Jun
In preparation for our upcoming book, Charles Heflin and I were asked the following question by the other co-author, Richard Dennis:
“Charles and Tom, what is it about content syndication that blows your mind?”
Since I’m older and cuter I went first…
OK, I know, having your “mind blown” is a rather dated colloquialism, but it still manages to get the job done, and just about everyone knows what Richard was after by his question. So here is my answer. Actually, to be honest, it’s a SUMMARY of my answer. You must read the book to get the complete picture (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?).
What blows my mind about content syndication is that it is the ultimate END GAME for all current and future successful online marketing; yet only a minuscule number of people understand its immediate and long term effects and implications. Even fewer know how to execute a successful content syndication campaign. Now stop for a second… and read this sentence again. I’ll wait…
If this statement is ANYWHERE NEAR true then you have every reason to dissect, explore, test and literally devour what I’m about to share.
Content syndication currently exists in a kind of “FUTURE SHOCK” state, to borrow Alvin Toffler’s description. He defined Future Shock as the “The premature arrival of the future.” This is exactly how I view the current state of content syndication.
It’s “premature” only in the sense that the online world is not ready for nor do they expect the outcomes and massive success that content syndication will generate, especially when it’s executed properly, as we have demonstrated and continue to perfect at SocialMediaScience.com.
It’s the “future” in that content syndication is where ALL future online marketing is heading, regardless of whether people like it or not. In the very near future EVERYONE will be forced to abide by what will seem to be a very stringent code. But it’s not stringent to those of us who have practiced these syndication protocols for years and LOVE THEM because of the results we get, time and time again.
Even the words, “Content Syndication”, both alone and together are packed with stellar meaning. Quality, relevant “Content” describes the number one motive and goal for every person engaging in an online SEARCH. The primary goal of ALL search engines therefore is to deliver this quality, relevant and easily digestible CONTENT to all its users. The search engines KNOW that this is the ultimate end GOAL.
What is mysterious and baffling here is that most online marketers also know about the role of quality content. Around the world millions engage in various kinds of SEO strategies as a costly and often unpredictable solution. They understand the “trees” but for many reasons they have yet to see the “forest.” Believe me, once you see the FOREST and you understand what this vantage point offers, you will kick yourself for not seeing it sooner. It’s as if Fort Knox has stacked its gold bullion onto the center of Times Square and day by day people walk by and see only shiny metallic images, with less than 1% of 1% ever stuffing one of those valuable gold bricks into their backpack. The FOREST and the GOLD BULLION is CONTENT SYNDICATION.
In the next few years the search engines will finally perfect their search architecture to such a degree that they can superimpose their MASSIVE CONTENT SIEVE onto every combination of words and phrases that people so glibly submit as CONTENT. Expect the Net as we know it today to undergo the most massive and complete CONTENT HOUSE CLEANING since its inception. We have already seen smaller versions of this grand WORD PURGE; but you ain’t seen nothing yet! Expect this grand daddy of them all to be on the horizon soon.
Online marketers are fond of calling this “The Google Slap.” Well, call me a seasoned sadist, because I LOVE it whenever Google slaps me (and rest of the net). “It hurts soooo good!” Why? Because when they do this I see yet ANOTHER reason why content syndication blows my mind and another reason why it SHOULD blow yours. It’s like cleaning up the streets of New York City so that the hard working, honest and law abiding citizens can walk freely and enjoy the fruits of their labors; which for us content syndication advocates means more READERS and more SALES. Whenever the net get’s SLAPPED I win, because I know how to leverage my content by syndicating it on the new and cleanly swept syndication sidewalks that Google cleared off just for me and for everyone else who VALUES true content. And just think; now we get to do this without all the hindrances and trash that used to line the content roadways of cyberspace. Do you get the picture?
