Hey what’s up listeners! Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode#61 of the podcast that helps you build and grow a profitable audience online. I am, as always, your host James Reynolds and I am excited for another awesome show that we have lined up today.

But before we get to the show today, let me just send a couple of high fived out in to the Traffic Jam community. The first one to Julie who commented on the Yaro Starek episode and the second one to Chall who commented on the Mike Rhodes episode. Thank you to you both for providing such awesome feedback. I really do appreciate that.

And remember to you, the listener, the episode page for each show is the place to comment, ask questions and to access all the extra bonuses that come with every single show. Because each week we painstakingly put together a full word for word transcript to the show, we add a downloadable MP3 file just incase you want to save the show to your computer and don’t want to stream via iTunes or Stitcher or one of those places. And we add some special bonus training to really help you take the ideas and methodologies that are presented in the show to even greater heights, all of which are available to download for free from the episode page itself.

So you may be asking, well, how do I get to that? It is very simple, in this instance go to TrafficJamCast.com/61 and to access the bonus training for the other episodes, same thing, TrafficJamCast.com/ the episode number.

So before we get started today, head on over to episode page, grab the MP3 if you wish, grab the transcript, but also grab the special bonus upload, the content upgrade that comes with the show and then be ready to listen on to this episode.

Okay, so now to introduce our guest for episode#61. His name is Brian Honigman and he’s a marketing consultant, freelance writer, and professional speaker. He worked with both startups and brands, improving their content marketing, social media and search engine optimization efforts; NYU, UNICEF, Huffington Post, Live, The American Advertising Federation, and for organizations and conferences all over the world. He’s also a contributing writer to Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Forbes, The NextWeb, Wall Street Journal, and others.

Are you interested to know how he got those writing opportunities? Well, it’s your lucky day because that is the topic of today’s interview. We’re going to be talking content syndication – how to take your own content and get it syndicated to major media channels for wider exposure. That’s what’s coming up. So without any further ado, let’s introduce our guest today, his name is as of course, Brian Honigman and we’re talking content syndication.

James: So hey there! Welcome back listeners. You’re tuned in to Episode#61 of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Brian Honigman. Brian, how are you doing?

Brian: I am doing great! Thanks so much for having me James.

James: Great to have you here. As always, I want to drive straight in to the content and it’s actually content syndication that I want to talk to you about today. Just to kind of set the scene because these types of terms do get banded around quite a lot. What’s the difference around content distribution and content syndication?

Brian: Content syndication is actually a form of content distribution. So content distribution is just utilizing the content that you have in behalf of your brand or to reach your audience and distributing it where they give their attention where they are active or where they are reading or watch video etc. Wherever your audience is at the same time. The active content syndication as a form of content distribution, content syndication is basically producing your own content on your own properties and then having different partners republishing that content elsewhere. So I think listeners would probably be most familiar with content syndication on TV. Seinfeld is probably the most syndicated television show ever. I don’t know at the top of my mind what the initial channel they were on, but years and years after their show is replayed on other networks giving them more visibility on a wider audience to see their show so business owners and marketers can do a similar thing on a variety of ways – video content, blog content which will be the main content as I describe content syndication. Basically in a nutshell it is a way of producing your own content and making a way to post it with your permission to achieve common goals.

James: Nice! You’ve begun to answer my next question which is why after putting all this time and effort and energy in to your content then why give that content to other people for them to gain the benefit of it and I guess it is that exposure, right? I mean really what we are talking about is taking an asset that you own and giving it wider distribution and getting it more eyeballs. Would that be fair to say?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely and I think you brought up a common concern. I think the whole process of content syndication has to be very strategic. I wouldn’t say creating a blog post then having it republish on these blogs is a real worth. I think you have to have a very specific plan in mind and understanding why you are doing content syndication you give it greater visibility but in a nutshell you republish your content with partners that reach the audience that you are trying to reach. You want to ensure that you get credit for as the owner of the original content and you want to make sure that your content partners actually get traffic and engagement with their content because what’s the point of publishing a blog post on a website that doesn’t nearly get any traffic or doesn’t get searched with the same audience then that’s when spreading the content is taking much time but it isn’t worth it. So you have to be very strategic in that approach and you can choose what you want to keep as your own solely or other copy you want to syndicate. I have seen blogs that do not practice syndication with all of their content. They only choose some of it, they think that it will do better than others. It is important to incorporate content syndication as part of a greater strategy. It isn’t like the sole channel but one of many that can drive results.

