The answer to getting blog traffic is to ensure your content is out there where your prospects and future readers are hanging out. In other words, you need to be found OUT THERE. The answer to doing that is called syndication.

In this episode, I go over multiple syndication tactics you can use in order to get your blog content out there and into other formats. That’s the key… to reach people where they’re at rather than cross your fingers and hope they find your blog on their own.

Today, here at Coffee Break,  we are going to talk about blog post syndication… That’s how to get your blog post out there and make as much headway as we can with them, get as much traffic as we can with them.

What Is Syndication?

Now the first thing I want to answer here is, “Just what the heck is syndication?” So if you are not familiar with it; basically, syndication means that we are getting our blog post to appear in other places around the internet. If your blog post is written and published to your blog and then no further action is done and that blog post just sits there on your blog and you wait around for people to show up; it will be like a little island into yourself… Like nobody will know about you, nobody will know about your new content and you are not going to get much in the way of traffic.

So, syndication is getting it out there. It is getting it to appear on other sites and other publications. That is exactly what syndication is.

Now as we look forward into what we are doing here, I want you to keep two (2) words in mind. The first one is the word “leverage” and the second one is the word “repurposing”.

So essentially what this means is that… the word “leverage” means that we are getting as much result for minimal effort as possible. It is the idea that we create something once and we are going to get as much use out of that thing as we possibly can.

Now very, very closely related to that is the idea of “repurposing”. Repurposing is where we take a piece of content and we put it into other formats that will then allow us to reuse it and get more leverage out of it.

So, many of the strategies that we are going to be talking about here are doing exactly this. It is ways to take our blog content and kick it out there in other places; sometimes by changing the format.

Syndication Tactics

Social Media

So the first thing that I want to let you know about, in terms of syndication is simply social media. Now I am not going to repeat myself on this because the episode previous to this; Episode 90, went all into how to get your blog post out there on social media. So instead of me repeating myself, head on back to Episode 90, it is the episode right before this one and we are going deep dive on how to get your blog post out there on social media after you hit the publish button.

So that is one very simple way of syndication. Usually it is the easiest one so therefore it is the one that pretty much everybody does. But you do need to make sure you get it done right and that is what Episode 90 is all about.

Social Bookmarking

Now moving on to the next syndication strategy or tactic would be simply social bookmarking. Now social bookmarking; I don’t want you to think that this going to be some kind of Holy Grail of traffic. It is absolutely not and in fact, in many times, you are going to social bookmark stuff and the effect would be barely noticeable. That is just kind of the way it is. I used to have a strategy in place for social bookmarking because I thought maybe it was actually resulting in something… At the end of the day, it wasn’t doing much for me.

What I found for me was that… It would get it out there in front of the few people’s eyes, you know… on some of the aggregations sites that take content in, but the biggest traffic generation for me was StumbleUpon. That is StumbleUpon.com. Now, that is a big link discovery social network where people are stumbling around and randomly hitting sites or they can like up boat it, so essentially that helps spread it around. And you can get massive traffic spikes out of StumbleUpon, and I have, multiple times.

The problem with StumbleUpon traffic is that they bounce off like nobody’s business. It is very low quality traffic. They are not targeted leads by any stretch of the imagination in most cases. So you can get a nice big traffic spike and it makes you feel all good about yourself but you are going to have an insanely high bounce rate and it is because they are really often the right type of people. They are just in internet surfing mode. They are not looking for anything. But at the end of the day it is one other little tactic control in your arsenal and see what happens; is using some social bookmarking.

And there is some tool out there that you can use. One of them is called OnlyWire.com that you can use to get some of the social bookmarking done for you automatically or at least make it a lot simpler.

Video

So this goes in to the area of repurposing. You can actually take a blog post; especially one that you see has been performing fairly well written and you could repurpose it into a video. Now how could you do that? You could get on camera and just talk about the topic of that blog post. I don’t think I would read it because you are going to look like a mechanical robot if you do that… But just take the topic of the blog post and just talk about it. Just have a conversation with the person on the other end of that camera lens and just talk about it. Now, another way that you can do it is to turn it into a slide presentation so that you don’t have to be on camera; it will be slides and then you will just be speaking to it. So that is another way of repurposing.