Lastly, what blows my mind is the word “SYNDICATION” itself, and the various meanings it conveys. Have you ever done a study on this word? Do you know what it means to “syndicate” something? For example when applied to online content I discovered that to syndicate means all of the following:
1. To BROADCAST through multiple channels.
2. To CONTINUE to broadcast through multiple channels on a REGULAR basis.
3. To syndicate so often and so well that you DOMINATE your content niche, topic or keyword. For example, when we say things like, “Las Vegas is still run by the Syndicate,” we are implying that a “Syndicate” is a group of people who have established themselves as a powerful multichannel force, one that will not be EASILY MOVED.
4. Isn’t this EXACTLY what we want our content to accomplish…to dominate our chosen niche so that NO ONE can move us aside…ever?
Now consider this. When most people think of content they automatically think of something written, like an article, blog post, press release, etc. But as my friend, Russell Wright, reminded me recently, content means any “item” that is capable of embodying meaning and can be distributed through typical online channels. When you consider the implications of this you have to get excited. As the average online business owner begins to explore and understand the value and the mechanics of content syndication expect to see a tidal wave of new approaches to online marketing.
OK, if you have followed me this far you have either concluded that this guy is on to something historic and monumental or that he is a complete idiot mind freak toying with my lack of knowledge and worse yet, my emotions. Obviously, you must be the final judge, and I welcome that. I’m not trying to be cute or flamboyant about all this…(OK, so maybe I am a little). The point is that you owe it to yourself to find out if these predictions and forecasts are based in truth. If you discover they are then I suggest you begin now to learn how to live and succeed in the state of CONTENT SYNDICATION FUTURE SHOCK…because it has already arrived and it’s here to stay.
Now for a word from my partner Charles Heflin on this “Future Shock”…
The facet of content syndication that blows my mind is its leveraging power.
There is no other single thing in Internet marketing that you can do that holds more leverage than content syndication.
Why?
In a SINGLE move you can (single being the KEY word)…
- Initiate the viral spread of your content to many, many networks and people
- Enhance the visibility of your content in social circles from other people propagating (spreading) your content.
- Enhance the visibility of your content in the search engines through multiple references all leading to your content
- Enhance the ranking of your content in the search engines because of all the ‘Social Buzz’ surrounding your content
There is simply NO other more efficient action you can take in Internet marketing today that has more leverage, none. You can effectively narrow your marketing tasks down to simply writing educational, enlightening and entertaining content for your target audience, syndicate that content and watch as your target audience begins to arrive at your website in perpetually growing numbers.
No other form of Internet marketing is this easy and none is more powerful in terms of time spent to reward gained.
Of course to use this leverage you have to go through a paradigm shift in what you “thought” Internet marketing was all about. To use this leverage you must forget marketing and start being educational, enlightening and entertaining to the audience you wish to attract. Then this audience will seek out your wares, no selling required… Sales just happen.
It is a shift away from the “pitch” and into quality of information which leads to sales. Internet consumers are VERY wise these days. They base their judgment of what to buy based on trust and social mention. Consumers are savvy now; they know how to research to find the answers they seek… Are you going to be one that answers those questions in an educational, enlightening or entertaining way or are you just looking for a sale?
To harness the leverage of content syndication you MUST shift your thinking and forget about marketing. As you forget about marketing and focus on delivering quality content, marketing will happen for you automatically. How is this for counter intuitive?
Are you ready for some FUTURE SHOCK? … If not I suggest you get ready. It’s already here and Thomas and I (and our partners and staff) have spent over 4 years researching, testing and visiting Times Square, daily claiming our gold, which nobody else seems to notice…Honest, you should see OUR backpacks!
Thomas Rozof & Charles Heflin, SocialMediaScience.com
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23 Responses to “Online Future Shock: Why Content Syndication Is the Premature Arrival of The Future”
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- charles: Hi Jake... I haven't connected with you in a while. I agree ...
- Jake McAuley: Nice to see you are "back to business" Charles et al! I am h...
- Cala West: Setting up your Content Syndication strategy could be a very...
