Writing great content but not feeling the love? Posting brilliant articles on LinkedIn, but no new business, despite all your work? Don’t let lack of engagement or results stop you. Content syndication may be the answer to your woes.

What is content syndication? Syndication is a process where you take content you’ve already written and post it to third-party sites. This broadens your audience and increases exposure of your brand. It also builds brand awareness, and if done properly, drives traffic and potential leads back to your website.

Where do you syndicate content? There are paid syndication platforms, but for a small business, the free ones are good to start with. Test drive syndicating content on Small Business Trends, Business2Community, Tumblr, and StumbleUpon. Read the guidelines to make sure you’re posting correctly, then keeping adding to your list. You’ll want to include Reddit and Medium as other options, but more on those later.

Once you’re on a roll, find other syndication sites that relate to your industry and audience. A little research goes a long way. In a previous blog, I talked about cross-promoting your content with non-competitors who share a similar audience. They publish your content. You publish theirs. Make sure to get permission, of course.

Warning: Don’t post your content to just any website. Understand the nuances. Some that claim to be “content syndication tools” are spam-filled imposters.

How does this work? Ideally, you want to syndicate your best content. If you had a “unicorn” of a blog post that readers loved, chances are readers on other sites are going to love it, too. Usually your content is posted as-is, but occasionally it may need to be shortened up or lengthened to fit the platform.

When you post your content, be sure to note; “This content originally ran on ‘your website’ at the bottom and link it back to the original post if the platform allows you to.” This tells the Google bots that you’re sharing it on purpose, and it’s not the dreaded duplicate content it hates so much.

Keep in mind though, SEO shouldn’t be the primary goal of your repurposing efforts. Content syndication is a dedicated marketing strategy that extends your outreach, and encourages engagement. I suggest waiting until Google has indexed your original content, so it outranks syndicated content. Also, stagger your posts to each platform, so you can keep the momentum around your content going.

As with any marketing campaign, don’t forget to measure your results. See which sites are generating more traffic, or even better, more sales. Continue using those and drop the less productive ones.

Have you had great success with content syndication? Drop a comment below. I’d love to hear about it.

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