This case study will show you what is behind the curtains of a real Wizard of Content Syndication. You’ll see that with almost no resources, you can build your own content syndication network - or tap into one that already exists. You can bang the drum and gather a few other players and go from zero to big, big, big dog in a hurry.
Very few internet marketers REALLY understand the power of syndicating your content through the social media. Oh, sure … enlisting others to promote your content is obviously a good idea. But almost nobody really gets this.
Content syndication is the secret element that most Internet marketers know absolutely nothing about. The reason is simple: content syndication is relatively new and is a byproduct of the explosion in participation in online social networks. Content Syndication is the single most important factor that will cause your online business to succeed in the coming years. It is the driver behind higher search engine visibility and rankings. If your content is really good, syndication can set off a viral spread through social channels.
Using social media to achieve content syndication gives you measurable business results. That is the gold. That is the payoff. Almost all the other Web 2.0 activities everyone is doing are just fruitless distraction, taking your focus off content syndication.
So what is content syndication?
Syndication is the simple process of extending the reach of your central hub by having your content distributed and shared by a network of people (not by you) to many different social communities. Social networks frown on “self-submission” of content. The goal of both social networks and search engines is to provide the best user experience, guaranteeing that users will return. When you submit your own content, it’s a red flag suggesting that no one other than you finds your content worthwhile. The search engines see this and will bury your content. For best results, you need to build a content syndication system where others consistently submit your content and vote and comment on it.
Let’s take an example from Digg, one of the most popular news/story networks. This case study was first shown to me by my friend, Charles Heflin. (Charles has created his own powerful Content Syndication Network, which I use to promote my blog posts.)
Look at the third listing on this page, with 785 diggs. You can see that MrBabyMan submitted 2008 Greek Riots (PICS), and this story made the front page of Digg. Now, the content may very well not be as good as something you could create and submit to Digg. But here’s the difference: MrBabyMan has built a Content Syndication Network (CSN) that moved his story on the front page of Digg.
There is no more powerful element in internet marketing than the ability to build a content syndication network that pushes content up in visibility. When your network can push a story so that it gets front-page recognition in Digg, you have created some very powerful – and profitable – visibility.
And you can actually get visibility and traffic from the public at large who use Digg to find stories to blog about, ideas to write about, stories to use to engage their own audience. They come to Digg and use it as a news source. So the higher your visibility rises within Digg or any other social network, the more action you will see.
It is a numbers game. Out of 10,000 people who see your content, you may end up with 100 of them who link to your content. And that is very powerful, because those links will attract a lot of search engine attention to your central hub.
Take a closer look at MrBabyMan’s network
When we click on his profile name, we get this:
He joined December 7th, 2005, so he’s been around for awhile. Scrolling down MrBabyMan’s Digg page, we can see that he has 247 friends, and most of his friends are “mutual friends.”
They are mutual friends because MrBabyMan has an understanding with these other users: when MrBabyMan submits content to the Digg network, he’ll share it with his mutual friends. They are expected to go in and look at the content and if they find it good, they will Digg it up in the rankings.
Understand that MrBabyMan’s friends are not just any friends – and this is a critical point for your own content syndication network. Many on Digg have far bigger networks. Mr BabyMan has a syndication network of just 247 friends.
But he uses this network to consistently get stories dugg to the top of the front page of the Digg news/story network. MrBabyMan is a Digg power user. He has built an extremely powerful Digg syndication network.
You could actually build a network like this and earn money by taking content from clients and having it pushed to the top of Digg because of the search engine optimization benefits derived from your content syndication network.
It’s a lucrative black market business that isn’t really talked about. This type of activity is definitely frowned on by big networks like Digg.
MrBabyMan Digg Stats
We know how long MrBabyMan has been an active subscriber to Digg, and we can see how many items he’s Dugg (135,735 at this viewing), and how many times he has left a comment.
Next, you can see the number of stories MrBabyMan has submitted to the network. And many of these stories have made it to the Digg front page, as noted by the “Made Popular” stat. In fact, MrBabyMan has a 28% “Popular Ratio.” That is extremely powerful. The websites with that content, the 3,711 links “made popular” by MrBabyMan’s content syndication, are probably plastered to the top of every search engine known to man.
It’s important to have a clear understanding of what’s happening here and how active MrBabyMan has been to have dugg 135,735 items. In fact, as the time of this viewing, he had actually submitted 13,190 news stories to Digg.
Now … he’s been a Digg member at this writing less than 4 years. Let’s round that up to 4. So that’s 4 x 365 = 1460 days. Look at how many actions he has done on Digg in that time. He has 135,735 diggs plus 13,190 stories submitted plus 2,283 comments. That adds up to 134,893 actions in 1460 days. That means he is averaging over 103 different actions per day, 7 days a week, since he joined Digg. So you can see that MrBabyMan has made a full-time job of building up his status in Digg.
The power in having a content syndication network like this is that you can, at will, get content bumped higher and higher in visibility … all the way to the top of the network, where tens of thousands of people will see the content. Of course, a certain percentage of those people will link to the content and share the content.
This activity pushes the content way beyond the borders of Digg, into many other networks, including blogs and websites.
You can do this same sort of analysis on Reddit or StumbleUpon or any of the popular social media sites. You see the same thing happening:
- Content gets voted up the chain.
- The top stories go to the front page and gain the highest visibility.
- You have the ability to go in and look at the user whose content got voted all the way to the top.
- You can back-engineer what they’re doing.
- You can see the relative amount of output they are creating.
Each network that you consider using as your injection point for your content will have its own system, differing from the others. And each of these networks has “Help” files, showing you exactly what you need to do in order to engage with that network.