- Thomas Rozof: @Steve Diamond Steve, You asked if we have some "secr...
- Tim Owen: Thank you for this post. I have been scratching my head...
Great points!
The Internet isn’t the Wild West anymore. It has grown from a haven for scammers and Get-Rich-Quick artists into an easily searchable source of information where the only way that you can stand out is with superior content.
The keyword is value: value in what draws people in, value up front to get them to buy, value in what they require in every aspect of their interaction with you.
The Internet will continue to be littered with junk, but the junk will find itself growing less and less effective. Outstanding content is the future for successful business online.
even though I cannot say I yet know how to do this properly it makes a lot of sense. Training fo rthis kind of challenge will again boost the syndication efforts.
Ok for me content syndication is the proliferation of automatic newsfeeds that people such as myself pick up on and use for attraction marketing purposes in a social networking sense, It makes me look like I’m at my PC 24/7 (which is not productive) and if used with properly targeted niches it can build you a huge warm list of contacts. I have 8700 Twitter followers built using this technique. The fact it works must mean it can’t be futureshock. Where I struggle on your post is the connection with Google slaps. This refers to Google Adwords normally and I don’t see the link between the two. Then again you guys are brighter than me so I am missing something there. For that reason the post feels like it has a certain dissonance, like you’ve made the connection in your heads but it’s not explicit in the post.
@Andrew Peel
Content Syndication means a great many things and encompasses what you believe content syndication to be as well. Syndication is a way to be omnipresent and there are many ways to syndicate content. Some are more efficient than others. We seek to find the MOST efficient action for time to reward ratio… or better yet ROI.
Building Twitter followers is easy and unproductive at the same time when you consider that the end goal is to produce sales… There are much more efficient ways to produce sales than building Twitter followers.
People who would follow your links on Twitter are not as powerful as people who SEARCHED for your information on a search engine. Sure, some may be targeted, but many are not seeking the micro-purpose you’re trying to fulfill. Many may follow links on Twitter just to see what all the hype is about… but they are not buyers. You could dispute this with sales statistics but that would be a defensive that is irrelevant to what I am saying. Conversions are ALWAYS higher when someone finds your content rather than you shoving it in their face (targeted or not).
You state “The fact that it works must mean it can’t be futureshock” … You are misinterpreting the meaning within the context we set in the post. Future shock in our case means that it is a new marketing system derived from the massive rising in social participation that is here NOW… This is a major disruption that leaves a gaping hole of opportunity that most people are not seeing… Futureshock!
Google slap is a slang term that originally came from the slapping of adwords pages but has become a much more broad term that encompasses anything that Google will do to clean their index.
I sense a condescending tone in your comment… We are used to it because we have been and will continue to rock the boat and jolt people out of their comfort zone as we have clearly done with you… This is a good thing!
content takes on a life of its own when you syndicate.
@ianharper
That is a great way to put it and YES it certainly does.
The future of online marketing is social media marketing using content syndication. And that future is right here right now. This is the way marketing should be done. It is harnessing the power of the social media to combine it with relationship and attraction marketing. Welcome to the future. Great post. Thanks!
You paint a very attractive picture of a future where anyone can attract a large and growing following simply by being educational and entertaining. If it were really that simple, there wouldn’t be millions of frustrated bloggers wondering how and where to acquire an audience.
Yes, some of them generate buzz, take off, and become viral. But the vast majority don’t.
Apparently you have in mind some “special sauce” that helps with the take-off. I hope to see that it has the kind of power you’re expecting.
@ Charles
I’ve been on your list since Oct ‘06 when I downloaded the Plan. I want to take this opportunity to say that I have found more golden nuggets in your blog posts and free reports than in many of the “shiny new things” or flavor of the month marketing systems I’ve paid for.
For this I thank you.
I wish I could say that I was smart enough back in ‘06 to have jumped on board an put into practice what you were teaching, but sadly I wasn’t… and I didn’t.
