Today I’m going to give you a strategy that will help you drive a lot more traffic to your website. I’m going to explain a cornerstone strategy that I’ve used to drive four million hits a month to one of my websites; its content syndication.
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Content syndication is when you take content that you have already published on your website and repurpose it in new ways.
You publish that content elsewhere, either in the same format as the blog post, as text, or change the format, such as video or audio.
This strategy can drive a huge amount of organic traffic to your website, when you do it right.
I’m going to give you the strategy, because in addition to the traffic you can also use it to build high quality links to your website, and you can use it to increase awareness of your brand.
There are some hugely popular web sites out that feature syndicated content, I’m talking about sites like CNN, The Huffington Post, the New York Times, and even my own content has been syndicated repeatedly by the BBC.
But where do you republish your content?
There are a few different things you can do.
How do you Syndicate Content?
The first one I’m gonna tell you about is repurposing your content.
You can take the contents of blog post, use that as a script for a video, and then upload that to YouTube.
You could also then extract the audio from that and turn it into a podcast.
Now have 3 pieces of content, made from 1.
And there’s a really smart way to repurpose your content because you now have 3 platforms that you can promote it on.
So you’re effectively reaching 3 times the audience – in theory, anyway.
Another way is to syndicate your content is to use a website like Medium.
You could just take your original article and paste it straight into Medium as a regular post on their website.
But I don’t recommend doing that. Medium has actually got an import tool that you can use.
Most importantly, when you use the import tool it will automatically set the canonical tag for you – and that is vital for good SEO.
Also another syndication tool that I have used extensively is called NewsNew.co.uk.
Submit your RSS feed to that website and every time you publish a new post it will appear there too.
NewsNow gets huge levels of traffic for practically every niche out there.
But if you’re going to use content syndication properly you have to scale it, right?
It’s no good just having a few places that you can republish for a bit of traffic.
We need to scale this, but people often get confused between guest blogging and content syndication.
I’m going to tell you how to use both.
Good, longterm content syndication starts with guest posting.
Have your own blog is essential for this.
Post high quality content on a regular basis and let people see that you’re serious about your niche and you know what you’re talking about, and that you are of service to your audience.
Once you’ve been publishing for a while and you have a solid body of work that lets people see what you’re all about then approach other websites that accept guest posts.
How do you find blogs that accept guest post?
Finding Guest Posting Opportunities
This is really easy.
Go to Google.com and ype in your niche then hit the plus symbol, and then type in ‘write for us’. The boolean search will look like this: Niche + write for us.
Hit return and you’re going to get a load of websites that accept guest posts in your niche.
When you’ve been accepted by them and you write unique high-quality posts for them, you’ll begin to build a relationship with those blogs.
Then you can then pitch republishing ideas to them.
Publish on your own blog first and show the post to blog editors that you’ve been working with.
Because you’re a valuable asset to their business there is a high probability that they will let you republish articles from your own blog from time to time.
And that begins the journey into content syndication for the long term, and makes the strategy scalable.
The end result is a mix of content written specifically for the audiences of other blogs, and syndicated content from your own blog.
I know from experience how powerful this strategy is because I’ve done it for my own blogs.
So I’m going to leave it there for today, if you’ve found this useful then share it with others who will benefit.