James: Yeah, well let’s loop back to the strategy in a moment. I certainly want to dig a little bit deeper on evaluating syndication partners and what quite you might have in place to sort of pick out what would be good syndication relationships and what might not be. But let’s move things forward by talking about the kind of the nuts and bolts process of getting your content syndicated. Do you have yourself Brian a formula that our listener could follow for hooking up these syndication relationships?

Brian: Yeah, sure. It definitely is a long process, definitely not something that happens overnight. Let’s talk about blog contents specifically. There are many types of syndication videos but this definitely is applicable to different types but I will be talking solely with your blog. With your blog, I think it is important for when you are producing your content for the long term. So consistently creating valuable assets that drive interaction with your audience. From that point, you want to start your transition to building relationships with other blogs, publications and voices in to space that industry that would potentially be interceding in syndicating your content. So that process involves a lot of relationship building. Also guest blogging. Guest blogging is typically when it comes to the syndication of your blog content, one of the best ways to transition in to this whole process. That is something that I had done and I worked with many clients in the past for my consultancy. Basically, you are creating your own content then in order to reach out and reach the similar audience to your own and generate reviews and your content visibility and is creating content to serve a particular audience, it is great to use guest blogging. Guest blogging is a lot of work because you are not just writing your own blog. You have to create content for the blogs of others that drives results back to you as well. It’s a great tactic and I definitely think that there’s great benefits to it in the long term but it requires a lot of work and a lot of asset and time which are blended for everyone. So syndication is a natural evolution from guest blogging where once you have created content in your own site, you start to reach out to other relevant sites. They are allowing you to blog on their platforms and once you kind of buildup rapport with these editors, blog and content managers, then it would be much more easier to say, hey, are you open for the potential of syndicating content as opposed to an additional content I had been producing for your website up to this point? So it typically requires a little bit of trust or a higher level of trust than just reaching out to a website blindly and that’s unless you have a really, really big brand behind you, a large audience where you can demonstrate the value of syndication so it can work but it is easiest to work once you have already established relationships with the other blogs and publications that you want to syndicate with and guest blogging is a really great way to bridge that gap and establish that relationship.

James: Yeah, it is certainly sounds like a sequential process. It’s not like a shortcut here? You’ve really got to first of all, have some proof of quality content before you can even approach those guest blogging opportunities and I guess once you’ve managed to hook up those guest blog post you then have the opportunity of a piece of gain with a little bit of traction. We also have perhaps a bit of interaction, people have enjoyed them, then the next step is, hey, how do we leverage this and perhaps I can give you regular stuff which you can just re-syndicate. Seems to be how it works, right?

Brian: Yeah, it’s definitely a slow transition and I don’t want to say that that initial proof that your content will resonate with their audience and it has resonated with yours in the past, that doesn’t mean your blog has to have three million unique visitors a month but what it does require is that you are consistently publishing and that your content is of quality to a particular audience. I think those are without a doubt requirements. Yes, the larger, if you have a very active blog with a large audience that it is very easy to illustrate, yes that certainly will help. But at the end of the day, what’s most important is the quality.

James: Yeah and I guess the other opportunity if you don’t have a good blog following and a proven track record of content, you can just go out and create something and submit that as your proof I guess that would be another strategy you could implement. So what are some of the key points then to evaluating syndicating potential partners? You did touch upon a few and that is of course that they have an audience because there is no point syndicating to a blog that has no one actually looking at, but what might some of the other criteria be in selecting who might be an appropriate partner for syndication?

