Digital marketers know that backlinks are a huge bonus for your SEO rankings on Google and other search engines. The more backlinks (sites that link directly to your content) the more authority your content and thus site has within the Google universe. This RANK applies to your Adwords account (how much you pay for higher ranks on Google search results) and SEO (no paid ranking) and it even applies to your AdSense account and how much you can make when selling advertising space to other businesses.

But there’s another amazing advantage to getting your content picked up by a syndication site like The Huffington Post. When your content is being shared on another platform regularly, you can begin to use those sites as additional opportunities to boost your influence and page views.

When socializing my content, I use the normal channels for distribution and promotion: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google Bookmarks, and HackerNews. (Only promote content that is appropriate to the channel.)  And once I have done this round of social promos once, I have done almost all I can on my own. Sure, I can tweet a few times during the course of a day (please don’t auto-tweet repeats) and then I’m done.

However if I have a story picked up by one or several other sites I can then socialize those publications as well. In the image above, one of my sites is regularly published on both The Huffington Post and The Good Men Project. And on any given day as many as 15 additional pages of my content are being shared through their sites, building traffic and authority as well as driving a new audience to my original site via "related posts" links at the bottom which point directly to my original site.

Of course, Huffington Post authors don’t get paid, but we do get a significant pop in our perceived authority with the little tags we can sprinkle around our profiles. "Huffington Post writer" is one of my favorites. And with The Good Men Project I have even used my prolific production to garner a position as a contributing editor. More perceived authority, but also some insight into what’s being planned for future editorial pushes.

For the day in the image above my direct referrals broke down like this:

29 – Good Men Project

28 – Huffington Post

21 – Twitter

3 – Facebook

And while I still share this content on the previously mentioned social sites, you can see most of my traffic is either from my direct effort (Twitter/Facebook) or more likely, the referrals from my ongoing content relationship with these two major content aggregators.

And even when I’ve worn out the self-promotion of my page (primarily through Twitter) these other two sites give me another handful of pages to promote that will indirectly lead to increased traffic on my site.

All this is interesting. And you can see how my growth has been progressing over the summer with these page view stats from this site.

And finally, here are my 30-day inbound stats for this site.

And this is for a site with only 75 posts. I’d say this content is performing quite nicely.

Get your referral sites in order. Get your content picked up by some of the big aggregators and you can use their pages to also lift your traffic. And while I don’t get paid directly for the monthly page views, I am building a publishing platform for several books that will be created, in part, from the 75 (and counting) pages. And with each tweet I grow a few new readers. Now my sites are set on the NY Times for content syndication. (grin)

And, of course, if you need help with your content strategy, I’m always available to talk.

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)
permalink: https://uber.la/2014/09/your-referral-networks/

Check out the Strategist’s Notebook page and these other posts about online marketing:

• Workin Facebook < all the Facebook Posts in one place
• uber.la quickies < a streamlined takeaway from today’s best marketing sources
• Social Media University < 2 minute educational videos
• Social Business MBA < the reading list
• Becoming a Social Media Rockstar: The Quick Path < um… let’s discuss

I can help you jumpstart your digital marketing:

FluentSocial (Social Media Marketing)

FluentSearch (SEO, Google Adwords)