Because The Simpsons is the longest-running scripted sitcom, animated or otherwise, of all time, the possesses an huge library of content, and apparently, the desire of the Fox suits goes beyond simple syndication. Instead, when discussing ways to further monetize The Simpsons and its content, the idea of an “All Simpsons” channel began to take shape.

Over at SlashFilm.com (via Slice of SciFi), the details of such a venture were discussed by Fox COO Chase Carey at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media Communications & Entertainment Conference (and that’s a mouthful), and while the idea is definitely in the gestation stage, there does appear to be some interest. Obviously, Fox’s interest comes from making more money off of their Simpsons content, and considering the show’s popularity, the idea should be at least intriguing for consumers, provided they want nothing but Homer choking Bart playing on their television screens on a continual loop.

Of course, The Simpsons are much more than that, which is obvious by the amount of years it has been on the air. For those who may be unaware, when the Fall season kicks off on Fox, The Simpsons will be entering their 23rd year of original content.

Like SlashFilm points out, apparently, there’s only so much money to be made off of syndication, DVD sales and Simpsons-related collectibles, and so, the idea for such an “all Simpsons” channel, especially when you have 22-plus years of content, does make sense, especially if there’s a demand for advertising slots. SlashFilm continues:

If this does happen, however, it wouldn’t be for several years. First of all, the show is still on the air for Fox and doing well. Plus, it’s wrapped up in long term syndication deals. Fox would have to let all the show’s current contracts expire before they could go ahead and program an entire channel without huge legal ramifications.

Which means, if the Simpsons channel did happen, all those syndicated showings would cease to exist. This indicates the syndication revenue is not as lucrative as Fox expected, or it means Fox realizes it could make more off of cable subscriptions and advertising on a channel dedicated to showing nothing but The Simpsons.

With that in mind, is an “all Simpsons” channel something you would support, or is this just overkill by a company trying to ring every last dollar they can out of Homie and the gang? With all of this in mind, this seems like a perfect place to revisit the intro Banksy made for The Simpsons.

“This new offering on our studios platform expands our mission of publishing high quality content at scale," says Stewart Marlborough, GM of Demand Media Studios. "We are already a leader in publishing original, actionable, evergreen content. With the addition of the Demand Media Blog Network, we broaden our content offerings to include timely, topical and opinion-based content from the best of the blogospshere. Now highly-qualified bloggers will have the opportunity to extend their individual brands to the millions of people that visit Demand Media’s websites and those of our partners.”

Demand Media pitches the Blog Distribution Network as a way to help boggers be more successful by giving them the tools and distribution they need to effectively expand their audience and build their brands. The flyer the company is handing out at their exhibit promises:

Also at the event, we spoke with John Hewitt, who ran a session on how-to articles (the premise of Demand’s eHow.com), about how the average blogger can compete with companies like Demand Media and Yahoo’s Associated Content (which is also represented here at the show). He simply said to make your content better, because frankly, the stuff that you’ll find on Demand’s properties isn’t always of the highest quality (not that this is the case with all of the their content). Demand has discussed its plans to make this better numerous times throughout the year, and the company appears to be taking the subject very seriously. 

It will be interesting to see the kind of content that gets picked up through the Blog Distribution Network. I spoke with a couple reps at Demand’s booth, who told me that they’ll have editors going through all the content submissions and overseeing the approval process. They will not accept any obscene content, as they’re looking to keep it family friendly. They also told me they’re only interested in blogs that are updated regularly. 

Some of the folks trying to learn about writing good how-to articles may actually find applying for this program to be a better alternative to trying to compete with eHow. 

Either way, its clear that Demand Media is building an army of content producers. If you thought they were already doing this, you can only imagine how much this blog syndication will take things up a notch.

