The Pros and Cons of a Content Syndication

Content syndication is a word we see floating about often. Its effects are often boasted by businesses that make use of this way of spreading our work. However, its definition and advantages can often be harder to discern from these boasts. This is why we’ll be going through the pros and cons of content syndication. Making sure to cover the most important and worrying details present, hopefully helping you employ them better

What is content syndication?

Among the number of definitions of content syndication, the most general one is that it’s the process of pushing your work to other sites. This can be in the form of a sample of it or a full piece of work. This can include entire blog posts from your own site, but of course, it will depend on the application.

Content syndication is a powerful tactic that allows us to spread to other communities that share a certain connecting thread. However, it’s important to know the pros and cons of this method of spreading content in order to properly apply this.

Pros

Content syndication costs little

As a first major benefit of this approach, we have its cost. To begin, a number of sites will allow you to share your content for free. Sometimes, this lack of cost comes back in limits to our options, but that doesn’t matter as much.

Even if we can upload only a part of our work, we will be good to go. However, the paid platforms aren’t meaningless either. They usually strive to boost your visibility while providing ample tools for the user to truly customize the overall experience.

The simplicity of associated platforms

While customizable, these platforms aren’t bloated. They know what their users want, keeping the features topical overall. The most common customizability is in terms of what demographics you wanna hit and which places the user wants to send their work to.

These simple platforms provide an increase in awareness of your brand, and they are extremely useful as a form of growing your audience. These platforms will offer a good return on investment from sheer reach alone. It’s hard to get a way of putting yourself out there as simple as content syndication.

Of course, simplicity doesn’t mean you should be haphazard about the platforms you use. Make sure they are legit and fulfill your needs adequately. Investing a bit of time now can save a lot of it later.

Increased audience

Of course, because of the spread nature of this approach, it will be way easier to reach new audiences. Doing it regularly can be quite a hassle, leading to a lot of unnecessary time being spent. Through these platforms, you’ll quickly get a huge reader base circulating through the content you wish to provide. The content may then be shared with others after the initial members of the audience get intrigued.

This way of spreading your work enhances the overall word-of-mouth recommendations too. While not the most effective part of content syndication, it is an important one to consider. Especially if you are posting on multiple platforms that target different demographics. That’s an exponentially higher number of potential people who’ll engage with our content in the future. Of course, pairing it up with good SEO is the best way to truly maximize the presence that the content syndication platforms provide. If you aren’t acquainted with all the intricacies of search engine optimization, we suggest you to read more here.

Cons

Limited metrics

As with any marketing campaign, we aim to get feedback on the effectiveness of our approach. With these syndication platforms, it can be a lot harder to do so. The traffic will be entirely dependent on the metrics of the platform you are using. If these platforms do not provide accurate metrics, the general knowledge of how well our entire tactic is going will be unknown.

This can heavily hamper our overall behavior toward content syndication. As unknown nature of its effect can make people not invest more time and resources into the platforms provided. While that’s understandable, it’s also a reason why certain platforms can feel unreliable. Consult how much you should invest into these types of marketing and which ones they should be.

Limited media format

It’s possible that your desired content syndication platform will not provide ample support for your formats. The most common type of syndication covers blog posts. Those willing to use different forms of media, especially complex ones, will have a harder time finding a proper platform that covers them.

Of course, certain platforms are made in a way where they can use any form of content, no matter its type. However, they often draw in fewer users than the more specific ones. It’s important to note that these platforms aren’t useless. Their niche dictates their size instead. The blog posts are one of these, will not experience this con as much, if at all.

This approach affects SEO

Because syndication sites have a better ranking than ours, it’s possible to negatively affect the ranking of our content. The spreading of content will result in that site cropping up sooner on google searches than our own. It can be problematic for establishing new niches or new sites too.

This action of doubling content will be rather harmful to our SEO because of this. The sheer act of sharing content across different platforms makes it harder to focus traffic. It’s even tougher to make sure we get a better spot in the search results. While the work is technically ours still, it will potentially leave a focus of impact on the content syndication site, with part of it dripping further toward ours.

Content syndication should be approached with a certain amount of care, managing the fine line between the popularity of our own sites that we get hosted on and the content syndication sites which are meant to further its reach. Knowing how to properly even them out is a goal towards maximum satisfaction and utility.