Brian: Sure. So I touched on this a little bit already in a sense that you want definitely to choose partners where they’re reach is to a similar audience to your own. So if you are in one industry and the other blog and publication reaches a completely different industry that you are not trying to reach and has no value for your offering as a business that really doesn’t make sense. So first and foremost you want to pick a match in terms of the audience that they are reaching. It doesn’t seem to be a hundred percent exactly the same but if you are trying to reach email marketers. Let’s say you are trying to reach blog managers and this blog and publication reaches in general role, then that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be a 100% match but it should be pretty similar on audience reach or you won’t get any value on this effort. Another really important consideration is does this publication or blog really syndicate content? Not all blogs choose to do so. So how do you find that out? Looking at their content, seeing if you can see any content on there that has been syndicated in the past, just simply illustrated within the article, it will either say at the bottom or at the very top of the piece it will say something along the lines of – this article was originally published on this blog, and will have a link to that original article making sure that they get due credit for their work. That’s always a good sign as to know if the blog does actually accept syndicated content. Also, kind of pointing back to establishing relationships. When you have a relationship with this blog, in any capacity and you have individuals reach out to you, you can just kind of ask them since they are already in touch with you in some capacity. Whereas in other cases it is going to have to be a blind outreach. Some places love to do it, others are against it. it really just depends on where the publication is at and what they are looking to accomplish so I know a big publication like Huffington Post often syndicate content from other sources and I found that out just by looking at following writers on there that I valued their insights and I saw that the article was originally published on their blog or for some other place that they writer for and that was indication enough to do it on my own but yes, understanding if it is an audience match, if they actually do syndicate and then just getting the right contact info. It probably is the best way to do so. It’s the things that I consider when matching up with partners and kind of a tactical approach to the whole identifying partners aspect of content syndication is when I am creating content for my own blog or for another blog for a client, I often think about, okay, so we are writing this blog article, and I always want to ensure its relevancy as it is relevant to my own audience but at the start I begin to brainstorm this article and start to think beginning to write it, will it benefit another audience of the places I am currently or in the future would like to syndicate to? Let’s say I am writing an article on my blog that I plan to have ideally republished in Huffington Post, I will keep that in mind to ensure that from the beginning my article is of worth to my audience but also I am catering it to the style guide and audience interest of the Huffington Post in this example but that’s something I always like to keep in mind so that in the end when I produce this article for my site I want to make sure that it still matches other audience as well otherwise they can potentially say no it is not a match and that is something in the world that will happen but if you plan to really tackle syndication it really is important to keep that in mind from the beginning.

James: Yeah, interestingly as we talk about Huffington Post, I know of course obviously that it is one of the sites that you syndicate to. Another one to my knowledge is nextweb and those are quite different right? You’ve got Huffington Post which is kind of a big behemoth of a site with a huge audience spanning a lot of different topics whereas nextweb is a smaller website with a lot more niche focus so I guess one is going after the audience and one is going after the particular demographic audience type that you want. What have been your differing results between the two like if you were to weigh one up against the other, which would you take first?