I have finally decided to take this business seriously and not treat it as the interesting ice breaker at parties… “Why… I’m an internet marketer” that it currently is.
Thank you for this outstanding post. I understand that I must shift my focus from marketing to educating, enlightening and entertaining but I’m having difficulty seeing how to do this:
1. With content that is submitted to article directories that the experts say should be no longer than 500 words due to the short attention spans of those seeking information. ( I think content should be as long as it needs to be to deliver what you promise in the title, yet somewhat incomplete. Am I wrong here?)
2. In markets such as weight loss, get your ex back, yeast and hemorrhoid cures. I don’t see the potential for any content here to go viral unless you have your own content syndication network.
While I have websites in the aforementioned markets that I still maintain, I have decided, in an effort to keep my sanity, to concentrate on the weight loss market. This is a huge market that has lots of niches and sub-niches.
Can content syndication work here? Am I missing something here?
Thanks for hearing me out and Have An Awesome 4th of July Weekend!
I love what Charles said about the paradigm shift of marketing. Now instead of “pitching our wares” we have to become educators and sources of credible and enlightening information. I think the hard part for me is going to be not having the end result in mind (the sale), as being the most important thing. To shift the focus away from “closing” to simply offering value and education will be a paradigm shift for me.
@Steve Diamond
This is not true… there are millions of frustrated bloggers because they DO NOT promote their content. They rely on building RSS reader mostly and very few understand the value of the distribution and propagation of their #1 asset… their content. Most bloggers have no marketing plan other than just posting new content.
This picture was not “painted” … it was researched and discovered to be the most powerful point of leverage for Internet marketing. Also… don’t forget about the SEO benefits … The viral spread of content is more complex and happens unpredictably but the SEO benefit remains constant.
@Victor Cortez
There is some validity to the attention span thing… You should finish your thoughts and if they run long then consider breaking it up into multiple posts. Attention spans will be short until you earn “mind share” then people will read longer content from you.
This is a fine tuning process… you want to finish your thought but at the same time you want the reader to get through the whole thing without losing interest … make a short content series… This gives the search engines more pages to index also.
You are right… going viral in markets like that is going to be tough… Instead look toward content syndication as a way to drive your search engine visibility as well as your rankings for a growing number of key terms over time. This places your content in front of people that are SEARCHING for your content.
Once a person arrives at your content from a search then enlighten them, educate them, entertain them. Going viral is not the primary goal but should be seen as a nice side benefit if/when it happens.
Absolutely… as I stated before, content syndication will drive your search visibility and rankings then you will be much MORE visible to searchers looking for your content and ultimately your solutions.
It was almost a year ago when I started a journey to uncover methods for the content I generate to gain visibility out on the “Net”.
Within a few months, I came across videos and article posts written by Charles and others about the Syndication Revelation and the Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine (search the last long-tail phrase and let me know what you find). Although I found the information interesting, I just thought it was a training and link building network site.
Clearly I did not have the real picture regarding all this is involved with the system.
After doing a little more research, I joined Social Media Science for both the training and syndication services coincident with launch of a new blog site. After making use of both the training and syndication services, many of my posts were gaining a top ten page position for many of my keyword phrases within two weeks time.
This early success was followed with the launch of a second blog site a few weeks ago where posts created within three days of the launch were gaining similar page positions after syndicating the content. Seeing the outcome definitely put a smile on my face
Even though each blog has a PR of 0 and only use a fundamental WordPress SEO plug-in, many of my posts continue to gain excellent page position after using content syndication principles.
This is one time when I am glad I am associated with something considered to be premature! I also look forward to learning more about content syndication and watching it evolve.
I love to write for my public, Charles! You said, “You can effectively narrow your marketing tasks down to simply writing educational, enlightening and entertaining content for your target audience, syndicate that content and watch as your target audience begins to arrive at your website in perpetually growing numbers.” Yes! That’s what I am doing…
Thanks for such a great post. I agree 100% content syndication is the thing of the future. You have come up with an amazing concept and product. As long as people provide good content and use content syndication result will come by itself. Have been testing your way of thinking and it does work … it is the reality.