The content syndication network in Digg is an unspoken culture. To understand it, you need to take a closer look at a power user like MrBabyMan and the mutual friends he has collected. It’s the same thing across all these story networks: people befriend each other and vote content up the chain for friends.
Why is this small network so powerful, effective, and profitable?
To answer that question, check out some of MrBabyMan’s mutual friends. Let’s start by clicking on vroom101. He’s been in Digg since August 28th, 2005. Vroom101 has 45 friends, and almost all of them are mutual friends. Look more closely at some statistics.
It’s friends helping friends here, the Law of Reciprocity. You are seeing human nature in effect here. So let’s take a closer look at vroom101’s activity and see why MrBabyMan wants vroom101 to be part of his own content syndication network.
Vroom101 Stats
When you look at the activity, you see that vroom101 is highly active, too. It all goes back to the OGRES formula:
- Observe your niche market, so you know who publishes really good content. Notice what the successful people are doing.
- Gather good content into your own network.
- Reward those you want to connect with by voting their content up in the network.
- Engage those serious, value-oriented content providers and networkers. You want to be part of their group, and you want them to be part of yours.
- Seek others in your niche who give value and want to network.
Building your network is the “S” part of the OGRES formula, Seek. This is how you find people who are doing the things you want done. In the case of content syndication, you are looking for other people who are observing, gathering, rewarding and engaging people on a network. The stats clearly show this person is doing that.
So of course, MrBabyMan will come in and see these stats and say, “Great. This person is active. This is somebody I want to network with. So I will add them as a mutual friend, and they will be part of my content syndication network, and I will be part of theirs.” And now, a more recent look at the power of this network for syndicating this single article:
The article was listed on the front page of Digg when it had 785 Diggs and 209 comments. Obviously, that was just the tip of the iceberg of the effect of MrBabyMan’s syndication network.
And now, along come you. As a new user on the network, you have a bit of a conundrum. You don’t have these stats to impress MrBabyMan. You haven’t built them yet. MrBabyMan will not be impressed with you. It would do you no good to do a friend request with him. He’ll just ignore it. That’s how these networks work.
For you to be successful, you need to spend considerable time priming your network. You have to go back to the network and search out stories you find interesting and reward them. When you reward other users by Digging their content, you help push it higher in visibility. That is the “R” part of the formula.
And then you also need to go out to the internet and find good content that nobody else has dugg yet, and submit it. That is the “O” and the “G” and the “E” part of the formula. You observe what is going on, and you gather the good stuff into the Digg network, which will engage others in the network.
As you do this, your stats increase. Your stats stamp you as a serious content syndicator, which makes you attractive to other content syndicators, and they will begin to accept your friend requests and make you a mutual friend. And now you begin doing syndication jobs for them, as they do for you. And now your stats really take off, because each of your mutual friends also has their own content syndication network of some size … with whom they will share the good content you want syndicated.
And all these people working together create a big mass whose sole purpose is to push that content higher and higher up in visibility within the network. And all MrBabyMan has done is to follow the OGRES formula. To find the people for your own network:
- Just go to the top stories of your chosen network
- Click on the submitters
- Backtrack them to their mutual friends
- Backtrack to their friends’ mutual friends
- Keep backtracking until you find people who will accept you as a friend, based on your current statistics in that network.
So you start by building up your own statistics. Find a lot of stories that haven’t been submitted to the network yet. Observe and gather. That begins to build your stats, the number of articles you have submitted. And you also do the “Reward” part, where you reward other people by voting for and commenting on their content.
The result is, you build up your “Dugg”, “Comments”, and “Submitted” stats … and then you seek out people who have similar stats to yours. Then as your stats grow, you seek people who have bigger and bigger stats. Result? Your content syndication network becomes more and more powerful.
This exact procedure is being duplicated right now on dozens … or hundreds … of social networks. Your job is to find the one which best targets your own content, and then focus on building your own content syndication network within that social network. Your reward is that as you build your CSN, your content will rise higher and higher within that network. And as other bloggers and website owners come in and look for good stories in their niche, more and more will talk about and link to your content. You will get more and more inbound links – it happens every time.
The collective marketplace judges the quality of your content, and that quality ultimately determines how high your rankings will go. If you publish good content and continually spread it into your own CSN, it will spread out into other social networks in which you are not directly involved. And that brings quality, targeted traffic directly to your central hub.
Keep in mind … traffic directly from networks like Digg historically does not convert well to sales for you. But that isn’t the main benefit you want. You want the backlinks that force up your visibility and rankings on the search engines … and which also bring quality traffic to your central hub. Also, because those links appear on blogs that your targeted niche market focuses on, you get a second, different level of quality, targeted traffic.
And you don’t need to be on the front page of Digg for this to happen. Your real goal is to rank high within your own category in your chosen network.
We call this the Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine because, as you build you CSN bigger and bigger and bigger, you’ll gain more and more visibility within these networks. A certain percentage of your content will generate massive amounts of traffic.
You’ve got to do it right. Never submit garbage or spam or any promotional material. Submit only content that is highly engaging to your target audience. That content will attract people to your central hub, and a certain percentage will fall into your sales funnel, which leads to money in the bank.
We call this “perpetual” because your CSN will get ever bigger and bigger and bigger. Your search engine rankings will get larger and larger. You’ll get more and more rankings because you are submitting more and more new content, which gets you indexed for new keywords, while your CSN and your social networks are working to bump up your rankings for that content. Plus, the inbound links you get for your CSN activity also bump up your search engine rankings.
So it’s perpetual. It gets ever-larger. Yes, it will take some time to set it up. But once your machine is set up, your activities are very simple. Just:
- Post quality content.
- Syndicate that content.
Focus on consistently repeating those 2 chores, and they will take you anywhere you want to go.
Richard Dennis
The Content Syndication Revelation
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