The council includes the Associated Press, Reuters, CBS, The Tribune Company, and many others. Here’s the full list of companies represented:

MediaWeek reports: "The guidelines are aimed at countering the effect that the group sees as a growing and dangerous trend on the Web—the rise of shoddy, poorly sourced and edited content, often produced solely with gaming search engines in mind. While not naming these companies directly, the ICSC’s push seems clearly aimed at companies such as Demand Media, Yahoo’s Associated Content and AOL’s Seed.com. Each churns out a large amount of enterprise or general interest service content—mostly produced by low paid freelancers."

According to the publication, the guidelines are aimed at informational content, as opposed to opinion or entertainment content. They reportedly suggest that online articles included a date stamp, clearly labeled corrections, and the authors’ credentials on display.

The Council has been around since 2007. It launched with the goals of improving the understanding of content syndication, increasing awareness of it (in terms of revenue, marketing, and quality), establishing best practices, and providing an objective "third party" point of view on it.

"Content farm" sites as they’re sometimes referred to, are on the rise (though reports indicate Demand Media has experienced a sudden drop in traffic), and it is hard to say if the Council’s efforts will have any bearing on their output. MediaWeek indicates, however, that  the council has been reaching out to them and search engines (including Google) alike.

Google doesn’t like duplicate content.  We all get that now.  There is still the lingering perception that there is some sort of duplicate content penalty despite repeated assurances from multiple Googlers to the contrary.  Maybe there is no penalty; maybe there is some sort of mechanism at work that webmasters perceive as a penalty… it really matters very little.  At the end of the day, if you aren’t showing up for your own content but somebody else is… you probably aren’t the happiest little webmaster.

As a result, syndication has been quite unfairly vilified.  Traditionally speaking, having a site link to your content has always been perceived as a compliment of sorts (Google certainly thought it was a fair indicator of quality). That said, syndicating content… having your great content actually picked up by a larger, more influential site was even better in a lot of ways.  The syndicated content was put right in front of a whole new user base without them having to click a thing.  Generally you also got a nice link back to your site to boot. If you produced a great piece of content, why not have it show up everywhere you possibly could?

Penalty or not, it is clearly the case that the site where content originates may not always rank best for that content.  Google wants to do their best to make sure they keep the content of their results pages as distinct from one another as they can. In short, Google doesn’t want to have a result page where 4 of the 10 results are all essentially the exact same article.

Here’s the thing though syndication is good.  It can drive traffic to your site.  It can establish your reputation and credibility within a niche and it can generate high quality inbound links.  If you are upset because the larger, more recognized and more popular site’s syndication of your content outranks your own then I’d have to say you might need to rethink that one a little bit.  So what if it does? You are there because you want to be exposed to the larger site’s community.  You want the links, attention, reputation and all the good things that go along with that don’t you?  Of course you do.  So if you do a search and find that the big site is number one on a good search query with your content, you don’t get upset – you say ‘yay’.

Why do you say yay? Because your super great content would never have that top position if not for the fact that Google found it on the larger more authoritative site. Sure, if it’s that good you can probably get a decent ranking but it won’t be as good.  Beyond the ranking, even if your site is #2 and the big site is #3 for the same article, guess which one is likely to get clicked thru more; the link to your site, which is not all that well known? Or the link to a site that somebody has heard of?

If you aren’t a household name or a recognized authority in whatever areas you are covering, the fastest way to build that reputation and credibility is to become associated with the brand that is. What’s the best way to do that? Get your name, your company and your link on their domain. Because at the end of the day the likelihood of you just outranking them on your own for similar subject matter is probably going to be a tough order.

Abby Johnson talked to Eric Enge from Stone Temple Consulting at SES recently about the syndication vs. duplicate content problem.  Eric has some great tips in the video for minimizing the negative aspects of duplication on a syndication model.  Three specific items he talks about are syndicating excerpts, including a no-index tag, and writing ‘alternative’ versions of your content expressly for syndication.  He also talks about how effective a syndication model can be.  One site he’d worked with increased their traffic by over 50% using syndication almost exclusively. 

