Curation vs. Aggregation vs. Syndication; Syndicating Your Content

In this curation, aggregation, and syndication series, we will be analyzing the difference between the three, while giving you benefits and tools to help you determine what’s best for your needs.

We’ve all heard that ‘content is king’, and that the best form of SEO is creating and publishing great content. Well, sometimes the great content pursuit can feel overwhelming and may seem to yield little reward. This is where content syndication can help.

What is Content Syndication?

Content Syndication is the process of re-publishing your content on other sites, with a link back to your site. Getting your content syndicated means that it’s appearing on more sites and reaching a larger audience than your site alone.

According to Wikipedia, “Web syndication is a form of syndication in which website material is made available to multiple other sites. Most commonly, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary or update of the website’s recently added content (for example, the latest news or forum posts). The term can also be used to describe other kinds of licensing website content so that other websites can use it.”

How is Syndication different?

Syndication is essentially re-using content as an advertising and publishing exercise.

In review, the main difference between curation and aggregation is that curation is manual and aggregation is automated. Then both curation and aggregation are forms of syndicating, or re-publishing existing content.

Benefits of Content Syndication

Having your content appear on other websites through syndication helps you reach a larger audience, drives traffic to your website, and helps establish you as an expert. This is why syndication is so valuable; it helps to expedite your growth by capitalizing on your existing content.

How do you Syndicate Content?

Content syndication can be approached in two primary ways.

Manually, you can contact sites and ask them to share your content. Or you may even be approached by someone asking to share your content.
Automatically, you can utilize syndication tools to help share your new posts automatically using your RSS feed.

Depending on your approach and current popularity, you could either be paying or getting paid for syndication opportunities.