags contain your keywords.
4. Credit
When you allow someone to syndicate your blog posts, be sure that they cite you as the original source and keep your author bios intact.
5. Keeping in Touch with Your Audience
When you syndicate your blog posts to another site, you need to know when each post will be published so you can keep an eye on comments and social sharing. I frequently miss conversations about my syndicated posts because I don’t always receive notifications when someone leaves a comment. That’s why it’s important to make sure that your notification tools are working
If you’re concerned about someone stealing or plagiarizing your content, be sure to check out my article, “Will Your Competitors Steal All of Your Content?” for tips on how to make sure your content doesn’t appear on unauthorized websites.
What about you? Would you allow someone to syndicate your blog posts? If so, what criteria would you look for in a syndication partner? Feel free to share your comments and questions below.
About the Author: Rachel Foster
Rachel Foster is a B2B copywriter who helps marketers improve their response rates, clearly communicate complex messages and generate high-quality leads. She taught white paper, sell sheet and case study writing for MarketingProfs and was included in the Online Marketing Institute’s list of the “Top 40+ Digital Strategists in Marketing for 2014”. Visit www.freshperspectivewriting.com to learn more or download free B2B marketing resources.