I do think that what you say is correct and will definitely say that” this guy is on to something historic and monumental” and those that don’t believe it are the fools!
For those that are sceptical … just give it a try and you will see, you will not be disappointed.
Very well put Charles. Ready or not, the future is here.
The interesting point for me is not only how the internet marketing game is changing, but the way the net itself is changing to the eyes of a random surfer.
Anyone not on board should make this a top priority, when your Synnd network is ready for open public release, it’s going to create a drastic change in the net landscape with the pioneers reaping the biggest rewards.
any type of syndication is good but the judge of a good one is when it takes on a life of it own and it sounds like you know what your on about with this respect.
How soon will you update your blog? I’m interested in reading some more information on this issue.
Thank you for this post.
I have been scratching my head a lot lately to understand how keywords are like a magnet holding internet content together, bringing searchers to the Google results they find. I say scratching my head because while there is good content on the matter so much of it seems to be speaking about the past and not what is occurring now and will be happening next with SEO.
While I may have started reading this post still scratching my head, by the end of my reading many questions have been answered.
Needless to say the few hairs I have remaining are also rejoicing in the opportunity you have presented here. Lead on!
@Steve Diamond
Steve,
You asked if we have some “secret sauce” planned for the near future. Yes, this is what SYNND is, both our proprietary software designed to automate and empower each members content syndication and the supportive SYNND community that will form around this commitment.
By the way, our Beta process is just about complete with less than 1% errors being registered in our current software activity charts. Now we move on to the addition of more social networks to which we can syndicate our content. We also have some amazing plans for the near future. Sometimes I wish I could pour the perspective that Charles, myself and several of our mature members live with 24/7. That might be a little to scary for most people, but at least you would see where SMS is headed. You guys are going to be so surprised by the “secret sauce” once it’s applied to your content. I can’t wait to get all 60 networks going, probably within the next six weeks, with more being added each day until we reach our goal. But the current SYNND module represents just THREE syndication channels. Imagine the accumulative power of adding video, press releases, pod casts and the like. We have often made the statement among ourselves that there will come a day when we may have to limit the number of members who use SYNND for any one niche, simply because it could grow to be TOO powerful. When this occurs members could end up cannibalizing one another as only so many can dominate the first page of Google or be seen as the TOP experts in a particular field. What a great problem to have. That’s when you know your really do have a secret sauce. Let’s continue to work together to pioneer the FUTURE, NOW. We are genuinely involved in what I consider to be a historic and trend setting venture. Just wait till you see the effect of all this. It’s there now…so jump in and begin to create use SYNND. Yes, you may have to download an upgrade to the software from time to time, but it takes very little time and it’s all for the goal of bringing you the very best in software “secret sauce.”
Charles and I love to hear your thoughts, questions, ideas, etc. So keep them coming.
Setting up your Content Syndication strategy could be a very complex exercise if you do not have a proper proven blue print to follow. But once it’s set up the results are amazing
Nice to see you are “back to business” Charles et al! I am here today because of your recent Tweets (which I missed BTW).
The only value I can add is the addition of a 4th E in your content formula and that is E for Engaging.
“To use this leverage you must forget marketing and start being educational, enlightening, entertaining and engaging.” ~ I think when we can participate (engage, like we are doing here) syndication is enhanced…
I have a lot of work to do and it is all Content Creation, I just have to figure out how to make it “simple” :~) The syndication part is now simple and somewhat automated with SYNND and I thank you all for that. Keep up the good work.
Onward and upward the future is now.
Hi Jake… I haven’t connected with you in a while. I agree Engaging is a 4th E for sure … If we work to make our content engaging then it makes that much more enlightening, entertaining and educational.