> Duplicate Content Owners Catch A Break From Google

> Duplicate Content On Google, Bing, & Yahoo

> 10 Search Topics That Require Further Discussion

The addition of RSS alerts was first picked up by Amit Agarwal, who found it mentioned in an October 1st Wall Street Journal article where author Katherine Boehret wrote, “In about a month, Google will begin delivering these alerts to users via feeds, as well as emails.”

In an email today, a Google spokesperson told us: “While I can’t be more specific about an ETA, I can confirm the launch.”

This could potentially be a useful feature for a variety of users from businesses looking to keep an eye on their respective niches’ SERPs, to people just interested in getting information on any given keyword topic delivered straight to their feed readers.

"Screen-scraping Google results was already easily possible but once live, RSS feeds should be a nice addition nevertheless, especially for all the tools out there which only work on RSS," says Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped.

Quite frankly, it seems a little odd to me that this isn’t already an option, and I’ve wondered in the past why it wasn’t. McGee even points out that Google is the only major search engine not to offer such a feature. That is odd in itself, since Google is so often the trendsetter, particularly when it comes to anything search related, not to mention the company’s vested interest in RSS feeds with it’s ownership of Feedburner.

Anyhow, the launch of this feature will be something to keep an eye out for. Of course in the meantime, you can always subscribe to Yahoo! or Microsoft searches.

Follower’s Gadget
Image from Blogger Buzz Blog

They want bloggers to be able to view the people that read their blogs, and will provide a gadget allowing users to display those people on the actual blogs. The way they are accomplishing this is through a "Follow this Blog" link that will appear on all Blogger blogs. Who is following whom will then be shown on the Blogger dashboard and in Google Reader, for those who use it.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web chalks up what Blogger is doing as Google’s attempt to push RSS into the mainstream:

For all its supposed simplicity, Really Simple Syndication or RSS has continued to confuse and intimidate millions of people online years after its introduction…

"Follow this blog" is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they’ll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company’s RSS reader. It’s a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

Kirkpatrick is probably right in that the mainstream public is still confused about RSS. The reason I agree with this is because out of all of the people I know that don’t work on the Internet, none of them use it. Many of them do have gmail accounts,  however, and could get sucked into the world of RSS without even realizing it with what Google is doing.

"Follow this blog" has a kind of Twitter sound to it, which could appeal to the social mindset. Blogger will also be integrating Google Friend Connect into the mix as to further increase the social aspects of blogs. Movable Type also announced new social features recently.

According to Wikipedia, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary of the website’s recently added content (for example, the latest news or forum posts).

The benefits of syndication are immense while the drawbacks are few, if there are any.   WebProNews talked with President of Newstex, Larry Schwartz about syndication.  He pointed out these benefits:

1. You can make easy money.

2. You gain recognition.

3. You are branding and marketing your product, which in this case is your blog.

Really with all of these wonderful and easy benefits of syndication, why wouldn’t you try?  So the next step is to figure out if you want to submit a full text RSS feed or a partial feed.

Schwartz approaches this topic with a view from both sides of the argument.  He said that for his company’s services, a full text feed is useful.

He went on to say that short posts don’t do well in syndication, and you should shoot for 500 to 700 words.  And of course it doesn’t hurt to post frequently.

Schwartz gave us one last tip; he recommended that you keep blogs separate. So if you are posting about marketing…leave your personal life out of it.  In sum if you want to blog about your personal life, just make sure it is separate from what your professional knowledge blog.

For more details of syndicating your blog, watch the video here on WebProNews. I promise you won’t be disappointed. And if you are…well then you will just have to blog about it and then syndicate the post to make some money. 

WebProNews presents videos and stories from the BlogWorld & New Media Expo taking place in Las Vegas. View our interviews and coverage of the event.

In a session called “Syndicating Your Blog For Profit,” Larry Schwartz shared some pointers on the matter.  Schwartz is the president of Newstex, and Newstex defines itself as “content on demand,” so he’s in a good position to know about syndication.