Brian: I think that is a pretty example to pull out there and something for others to definitely keep in mind. You want to be syndicating content to different types of blogs in different locations in your space so for instance the Huffington Post is a much more well-known brand, larger publication, add a lot of credibility for the content that we are producing for. It is a great way for myself or anyone else who syndicates on Huffington Post to say hey, I contribute content regularly to the Huffington post. The difference is that since it is such a large publication at all, once you do have content published on it, it is far more difficult to give that content the visibility that it deserves because there is a lot of other competing content on that website. Let’s say for example Huffington Post is a massive content producer, they probably publish a thousand content a day whereas a smaller niche publication like Next Web probably does something closer to a hundred or less. So you are competing on a far larger scale in a site like Huffington Post so it is likely that your content on there won’t get as much traffic and traction and engagement, social media because you are competing with a lot of other content on their site. But, if for some reason you right something really wonderful, and it gets the visibility you deserve on the Huffington Post or a publication of that size it will be seen by a lot of people. It has potential to reach a massive audience but you will have that less likely to happen on a large publication like that but you’re still so it is beneficial to publish there. You do get the links that are high value, the publicity stamp is there. But whereas with a more niche site, the more industry specific site like Next Web which is kind of tech marketing focused designed for marketers’ publication. It has a much smaller publication. It is not as well known outside of the tech space, still highly credible, still a wonderful place to pitch your content, but it is far more likely that each post will drive more traction for your business if you are in a particular industry. Because they are publishing a far less amount of content so you are competing with a lot less content, the entire audience of the site is more likely the audience you are trying to reach. When you are publishing on an industry niche publication, the entire website is focused on the subject that you are publishing and syndicating content about. Whereas on the Huffington Post, since there is such a large major publication, they are not only publishing tech for this example, but they are also covering politics, business, food, religion – all this different posts that they have, all the many audience that they are attending to. Whearas slightly larger number of the Next Web audience and other industry niche publication audience is relevant to the content that you are producing. Also, with the fact that they are producing a lot less content on a daily basis, your content is far more likely to get published on the homepage on their site, be featured on some capacity, be shared on social media with attribution to you whereas the Huffington Post, or a larger publication, he’s far less likely to tweet that article on your behalf or share on their Facebook page. They are far more likely to share content that they produce in-house and content that’s generating a lot of traffic building for the site so I think the best approach for someone who’s approaching syndication, the best time for the first time is to syndicate with both large publications like the Huffington Post as well as niche publications like Next Web so you get a variety of mix and it is a part of your content syndication plans.

James: Yeah, that would certainly be my experience too. A couple of the sites that I syndicate to, one is Entrepreneur Middle East which is relatively broad. It is obviously business focused but it is relatively broad topic related and another that we work with is communicate by advertising page which is a smaller site by comparison but is far more focused. Everyone that’s reading that magazine or looking at that website is in the marketing space and therefore it’s a very applicable audience to me. But would I trade either one of them? No of course not because Entrepreneur is that kind of nice credibility and authority building site that gets big exposure but the other one hits my perfect target audience so I think that is kind of excellent advice. If you can certainly strike that balance, that’s the perfect scenario to be in. Let’s talk about types of content. I’ve found particular success with visual content for syndication especially infographics and things like that. But in your experience, are there any types of content that particularly are well suited to content syndication? You’re obviously doing a lot with blogs, you’ve also mentioned videos, but what types of content might work?

Brian: it depends on your goals and the goals of your blog and your organization but I found that blog content – online at least, is one of the most syndicated. I think second to that is videos and visual but everyday videos and visuals are quickly rising in popularity in comparison to the written word and blog content but at the end of the day articles and written content still gets far more visibility so across the web and a lot more readership than a lot of these other forms of content so that is going to make a lot of editors and blog managers far more understanding in integrating blog content in many cases includes video and visual elements as well. But I think one thing that I found that’s worked is, also from a networking perspective, is including perspective of others in your industry. Not just like a roundup post or something like that, but let’s say, if you are talking about email marketing, including the insights of a prolific, influential email marketing expert within an article, you’re not only networking with that individual, but I found that it makes a feast of written content like a blog post gets far more accepted often for industry blogs because they take that industry voice and credibility source for your argument, you’re making it a piece and further encourages them to syndicate it so I would definitely consider a different source of information quoting different sources of info and individuals in your pieces because that is a great way to further encourage your content to getting accepted.

James: Yeah and I guess the real smart thing about that is if you do quote industry experts who themselves have a large following and an influential reach if you happen to tell them the fact that you’ve included them, there is also an opportunity they’ll send plenty of people and traffic and visibility your way as well, right?