Now another example of repurposing; we do not do any real fancy production job by any means, but this particular podcast is repurposed to YouTube. We actually take the audio, we put the feature image for the podcast, we splice it together into a video and we share every episode of this podcast to the YouTube channel. Now it doesn’t get nearly as much activity over there as it does in iTunes, and I wouldn’t expect it too. But it is another means of distribution, another means of syndicating this content out into other places because we put it in video format, it allows out to get it up on YouTube. So you can do this. You can look into content that would be worth changing the format up and getting a video to go along with it and getting it up into the major video sites, and YouTube, obviously is the biggest one.

Podcasting

That is what you are listening to right now. Now podcasting is a really great medium. It has very high engagement because you are literally; as I am right now, with you, I am buried into your eardrums most likely, or I am coming out your car speakers. One way or the other, you are listening to me right now and that is a level of engagement between you and me though I have a hard time getting if you are reading something that I wrote. Okay? So podcasting is really good.

It also, unlike video, you do not need to be watching something. Podcasting is one of those forms of content that is very easy to go through while you are doing something else like exercising or driving or riding your bike or something to that effect. And so podcasting is a really great form of content. Now you do not have to create all original content for your podcast nor do you need to depend on interviews like you see so many people do. You can actually take stuff that you already had written about and repurpose it into audio form. It is very much like you would do it with a video. You could simply talk about the same topic. It does not have to be reading the blog post.

Now, unlike video, you could, with a podcast, probably get away with just reading your blog post. You could probably get away with it. Now, I would encourage you to do some practice so that when people listen to you, you don’t sound like you are reading it. You want to sound conversational; sound natural. You do not want to sound like you are reading a piece of text… You don’t want to do that. So if you are going to read your blog post, get some practice under your belt so you can read it back in a natural way and then, yeah… You could just straight up read a blog post and turn it in to an audio version of your blog. I have seen several people out there do that and it is a way of getting a podcast out there without feeling like you have had this whole second thing that you got to deal with, okay?

PDF

You could turn your blog post into a PDF. And you could post it out there on sites like Scribd.com. That is basically a site full of nothing but PDF documents, eBooks, essentially. So you can take your content and do it that way. Now, will a single blog post be enough to justify a PDF? Ah, that will be your call. But some people might find it and find it interesting because Scribd is a PDF focused method of getting content out there. The other thing that you could do is offer PDFs of your blog posts to readers of your blog because some people would find that it is more portable, more easily referenced if they can take it off your blog and get it in to a PDF format.

Maybe they will drop it into Evernote or something and reference it later. You can give those PDFs for free or this could be the easiest way of doing content upgrades to build your list. Literally just have them opt-in to your list to get a PDF version of the blog post that they had just read. Easiest way to go… I am not saying your conversion rates are going to go through the roof on that but you are going to pick up some email subscribers that you otherwise would not have so why the hell not, right? But it is a way of repurposing a blog post and getting more leverage out of it.

Slideshow

Turn that blog post into a slideshow. Now, this is not a word-for-word thing or you copy and paste your blog post and do a slide… That would be stupid. What you would want to do is boil it down into some key points; some bullet points and put those on the slides and then that is useful. Now what you can do is turn around and put that slideshow on a site like Slide Share. Slide Share I believe is a .net domain… SlideShare.net; and get some further distribution there.

Don’t expect magic from there. The best performing slideshows on Slide Share are the ones that are going to be very, very well done. So the more work you put into this and like any form of content – you do a little bit of promotion behind it; you can get some legs some real legs going on on Slide Share; maybe get featured there. But otherwise, it is just a way of syndicating your content out into an additional platform. Now I did mention earlier when we were talking about the video, that you can take that same slideshow that you put out on Slide Share and you can record yourself giving a small, short presentation and screencasting the entire thing; record it and put that up on YouTube. So you see how you are getting multiple usages out of the same thing?

ZinePal

Number 7 on my list is the service at the site called ZinePal. ZinePal.com; and so, what this site will do is that it takes the RSS feed of your blog and will turn it into a PDF eBook. And you can control the formatting of that within some limitations. It is not like a desktop publishing app here but with some limitations you can put your own header and stuff on the document and you get yourself a PDF. So that is a way of repurposing stuff. But the other cool thing that ZinePal has the ability to do is repurpose this same document into the Kindle. So that allows you to actually publish your blog content onto Kindle eBook and people can actually read your blog on their Kindles.  That’s an interesting way of doing some syndication here, alright? So I would encourage you to check out ZinePal.com.