His first point, then, is that frequency matters.  Don’t plan to ignore your blog for weeks at a time and still keep people interested.  Also, you may not be able to hold their attention with short bursts – Schwartz said that longer posts are better, and cited 600-700 words as a good target range.

At the same time, you can’t ramble your way to an appropriate length – staying on topic is key.  You’ll want to stay non-exclusive, as well, and create some sort of summary RSS feed.  Schwartz recommended thinking about video as yet another option.

Granted, all of this may sound like a bit of work.  But as Schwartz said, “Big companies need blogs.”

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Prince contributed to this report.

Article Syndication

In recent years, many sites have employed article syndication to develop links. These site owners write (or have written) articles of interest to a particular audience. The site owners then offer these articles to other relevant sites free in exchange for a link back to the originator of the content in the "about the author" section of the article. In this way, a single site owner can submit dozens of articles for syndication receiving an inbound link from each article in return for the free use of content. They can also watch other sites post the content virally to keep their sites fresh, as well.

Sites need fresh content so many will happily display your article and provide a link to your site. It’s a tried and true link building tactic. However, search engines are programmed to seek out the most natural, and therefore valuable, links they can find.

The way articles are syndicated is through sites like goarticles.com and ezinearticles.com. The standard format for the display of the article is: headline, article body followed by a small blurb about the author with a link back to the author’s site. Since those links appear in the body of the page, they appear to be more valuable in comparison to most purchased or reciprocal links which often appear at the bottom of a page column, or in the footer surrounded by lots of other links — somewhat effective, but not necessarily the best way to acquire inbound links.

In addition, syndication leads to duplication when a single article appears on 10 sites all at the same time. This diminishes the quality of the text and the back link to the author’s site. It’s still more valuable than a plain link exchange but search engines are placing less emphasis on syndicated content. So, what’s a site owner to do?

Hosted Web Content

It goes by many different names: content swapping, advertorials, pre-sell pages and hosted content — all basically the same idea.

The way hosted content works is that you, the author, pay a site owner to display your article. However, now, instead of the back links to your site coming at the end of the article, you embed those links in the body of the text surrounded by your target keywords and actually useful content for the reader. In the "eyes" of a search engine, this is among the highest valued back link.

Hosted content is basically renting a page on another site with links to your site embedded in the main body of the article. The web site that hosts the content receives payment from the author plus fresh content, the author gets a valuable back link and visitors to the hosting site get useful content.

This strategy isn’t new. It’s simply doing what search engines want us to do – produce content that’s useful, beneficial and appears on quality sites. Not only does a quality piece of content receive more visibility when hosted on an authoritative site, it also delivers increased benefit to the author, and the page may even rank itself for target key phrases. When a major site hosts your content, you gain from its page rank in strong testimonials and referrals. Whether or not the site owners want to monetize their site by allowing approved authors to post content is the same debate as whether or not links should be bought and sold. However, publishing high quality, unique and useful content, rather than just creating inflated link popularity with diminishing returns, is, in comparison, a tested SEO tactic.

Designing a Hosted Content Page

You’re paying for the placement of this content so you want it to be good. In the eternal quest for successful link bait, you also want the content to be ranked by search engines because it provides real value to the reader and is hosted on an authoritative site.

Design the hosted content page using standard SEO conventions: a keyword savvy title, header <h1>, subheads <h2> and a keyword density of less than 5%. Any higher and search engines may consider the content to be "spamish" regardless of where the content appears.

Now comes the most important part. As you write the article, carefully place links to topically relevant pages on your own site within the body of the article’s text. These are high value links that will improve your SEO. However, it’s also important to place your articles on sites that are topically related to your piece (and probably already rank for related topics). The authority of the site hosting your content, the relevance of the site (topically speaking) and that back link make your site look stronger as far as search engines are concerned. Also, remember that the quality of the content to which you link also matters. Link to strong pages (those with quality back links) on your site, as well. Your article should reference other authoritative, relevant articles so that search engines see that your piece was written to offer real value to readers.