Brian: Exactly! It’s a networking move for both of you and you being generous in the form of content, actually funnily enough, I wrote an article today for my blog brianhornigan.com/blog, about using content marketing to grow your professional network and that is kind of one great way, that is syndication in a sense by including them and featuring them prominently and giving them some additional visibility which they are more likely than not share with their audience which is another great move for everyone involved.

James: Yeah cool! Of course content syndication also has SEO benefits, right? It can also support search rankings. What are some of the SEO related syndication tips that you might have and of course are there any pitfalls to avoid as well when you are kind of putting the SEO slant in to some of this stuff?

Brian: Right. With anything with SEO, I always, always, always, always encourage to be cautious. If you do anything that is kind of gaming search engine capacity it is highly likely that it will be flagged and not actually help and potentially hurt your efforts to optimize for the search engines. But it is important that all your content, you have this in the back of your mind you have to focus on the right approach. So in terms of SEO I think one really important concern is when possible, I know it is possible, but when syndicating with a partner there is a canonical tag to have them add whenever they republish content to their site of your own. They can add a canonical add that tells this search engine that it is a further indicator to let the search engine know that this is the original home of the piece and to give the original piece the authority and the greater visibility for search engines. So yes, both pieces will rank if you have a piece of content syndicated on three different places, all of those pieces will rank for keywords related to the subject but with the canonical tag, you are telling Google, hey, we’ve given express permission for this to be published out there but we’re the original piece so this is what should get priority in search results. That is an important concern. I don’t think you’re going to get hurt if you don’t use that in some publications. Some blogs that I have worked with and syndicate with don’t even know what that means and they are not really open for such changes but other ones, there’s a lot of plug ins that you can use if you look at this but typically in the instructions given by Google in the topic of syndication, they say that as long as you include that link on the post either at the bottom or at the top that says hey, this article is originally published in Brian Harmon’s blog. A version of this piece was originally published to Brian Harmon’s blog and a link to this piece. Typically that is good enough for the search engines to understand that this is a syndicated piece and to rank it accordingly but the canonical tag is another separate piece to have but not a 100% required. It is a nice to have rather than a must have.

James: Yeah totally and I am sure plenty of people’s eyes will be spinning a technical code on things like what exactly is a canonical but –

Brian: Yeah, it is a little touchy.

James: Totally, but let’s get wrapping things up. Before we do that I want to ask you about how this perhaps applies to great local business owner for him to kind of to get only a small percentage of the potential target market. It might be on some of this bigger publications especially Huffington Post or a site like that. Where do you suggest that they get started if indeed you do suggest they get started with content syndication?

Brian: It is not for everyone. I want to make that clear. It depends on what your goals are and your bandwidth for creating content. You don’t want to create it once, you want to do it many, many times and very consistently so if you don’t have the bandwidth to create content on a regular basis and then continue syndicating on a regular basis. It is a long term thing. For everyone who don’t have the bandwidth then it is certainly okay to skip it. Blogging on your own is still valuable as well. This is just an added tool for distribution. What I would suggest for small businesses is mainly using content syndication to help build their visibility online so getting the links, the traffic to your site can help build a more robust profile for your website. They may not have many links to it or may not even often be visited by members of your audience. It can be a small blog in your area, it can like in Brooklyn for instance, it can be a little Brooklyn blog that covers small business needs. See if they ever syndicate content, see if they ever are interested in anyone producing content for their site. Just start to build a relationship with them. Either way, it will be beneficial in some capacity. It is just really important to start small, realize that if that one article doesn’t move a needle for you that syndicated, over time, this whole process can help your website a more powerful than helping market your business and not to mention a stamp of credibility. Which business owner would you be more interested in doing business with? If one has written for the Huffington Post or some other publication or industry, as opposed to the same business owner who owns the same type of business but hasn’t been published anywhere. So it definitely is a great credibility tool like another stamp of approval that you can get from a third party source to help further validate your expertise and your standing within the industry.

