Content Syndication Series: Article Syndication

In this series I will discuss the best options for getting your content out to many high-traffic audio, video, and article directories.

Article Syndication Viability

Q:  Is content syndication still a viable and useful tool for getting visitors?

A:  Yes it is.  Years ago I advocated article syndication for the sole purpose of getting direct visitors and to make your content available to site owners who would publish your content on their sites, in front of their readership.

The song remains the same today.  With curation on the rise and several tools available to bloggers for finding and curating all kinds of content from many different sources, it makes even more sense now to syndicate quality content around the web so it will be available to publishers for curation purposes.

Expected outcomes:

1. Direct visitors from popular article directories and information sites.
2. Establish authority for you and your site on your topic range.
3. Get picked up by other web publishers and put in front of their readers.
4. Citations and social proof that you can leverage for guest posting opportunities on large sites.

Spreading your content around the web is not a difficult process if you have the right tools.  For article syndication, I recommend Submit Your Article.  They have quality checks in place to make sure you and everyone else in their network are syndicating only high quality stuff.  This keeps the article networks clean and protects all of us from submitting to junk article factories – which are useless to everyone on the web.

It’s not about search engines…

The biggest misconception about article marketing is that it is effective for search engine optimization.  People still advocate for article syndication for the sole purpose of getting links from different locations around the web to influence Google.

This was only a factor in the very early years of article syndication.  Google quickly quashed it as a link building technique that had any benefit to publishers for SEO.  Since then, hundreds of articles have been published on the validity of article marketing from only the SEO perspective.

This is why you’ll find all kinds of articles all over the web about how syndication is a dead tactic.  It is not, unless all you are interested in is search engine trickery.  Which is incredibly short-sighted because it ignores all the other strong benefits of syndication, mentioned in expected outcomes above.

Example of a winning article syndication campaign…

You craft a brilliant piece and syndicate it to all the directories around the web eager to have your content.

Your article sits on most directories and doesn’t get picked up by any publishers, but it starts grabbing social signals like “Likes” +1s Tweets and so on.  Over time and across the entire network that you’ve syndicated to, this becomes very important and impactful to your bottom line.

On a handful of the bigger directories, your article gets more social attention and has great potential to be picked up by a publisher and used on their website.  This is a big win, especially if that site has a ton more traffic than yours.  Now the social signals increase because you’re placed in front of a warmer audience of readers who are trained to show appreciation to the publisher when they put up something good.

Quality stands out…

If you take the time to write the same quality of article you would for your own blog, your article is going to stand out big time.  Most people suck (intentionally for lack of caring or unintentionally for lack of creativity and education) at writing good content for the web.  This is to your advantage – use it!

This is how you get the most out of article syndication.  It doesn’t provide enough impact to be worth the trouble, though, if you plan to do the syndication part by hand.  It only gives you a good ROI (return on investment) if you use a service like Submit Your Article to get the job done efficiently.