It’s Not Quantity, It’s Quality

It’s no longer simply a matter of how many links point to a site. There are many cases of sites in which 50 quality links outrank sites with hundreds of links. It’s not quantity, it’s the quality of the links that improve ranking in the SERPs.

Editorial links (links in hosted content) are more "natural" from a search engine’s perspective and, therefore, more valuable because the article has, at most, two or three targeted links pointing to your site’s pages. Just like quality link bait, which is unique, original and useful content, quality hosted content on respected sites will also naturally develop its own back links – the ultimate validation and the desired outcome of placing quality content. Finally, because these links are found on pages optimized with your keywords, search engines will consider them extremely relevant to the subject at hand.

Start Your Hosted Content Campaign Today

It’s being done everyday, successfully building small sites into larger sites, providing free advertising for the thought-leader/author, delivering less duplicate content to search engines and more new content (plus revenue) to the hosting site and, perhaps most importantly, hosted content actually delivers useful, relevant information to readers — exactly what search engines rank in the first place. As with any link-building technique, hosted content can be abused, but topically authoritative sites are not going to accept content that does not meet their high standards — so everyone wins when the goals are white hat.

Start searching for websites that might be interested in hosting your next article, or start looking for a site owner interested in content swapping. Create content that’s unique, useful and well-written and you may find that you won’t even have to pay a site owner to share your content with their readers — exactly how it should be.

What follows are some basic steps to optimize your content for syndication, as well as some more advanced techniques.

Basic Optimization

1. Offer full feeds – I am not going to argue about how this is good for subscribers. That argument has been debated almost to death. However if you want reputable sites to pick up your content, you need to give them an easy way to do it. Obviously they are not looking for excerpts. Meme Trackers that work on feeds rather than scraping content from your site will also attribute relevance better if you provide more content.

2. Image Alignment – lots of themes provide CSS for image alignment. It is useless as soon as your content is being read elsewhere. It doesn’t take much code to align an image left or right and wrap text around it wherever your content is being read.

HTML:

<div style="float:right;"> Image Code </div>

3. Scraping Friendly Theme – You might not realise this, but many meme trackers scrape your content. It is very important to have your article content appear before navigation and various “about this site” text. There are quite a few top marketing blogs where the snippet listed on sites like Megite for their articles is always their “about me”, rather than relevant content

4. Images - Try to include images with every post, but also ensure that the most interesting image appears first on the page. You might need to make an additional thumbnail for the start of your post of an image that appears full size later on.

5. Headings – Please refer to the post I made recently regarding Headings in Feeds

6. Related Content - link through to related content on your sites – not only will you get a backlink to your original article, but also a deep link to something else. Don’t go overboard, and make sure it is highly relevant. You can probably get away with more than you might be able to with article distribution, where self serving links in the body of an article is heavily frowned upon.

7. Unique Format – Here is something I spotted on Megite recently that made me smile, the “Search Engine Twins”.

Obviously there is some prior history there, but both sites were listing relatively the same content, in the same format. I am not sure how they are going to solve that one in the long-term, but I hope their formatting develops in different directions in the future to add some diversity.

Advanced Optimization

Today I spend a number of hours experimenting with CSS and hacking my Disclosure Policy Plugin to do what I wanted to achieve. A couple of weeks ago I was approached by someone who was interested in syndicating my posts, and they requested a picture and a byline. I looked on their site, and wasn’t overly impressed with the way bylines were handled by default. I decided that if my content is going to be syndicated, it needed to have a clear link back to the original article, and maybe a link to my root domain as well, all presented the way I want it.

My plugin didn’t have an option to include the post title and URL, so today I hacked it in.