Repurposing Your Stuff

Rewrite It Into A Guest Post

One of them would be that you can take some of your existing content and repurpose it. So guest posting is a traffic strategy as we talked about in past episodes depending on how you do it and who you are guest posting for. It could have limited workability but it does work. It is a legitimate traffic generation tactic. Now instead of writing a completely new piece or going through all these work to find out something you have never written about before, you can actually go to your own blog archives and use your existing content as a starter for a guest post.

So, I definitely am not saying that you republish an entire blog post someplace else. I don’t do that. What you would do is you would use your blog post and re-write it, make a new piece of content out of it, but on the same topic, you can expound upon it a little bit and then you have got yourself a guest post that you can submit to another site. What this is going to do is save you some work. It is going to save you some needless brain spinning because you have actually already done a lot of the work by writing the first version and now you are just going to repurpose it into a second version.

Turn It Into A Lead Magnet

Another thing that you can do is take a blog post or a series of blog posts or maybe take a blog post as an idea and do this and that is, turn it into a lead magnet. You can actually go into your blog post and take sections off it or the whole thing or maybe repurpose it into something that is more lead magnet worthy but essentially you can find ways to build your email list in stuff you have already written. Again, that is a way of getting more leverage by repurposing your content.

Turn It Into A Kindle Book

Now another way and we have already talked about this, but this is a different way of doing it; and that is turning this into a Kindle book, a Kindle eBook. Now, ZinePal, like I mentioned earlier is a way to do this based on your RSS feed; but you can also create a much better structure, basically a real book out of content that you have already written on your blog. Now you are going to have to do some work to put this content into the right order; into an order that flows like a book should, you are probably going to have to re-write a few things so that it actually flows well when somebody is reading it in that format rather than by blog post by blog post format. But you can do that and you can come out with a Kindle book that you distribute. At the very least, that is just an additional platform out there in Amazon which is not a bad place to be and you can get some leads into your site that way.

Make It An Email Autoresponder

The last one I am going to mention is that you can repurpose content that you have already written into email autoresponders. So, if you are looking for ways to put useful content into your email autoresponder sequences, you can actually go back into the archives of your own blog and take content you have already written and you can use that as material to email out to new subscribers on an automatic basis. And you can either copy and paste it in there, maybe tweak it up a little bit or you can tease the crap out of it in that email and then lead them right to your blog which is probably be a better strategy actually, but this is a way to get some additional use; out of content that is probably sitting back in the archives now.

All these ways are ways where you can do two things… Increase your leverage from your content by doing the second thing which is repurposing stuff. Get it out there in multiple formats in order to get more leverage; you get more use out of it.

It should not be something to where you will write it and it sits on the homepage of your blog for a week or so and dies. That is a hamster wheel. That is a content hamster wheel and that is no way to live. Okay? We need to be thinking in terms of long term asset and getting as much use as possible from every piece of content that we create. We do not want to be operating in first gear and having to like sweat and type our hands off here to get anywhere. That is not the way this stuff works. We need to be thinking in terms of maximum use out of the stuff that we make.

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So that is our syndication strategy. In order to take this up to the next level as well as get the specific “how to” on how to put all of these stuff together; in the last episode I mentioned my Traffic Action Plan that you can grab. Now one way to grab this is as a Blog Monetization Lab Member. Now there is another little way to get this and I’m just going to tell you about it here in the podcast; is that if you go to the Blog Marketing Academy, go to any of my blog posts and at the sidebar you will see one of my lead magnets which is the Pre-Publish Checklist… It is a checklist that you can run your blog posts through before you actually publish them to make sure that that post is set up in the best possible way to get as much traffic as you can once you release it into the world.

Now once you opt-in for that checklist, I am going to extend to you a front end offer. We have talked about front end offers on this podcast before, but the front end offer will be my Traffic and Syndication Action Plan and you can get it for as low as $7. And that is a special offer only for brand new subscribers of the list who come in through that particular lead magnet. The only other way to get that Action Plan would be to become a full Lab Member of the Blog Monetization Lab.

So with that being said, we will leave it at that, this episode is almost 20 minutes long, which is a little long for a coffee break… So we will leave it at that!

I’ll see you next time! 😉