Visitor Source #10: Syndicated Posts
Our final traffic source in this series is to run syndicated posts, a strategy not used too widely in the photography industry, but which has generated some good results wherever it has been used.
The basic idea is to re-use content you’ve already created, sometimes re-purposing it in different ways or across different media, with the goal of reaching a wider audience.
Syndication simply means posting multiple copies of a piece of content across different networks, much like the way radio or TV shows are syndicated across different media networks.
One of the first questions photographers have about this topic is whether or not syndicated posts are going to be seen by Google as duplicated content, and possibly lead to a ranking or SEO penalty.
The good news is that’s not too likely to happen.
Syndicated posts are easily identified by Google because there will always be one version that was published first – the original piece on your own website or blog. The clones of your post will have later publication dates, and will be treated as syndicated copies rather than as duplicates.
In fact, the SEO problems caused by duplicated content are usually found on websites where the same (or highly similar) piece of content is found more than once on the same domain.
To create a syndicated post or article, you can simply take an existing blog post and republish it as a syndicated post elsewhere. There’s nothing unusual or different about the publication process, with the possible exception of the “canonical” meta tag.
What does “canonical” mean in this context?
It’s a simple tag inserted into the header section of the page HTML to tell the search engines the URL of the original piece of content, and can easily be added through something like an SEO plugin.
It looks a little like this:
- <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.domain.com/original-article-url” />
Therefore, when you publish a syndicated piece on someone else’s website, you just need to ask the website owner to use the “canonical” meta tag to point Google back to your original post.
The LinkedIn Pulse publishing platform is a great place for syndication, as well as a place to publish unique posts to send people to landing pages.
Your Facebook page is a good place to include syndicated articles as notes, which are going to become more important as time goes by, with links back to your main post.
Tumblr and WordPress.com are both free blogging platforms where you can post articles with links back to your website.
Homework Assignment
- Take one of your blog posts or articles, preferably one that’s evergreen in nature (i.e. relevant regardless of when someone reads it), and publish a syndicated version of it on LinkedIn (their publishing platform is called “Pulse”). You can do that by going to your LinkedIn home page and clicking on “publish a post”.
- You will need an image at the size they recommend, a title, and the copy (text) for the post, as well as a section at the end where readers can find out more about you or get your lead-magnet. The post does not have to be the same as your original article – you can write it slightly differently to make it cater better to the LinkedIn audience.
- When you publish your post, share it social media to get the word out to your network.
