How underdog content can be transformed into blockbuster posts by republishing content around the web
Recently, media site The Verge hired a position for someone who will basically take some of their content and republish it on other user-generated publishing platforms like Medium and LinkedIn Pulse.
If you’re a SEO-savvy publisher, you’re probably thinking, “what are they, crazy? Have they lost their darn marbles?”
Well, truthfully, Verge aren’t exactly getting eyeballs based on SEO anyway— they’re a news site (ie: they work harder for the same eyeballs as evergreen publishers……oh, burn.)
But they’re not the only organization who has gotten into the habit of recycling content on sites with larger audiences than their own. Lots of publishers do it, and not even the SEO-unsavvy ones.
Several of our own clients have seen success with this habit for years. Their efforts have been rewarded with tremendous (temporary) traffic and email capture rates from this form of content republishing.
What makes an SEO’s heart stop beating, is re-using identical content, on a site that’s much more likely to rank on it than you are, and then actually doing exactly that.
Not to mention, most of these UGC sites I’ll mention below have nofollow tags, so you don’t get any backlink juice either. Sigh, right?
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But it’s not as clear-cut as it sounds, and not everything is about SEO, as long as it’s still about converting new visitors into email subscribers.
First, if you’ve published a piece of content, and it’s been indexed for a few weeks or months, Google is typically smart enough to tell who the originator is.
Next, don’t go out and dish up your best search-optimized content, and certainly don’t use the same exact title. This is your chance to leave SEO in the wind and use content republishing as a tool to reach an active audience.
Finally, you can pick and choose where you want the content to go.
All of the platforms below allow you to instantly write, optimize, tag, publish, and promote content on your own. There are no curators or editors, other than algorithms who may organize your content by popularity over time.
- Medium is user-generated blogging platform that is primarily used for content republishing. It started out with original content, but content marketers have taken to it like fruit flies to vinegar and users seem to love it. Medium does all the work of putting your content in front of the right people on their site and sometimes through email if your article gets enough shares. Here’s how to make the most of it. Also, note that Medium has an API feature that allows you to set a canonical link (so Google will know where the original content came from.)
- LinkedIn Pulse allows you to publish articles via LinkedIn’s user-generated blog, and it automatically gets shared with people in your network. Anyone can use their personal account to contribute, so you may rely on your editors for re-publishing to get the most reach and leverage their connections.
- Facebook Instant Articles seems like a more advanced version of Facebook Notes, and is already available to top publishers but will be available to all on April 12. We assume these will be highly integrated with Facebook’s ad network, which is where the bonus exposure comes in. You can already re-publish your articles to Facebook Notes, but it only shares the notes with your current fans, and they don’t currently offer paid promotion.
In B2B land there are other contributor networks out there that do have curators like Forbes and Entrepreneur where you’ll need to get chummy with the digital editors to get your content republished. There are also niche community-powered marketing and business blogs like YouMoz and Inbound.org
If you’re B2C, you can simply start a relationship with a general interest publisher with a larger audience than yours. For example, Tom Vick of Natural Health Advisory is in the natural health space, and guest posts on Mother Earth News, a large magazine portal focused on living, gardening, and eating organically.
Some examples include The Dangers of Sitting too Long and Is Chewing Gum Bad for You? In both you’ll find one link back to Tom’s site, which may be a restriction of republished content between the two publishers.
But let’s say you’re a gardening magazine and you wrote a great article on trimming roses that never really took off. Maybe you optimized it, but it never caught on because your site or your audience was simply too small.
This might be an opportunity to recycle that article on a larger platform.
- Create a new title for your article and make it catchy.
- In the article, link keyword phrases back to related articles on your site.
- Don’t forget a call to action at the bottom of your post (download a free related ebook, perhaps?)
- Include images (social media likes that).
- Include a link back to the original article.
If the content hasn’t performed yet and you think it’s worth reading, this is a case where content republishing could do you a lot of good. Just make sure when readers arrive on your site through those hyperlinks, you have 3C zone architecture set up to convert them into email subscribers.
