Syndication Is Alive and Well on the Web

When you mention the word “syndication” to the average person walking down the street, they immediately associate it with TV and think “Seinfeld” or “Friends”. But to a savvy web entrepreneur, it can be the life-line between failure and success. They know that syndication on the web can be much easier (via scalability) and much cheaper.

Syndication is a great way to scale a brand and drive traffic to that brand. Here are 5 reasons to seriously consider syndicating your content, service, or tools.

1. It is Cheap!

•Low overhead. Forget about hiring a marketing department to get traction for your product across the web. To get off the ground, all you need is 1 person pushing the brand and the product out.

•Slow, steady growth. Through great times and lean times, the syndication model continues to build. For example, when Salary.com got started in 1999, the tech bubble was about to burst, but this didn’t stop the growth of the Salary.com brand or the Salary Wizard. Syndication allowed Salary.com the ability to continue to grow through the last recession.

•Low tech costs. On the tech side, you only need to build one site. Then you slap on the wrapper of multiple publisher sites via the use of dynamic headers and footers. A great example of this is seen with CareerBuilder.com. On many newspaper sites, you see CareerBuilder powering the career sections. You can see an example of this on USA Today and LA Times.

2. Easy to Scale

Syndication and Bankrate.com go together like PB&J. Bankrate.com knows how to scale a brand. On every major portal, you see the Bankrate tools in the Business or Money section. They have great tools and content -making it very easy to pinpoint a need and scale based on that need.

Also, if you have a widget to access your content, then you can easily place that widget across many publisher sites -in the left or right navigation. See Bankrate tools on Boston.com, for example.

3. Branding

Every product is a brand and it is the goal of every company to get that brand out there. If you have plenty of cash, it is easy. If you don’t, then syndication is one answer. As you syndicate your content across the web, you also spread the brand. The more sites you get on, the more the brand establishes itself in the marketplace. The direct goals are driving revenue and traffic, but the ultimate payoff is the brand exposure you receive from the syndication process. Syndication clearly helped the Salary.com brand get into the minds of consumers across the web.

4. Traffic-builder

Driving traffic is the main goal of the network. One of the best ways to do this is to build a self serve affiliate program. You build it once and then watch it grow. SimplyHired has done a great job at this with their Job-a-matic program. Thousands of sites have signed up to serve job listings to their users while making money for every click on a job listing. The more traffic you drive to your domain, the more money you can demand from advertisers. Leverage is a beautiful thing.

5. Monetization

Syndication helps a site monetize faster. As you build out your network, via a self serve or manual process, you start to monetize and optimize the traffic. Each site you add to the syndicated network brings more cash to the bottom line. You can monetize with advertising, e-commerce and license fees. If you can monetize your content to an attractive level, then the syndication sell to partners becomes much easier. To any partner – what’s better than sticky content and a good revenue stream!

[Photo courtesy Gideon Burton on Flickr]

This insightful post on the benefits of syndication has been written for Profy by Tyler Toby, a recognized expert in online syndication and traffic building. After working on syndication, business development and partnerships with Salary.com since 2004 Tyler is now considering new career opportunities so if your team needs an expert in syndication and traffic building like Tyler is, leave a comment below or shoot me an email and I will introduce you to Tyler for you to discuss how you could benefit from working together.