How to Syndicate Your Blog Content

  Written by Easther Sudharta on Feb 9, 2012 3:35 am

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What is blog content syndication? It is simply taking one piece of content (such as a blog post) and sharing it in many different places. The pro of syndication is that you will get additional exposure - instead of just your audience reading your content, you will have the potential for many different audiences to read it as well. The con is that, if you allow other websites to syndicate your content in full, their site *might* outrank you for the keywords that post ranks well for. So instead of your site getting the traffic directly from search, the sites that syndicate your content might get it. Of course, if you do it right, you can still benefit.

Preparing Your Blog Content for Syndication

One thing to keep in mind is regardless of whether you want to syndicate your content, it could be syndicated without your explicit permission, something we will discuss in the next section. But with the fact that it can be done without your permission in mind, be sure to prepare your blog post content for syndication in the following ways. Include internal links within your blog post. Internal links are simply links to other posts / pages on your website within your content, and they are great for three reasons.

• They help people reading your content find additional posts / pages on your site that they might be interested in.
• They are great for your on-site optimization, so be sure to use good keyword anchor text.
• If your content is syndicated exactly as it appears on your blog, then your internal links will be placed on other websites, creating great links back to your website which help with overall search rankings.

Use the RSS Footer Plugin. The RSS Footer plugin for WordPress allows you to add additional information at the top or bottom of your posts - information that only shows up in your RSS feed. You can use it to say something to the effect of the following. This post was written by Easther Sudharta and was originally published on My Online Game Plan. Be sure to follow me on Twitter and Facebook. That way, any site syndicating your content through your RSS feed will automatically have that information at the top or bottom of the content they use. If someone were to read your content on another site (or even in their RSS feed), they would see that you wrote it and have the chance to click on your website link or links to your social accounts.

Syndication Without Your Consent

As mentioned earlier, your content may already be syndicated without your permission. This is known as content scraping - where other sites will use your RSS feed to steal your content and republish it on another site. Most of the time, sites steal content on certain topics to "auto-blog" on subjects that they can build ads around in the hopes that someone will come to their site (thanks to your content) and eventually click on the ads to make them some extra income. What can you do about this type of syndication? You can either put up a fight and insist the thief take your content down by contacting them directly (assuming you can find their contact information), or you can do a little research about the site using a WHOIS lookup. Then contact the site owner or the company hosting the site and let them know they are stealing copyrighted material. You can learn more about this process on Wikipedia Your other option? Accept that it is happening and prepare your content to be syndicated with lots of juicy internal links and the RSS Footer plugin. This way, at least the content thieves will be working for you and building you additional backlinks to your website.

Syndication of Your Choosing

What are some ways you can syndicate your own blog content? Here are just a few ideas...

• Syndicate to social media. Syndicating to social media simply means sharing your latest blog posts on your social media profiles. If you're looking for automatic syndication on Facebook, try registering your blog with Networked Blogs. Then you can set the blog to automatically update your Facebook page each time there is a new post. You can also register your RSS feed with Twitterfeed and have your latest post sent to one or more of your Twitter accounts.
• Syndicate to RSS and blog directories. There are a ton of directories that will let you submit your RSS feed. They will, in turn, update your latest post in their system. Most of the time this is just with a link to your latest post, but be sure to browse around to see how the directories share other blogs' latest content. There are over 200 directories listed in this post that you can try.
• Syndicate full content. Some sites allow you to sign up and add your RSS feed to their network. They will then review your latest posts, and if they like the post, they will publish it in full on their own site. Social Media Today is one example. If you click on their Our network dropdown at the top right of their website, you will see an additional nine sites that also allow you to submit your RSS feed for possible syndication on their blogs (based on topic relevancy, of course).

You can also let others know that your content is free to use (with credit) by giving it a Creative Commons license. This means that instead of being copyrighted, you are saying that others can use your content on their sites with proper attribution. You can learn more about this and create a Creative Commons license for your content at CreativeCommons.org. Do you syndicate your content? What type of traffic results have you seen from allowing others to publish your content, either in part or in

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