EVO: How to Grow Your Blog Through Syndication

I just got home from attending  the EVO Conference hosted by Rachael from Today’s Mama and Jyl from Mom It Forward and here’s a quick recap of the Syndication panel.   These are my notes from the Syndication panel by Dina Freeman, Robyn Hessinger, and Sheila Bernus Dowd.

Syndication, is it for you?  Get tips on who to work with, what questions to ask, compensation, and find out how it affects your website.

The only thing I knew about syndication before this panel was that TV shows like Seinfeld are syndicated and still make money even when they’re in re-run! So I was really interested to learn and see how I can use syndication for my old blog posts here on Tip Junkie.

You can check out the rest of my insights and what I learned from my posts:

• EVO: How To Create Your Impossible Dream
• EVO: The Business of Blogging

Me, Carley, Jenny, and Meredith ~ Bonding!

What is syndication?

Syndication – you’ve heard of it, but is it for you?  Get tips on who to work with and what questions to ask, learn about compensation, and find out how it can affect your website.  Here are my notes from the Syndication panel by Dina Freeman, Robyn Hessinger, and Sheila Bernus Dowd.

You’ll be blown away at how simple steps of re-purposing your old blog posts can earn you some cash, gain influence as an expert in your field, as well as give you some powerful SEO juice.

What is syndication?

Partnerships between website and authors (content producers).  There are three ways to syndicate blog posts:

1. Licensed: paid, link backs, attribution, and royalties for a story.
2. Ad supported and contracted: Blogher, Ads, Split revenue – blog burst, FM daily buzz sites
3. Free/bartered: exposure, not paid, submit a story

Why Syndicate?

• Introduce your content to more people
• Increase traffics raise profile to create new opportunities
• Money

When you write for a newspaper you’ll get traffic and exposure.  Charge the freelancer rate for articles as the local markets is great receiving $75 – $500 per newspaper story. You most likely won’t get that on any 1 article.

Best Practices:

• Syndicate a good post that doesn’t rank well
• Never syndicate your top key words!! So you are always in the top.

Inbound:  When You Post A Syndicated Article On Your Blog:

1. Re-wright the title, first paragraph.
2. Split longer articles across many pages
3. Embed links to your own content within the body of the article and related stories
4. Promote commenting to generate unique content
5. Add 3-5 links byline to local author blog

Outbound: When Your Article is being  Syndicated On Another Site:

1. Post it live on your site first {at least 2 weeks before}
2. Negotiate and require Do- follow link  on blog and all related stores at the end of post.
3. Require that embedded links are retained, without redirects or no-follows
4. Request 3-5 related story links from your blog

Keys to successful partnership:

• Communication (the best relationships get the most articles published)
• Collaboration
• Written agreement
• Structure + flexibility
• Reciprocity

Alternatives To Syndication:

• Become a contributor
• Guest post
• Develop link love  relationships with biggest competitors.

This is the basic outline of what we talked about.  I promise I was typing as fast as I could to be sure share with you all of the amazing information that was shared by Dina Freeman, Robyn Hessinger, and Sheila Bernus Dowd.  They are incredible women who I now have the biggest crushes on!  {snicker}  I just learned the basics and can’t wait to learn more.

More Tips From Conferences:

• BlissDom: Top 10 Reasons To Attend A Blog Conference
• The Creative Connection Event
• How SITSgirls Changed the Tip Junkie
• Connecting With Your Community of Readers

Also, don’t forget to check out the Tip Junkie Facebook page for even more blogging tips, creative ideas, and free tutorials.

Creating Memories that Endure,

Laurie