These changes are around line 70 in disclosure_keywords.php

PHP:

$dpp_post_title = get_the_title($id);
$dpp_post_url = get_permalink();
$str = $content;
$content1 = $str."<br><br>";
  eval('$content2 = "' . $keywords_div_start . '";');

The first 2 lines above set 2 variables to contain the post name and URL

The 5th line evaluates the first block of text you set in the options, looking for php variables and processing them.

Handling quotation marks with this is a nightmare but here is what I found to work.

In all the CSS used in the options, I used single quotes.

For the quotes around the variables to evaluate, I used double quotes.

For the actual disclosure lines that are defined, I use double quotes.

Thus the code in the options “Insert Start Div Tags:” looks a bit like this (though it still needs tweaking)

CODE:

<div style='margin: 0 0 0 0; padding: 0.3em 0.3em 0.3em 0.3em;'><div style='border: 1px solid rgb(184, 184, 184); margin-bottom: 0em; margin-top: 0em; padding-bottom:0.3em; width: 450px; float: left;'><div style='margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 0.3em; margin-top: 0.3em; margin-right: 0.5em;width: 75px; float: left; line-height:1em;'><img style='width: 75px; height: 100px;' alt='Andy Beard' src='http://andybeard.eu/andy75100-a.png'></div><div style='margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 0.5em; margin-top: 0.3em; margin-right: 0.3em; float: right; line-height:1em;'><a href='http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/' rel='nofollow'><img alt='CC-GNU GPL' border='0′ src='http://creativecommons.org/images/public/cc-GPL-a.png' /></a></div><h3 style='margin: 0em 0 0em 0;'><a href='http://andybeard.eu/'>Andy Beard - Niche Marketing</a></h3><p style='line-height:1em; margin: 0em 0 -0.2em 0;'>
Blog search engine perfomance, WordPress and general niche and affiliate marketing tips</p><p>Original Article:<br /><strong><a href=".$dpp_post_url.">$dpp_post_title </a></strong></p><div style='width: 100%; float: left; line-height:0.7em; margin: 0em 0 0.2em 0.5em;'><h3 style='margin: 0em 0 0em 0;'>Disclosure</h3>

Note: all the quotes seem to be messing up even with a code plugin, so don’t just copy/paste the above, it won’t work. Also note I am not a CSS expert and just play around with things until they look ok. I tested first of all on a test blog running Kubrick, and then copied the code over here.

In the second box you just have 3 closing Divs

For individual disclosure declarations, I am using something like:-

HTML:

<p style="margin: 0em 1em 0em 0em;"><small>Whilst the content I create, however it is distributed is commercial, relevance is always considered before any potential financial gain. <a href="http://andybeard.eu/disclosure-policy" rel="nofollow">Disclosure Policy</a> <a href="http://andybeard.eu/contact/" rel="nofollow">Contact</a></small></p>

I actually need to make that a bit more structured, so I can just wrap any entry with paragraph tags, although that entry will always be “small print”.

The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating.

The only way to really see the effect is to see how it looks in an RSS reader or on various Meme Trackers.

Meme Trackers

Here is what a post should look like on Megite:

You will also notice they also use your favicon, so well worth spending a few minutes generating one.

RSS Reader

No screenshots – try signing up by email and RSS to take a look. I think I need to make my box slightly narrower, because then the Feedburner Feed Flare using will all align nicely down the right hand side of the author box. Currently on a 1024768 Google Reader view, only some of them are on the right hand side.

Landing Page

The changes have definitely made my Feedburner landing page for subscribers look more professional and personal.

ToDo List

I still need to format my tags the way I want to, both on page and in feeds. The same goes for related posts, which in syndication will most likely be cut off.

Some default CSS of my theme also seems to over-ride my inline CSS with margins and paddings, so I need to take a careful look to see how that can be corrected.

Standards compatible? Well I didn’t use any tables, or fixed fonts -

Conclusions

It is worth spending some time working on how you want your content displayed in the future, as once your working environment is setup, it can save you a lot of time, and improve the results you achieve. Are you in this for the long haul?

Comments

*Originally published at andybeard.eu

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