James: Yeah, well that is something that I am sure that has been of huge benefit to you Brian. You’ve got those relationships in place and you can say that you’ve been published on Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal and some of the other places that you’ve appeared, but to just kind of wrap this whole topic, what have some of those spin offs been? Have you been able to attribute some of this content syndication down to revenue in your pocket or increase traffic to your website? What have been the spin off results for you and your business?

Brian: I definitely think without a doubt that using content both on my blog, guest blogging and having it syndicated has been one of the main growth drivers for my entire business. I have been blogging and writing for probably 3+ years now and that content across my site and elsewhere ranks for relevant keywords in the search engines, is shared on social media often so that typically, like 80% of the people that reach out to me are close to other people within my network or from referrals reach out to me because they saw my blog content that was ranking in the search engines or they saw it in social media because someone shared it. And that is typically a source of all my inbound leads. These customers are already interested in my offerings. It is not a hard sell now that they have kind of learned something from me. Sometimes a client will reach out after having followed my content on a particular site for months or years and they’ll say hey I have been following you on the site for a long time you’ve taught me a lot, now I need your marketing expertise for XYZ we’ve got to work together. That helps me make clients, that helps make initial conversation a lot easier because we already kind of have an established rapport if you will, and I think it has been really wonder and a lot of great things, having been able to establish relationships with great individuals in the industry, I have been able to press mentions just because you produce enough content on a particular subject matter, you slowly get started to be associated with someone who knows what they are talking about in that particular field. So it’s been a really great benefit for my efforts and I can’t recommend enough. Just as an example, of the content that I am producing, last year just on the search engine, so content on my blog, content on other websites that I have written when it is ranking in search engines on Google, it’s clicked on over five hundred thousand times a year so that is only a metric of someone clicking on an article and reading it, it doesn’t necessarily mean they read the whole thing, they bounced right away, etc. but that is a lot of potential interaction that has led to a lot of visibility from that so I certainly implore others to definitely experiment with creating content on a consistent basis and seeing what works and seeing what doesn’t.

James: Okay cool! Also, it really is inspiring for someone who has only really been writing in the past two or three years and from what I understand kind of hated writing until he passed through school, a bit like me. I think it is quite inspiring for us to get on board and try some of this stuff themselves. Brian I think this a good juncture to send people off somewhere where you live on the web, I guess that would be your website, www.brianhonigman.com or is there anywhere else that you would like to suggest our listeners head on off to?

Brian: Yeah, www.brianhonigman.com/blog, at this point I am producing content on there once a week on all these different subjects so I have an article about content syndication if you want to review the process we went over today, that would be helpful. I’m also very, very active on Twitter. You can always reach me there just www.twitter.com/brianhonigman.

James: Perfect! Well to you the listener, Brian’s website, his Twitter profile and some of the other resources mentioned in today’s show will also be listed on the episode page for this show which you’ll get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/61. That’s it! I guess all that remains for me is to thank you Brian. Super stoked that we connected and this was a blast! Thanks for sharing so much.

Brian: I had a great time, thanks for having me!

So welcome back listener. There you go that was Brian Honigman from www.brianhonigman.com. Now be sure to check out Brian’s website and his social profiles which are included in the episode page for episode#61. And also contained on that page is a special bonus for you. To help you really get started fast with content syndication, I have prepared 52 of my favorite Google search strings that will help you find guest postings and syndication opportunities faster. So to get your hands on that, and of course to join in to the discussion for this episode, go to TrafficJamCast.com/61.

Now of course we will be back on Traffic Jam next week with another awesome guest lined up for you, but to play out this week’s show we do have as always, a traffic jam. It is of course chosen by our guest, Brian Honigman and he has gone for a very recent and up to date track. He’s gone for Charlie XCX and the track Boom Clap! So enjoy that and I will catch you again here real soon.