Republishing Content on the Web to Improve Your Visibility

Blogging is a fantastic business tool, but a business’ blog does it no good if it is never read. There are over a hundred million blogs out there, many are business blogs, but only a fraction of them get any kind of decent traffic.  It is a shame that many great blogs languish in obscurity.

Even those blogs that do attain a substantial readership often take time to get there.  As a result, there are a lot of blogs in the blogosphere that have great content sitting in their archives that have barely been seen.  It seems like a waste to have taken the time and effort to produce great content and then not have it seen.  The solution to this problem is republishing.

The ability to make cheap/free copies of content thanks to computers and distribute it for cheap/free thanks to the internet has caused challenges for many industries such as music, publishing, news, and film. However, many people have found ways to make those exact same causes work in their favour as a cheap/free method of distribution for their own content.

In the case of blogs, the tactic here could not be simpler.  Look back through your archives for some quality content that didn’t get too many eyeballs.  Polish, edit, and maybe even add to it a little bit.  You can polish the content as much as you like, but the main idea here is to re-use what you’ve already created so it’s easy.  Once you have the pieces you want to republish, it’s a matter of finding the right places to put them.

I would recommend two resources: ezinearticles.com and hubpages.com.  Both sites have their own guidelines, and their formats are slightly different.  What they have in common is that both sites get a lot of traffic, and have high organic PageRank.  They do request original content, but if you edit an old piece and make a few modifications, then you should be okay.

Another alternative would be to turn an old blog post into a PDF, and re-publish it as a whitepaper, or a report.  There are a number of services that host and distribute these kinds of reports, but one example that I’ve heard good things about is Scribd.

There is a counter-argument for re-publishing content online, and that is that if you re-post duplicate content, your SEO rankings will suffer because Google and other search engines use duplicate content against you.  While this is a legitimate argument, it is not one I would put much stock in.  Anecdotally, I know no one who has been severely hurt by duplicate content issues for doing something like this.  Remember, you’re not re-posting your entire website, you’re posting one article amid an entire archive.  Also, if this is something that truly concerns you, put a little extra time in to revise and edit the piece.  As any writer will tell you, you can spend an infinite amount of time editing, and with each edit, your piece will change.  I don’t necessarily recommend spending hours editing a piece you’re going to republish (might as well just write another piece), but some editing is still advisable.

Besides not being too concerned about the duplicate content issue, I actually believe republishing articles on strongly ranked websites will help more than harm your own site’s SEO ranking.  By re-publishing, you’re seeding additional content that links back to your own site. The link from the re-pub’d article is already a bonus, but you will likely also be able to get additional links back from the readers that article will have attracted.

Of course, for any of this to happen, you have to link back to your own website from within the article that you have re-pub’d, with a clear description of what people will find when they visit, and a call to action to get them to check it out.  This also means that the piece that you re-pub should reflect what your blog is actually about.  If you write about practical motorcycle maintenance tips on your blog, and you happened to run one post early on that was a rant about why Harleys are so much better than Hondas, that’s not the right post to re-pub.  Not because it’s not valid, but because it doesn’t reflect the specific theme of your blog apart from being on the same broad topic.

In your journeys across the internet, always be on the lookout for additional syndication opportunities.  If you do video, check out TubeMogul.  If you’re a photographer, cross-post with Flickr.  The internet offers a ton of distribution opportunities, and it’s important to use them to get your content out there.

In any case, your posts aren’t doing anyone any good sitting  unread in the archives of your blog.

Have you tried re-publishing or syndicating your publishing?  Do you have any success stories or tips, you could share?  Drop a line in the comments.