Syndicating for Success: The Secret to Getting People to Read Your Blog

Imagine this: You have finally overcome the ominous blinking cursor and have poured your heart and soul into the most fantastic blog post that the world has ever seen. Shakespeare? He has nothing on you. Bill Gates? Who is that guy? This is the post that will turn the tide. It’ll sell products and get you that promotion you’ve always wanted. You sit back, breathe a sigh of relief, hit the publish button and wait for the glory to stream in. 

However, nobody reads your masterpiece.

This problem is all too common among organizations that are just starting to get their content calendar up and running. We’ve all heard the benefits an engaging blog might bring. A well-written post may not be the revelatory experience highlighted above, but it can help to drive your thought leadership platform, improve your relationships with stakeholders and even obtain valuable leads. Sculpting the idea and writing the piece are often the hardest parts, so if you’ve gotten that far already, good for you, you’re almost there. Next comes one of the most pivotal parts, syndicating the post.

Putting up a new blog post on social channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook is an obvious way to get more eyeballs, but there are actually syndication methods that go beyond that. There are entire sites and communities that are dedicated to syndicating quality blog posts across various industries and vertical markets. Often these sites will be receptive to simply taking your RSS feed, enabling you to spend more time focused on actually drafting and publishing your content.

In order to be successful with your blog’s syndication, there are a few key things to keep in mind:

• Track your success: It’s tempting to set up your blogs for automatic syndication and just forget about them. However, it’s far more beneficial to actually track your successes. While most syndication sites don’t have built-in analytics, many do at least have view counters. These counters allow you to see which posts are most widely read and which syndication sites produce the greatest return on investment. From there, you can focus your efforts on working with the sites and drafting the posts that give you the best results.
• Befriend the syndication administrator: Most syndication sites have delays from a few hours to even a couple days, so sometimes you have to grease the wheels a bit to get a crucial blog post syndicated as quickly as possible. In these moments, it helps to have a friend on the inside. Be sure to occasionally check-in with the admin behind the syndication operation you’re working with to develop a mutually beneficial relationship. Aside from helping with the menial tasks of getting the correct byline on a post, it can also help you out when you need it most.
• Stay relevant: There are more syndication sites than you could ever possibly need, so it’s important to pick ones that play into your blogs strengths. When choosing a site, be sure to not only research its potential reach, but also how it fits into your message. Syndicating to every single site isn’t necessarily the best idea, so pick and choose the top five that you would like to initially focus on and move ahead from there.
• Automate when possible: If you’re keeping up with your blog posts as you should – posting at least once a week – it can be cumbersome to upload them to manual syndication sites all the time. While these sites shouldn’t be overlooked, opt for syndication options that feed directly into your site’s RSS feed when possible. Distributing syndicated content is certainly important, but it should take a back seat to actually creating it when possible.

Syndication isn’t the secret to a good blog, but it can propel an already great one to success. If your company is already putting human capital into an aggressive editorial calendar, help make the most of it by getting that content in front of as many people as actually possible.