If you’ve ever had to manually share your content on socials and then had to wait for it to reach the right people, then you know how important content syndication is. At its most basic, it’s about placing your best content in front of the people who want and need to read your content. This increases the likelihood that said content will convert those readers into paying customers. In this piece, we take a look at the most basic tool you have to syndicate content: your blog.
The Value of Your Blog
The primary value of your own blog is that it’s yours. You can decide what you put in, you can customize your SEO to your liking and preferences, and you can change out the content any time that you want. This degree of control lets you match trends, changing audience wants and needs, and place yourself ahead of the pack. That is, provided that you take full advantage of the potential of your blog to syndicate content. Let’s look at several ways that you can do just that.
1. Syndicate Other Relevant Third-Party Content On Your Blog
Hosting third-party content on your blog might seem like it only benefits the third party, but there are several ways this can be advantageous to you. First, if you’re syndicating content from a brand or company that has a bigger audience than you do, you’re drawing that audience into your own website. Second, provided that it’s high-quality content with relevance to what you have to offer, then your own audience benefits from the new information.
The caveat here is that you should only host content that’s clearly a fit for what you offer. If you share content that’s far removed from the industry that you’re in, you might draw in an audience, but they aren’t going to be interested in what you have to offer. Your existing audience, in the meantime, will wonder what you’re doing. Another thing to watch out for is the volume of links that they want to put in. Make sure that it isn’t too much that it disrupts your SEO efforts.
Simply put, content syndication means republishing your content on other sites in order to reach a broader audience. Blogs are the perfect vehicle to get you there.
2. Syndicate Your Blog On Other Websites
In as much as you can syndicate other B2B company’s content on your blog to gain their existing audience, you can just as easily create content worth syndicating on other companies’ websites and blogs. In this way, you still gain more audience by effectively expanding your reach beyond your own website. There are two ways this commonly happens. First, they can syndicate your existing content. Second, you can create original content for them to syndicate.
When it comes to first option, they’ll often be choosing content that suits their own audience. If your content is too specific for your brand or niche, it isn’t likely that you’re going to attract many businesses willing to syndicate. This, in a way, highlights the importance of not focusing exclusively on branded, sales-centric content. Cover key topics in your niche. Additionally, you can always ask what kind of content they want you to create for them. If it fits your content marketing strategy, it’s an easy win.
3. Syndicate Your Blog On Third-Party Syndication Sites
An option that’s fast becoming popular among B2B marketers today is syndication on dedicated third-party sites. The reasons for this popularity are that these sites have the advantages of specific targeting according to your needs as well as the ability to gate content with lead capture forms. Apart from expanding your audience and reach, this set up allows you to gather leads that are genuinely interested in—or at least curious about—what you have to offer.
While you can actually syndicate a blog post itself, what a lot of people do is use a blog post as a portal to more nuanced, better designed content like downloadable e-books, whitepapers, videos, and other high-quality material. This way you can create something that truly stands out from your average posts. Your blog post, in this regard, can serve as an introductory piece that teases what they can get from giving up their contact details.
One of the biggest advantages of using your blog for content syndication compared to guest posting is that it’s scalable.
4. Syndicate Your Blog Yourself
Of course, you can also conceivably syndicate your blog content yourself. There are certain advantages to this. First, you can create your own lead capture forms with fields that match what you want to get out of your potential leads. What many B2B companies do is add in probing questions that will aid sales and marketing teams in their nurturing. Second, you can change out the content to syndicate at your pleasure—perhaps based on performance numbers.
The downside to syndicating your own content is that you have to do the work to figure out your targeting for yourself—which isn’t always easy to pull off. Next, you’ll have to figure out for yourself what channels to syndicate on. You could do socials but then you lose the specificity of targeting if you don’t pay for ads—your syndication then becomes a passive effort. So, basically, you’ll have to pay anyway with a lot more work needed to make it work.
Syndicate the Right Way, and Gain Valuable Leads
At DemandScience, we can help get your best content in front of the people who want and need to read what you offer. We can even provide engagement data to help determine which among them are worth reaching out to nurture further. Better, we can also provide you with qualified, verified leads from our database of over 70M+ verified contacts in all industries. Tell us your needs and we’ll be more than happy to help you out.
