How Embedding Content (to Third-party Services) Benefits Your Marketing Efforts

The problem of online content theft has always been hot. You may have spent weeks and months producing some great piece of content (be it a photo, a video or anything else), and once it is live online, before you know it, hundreds of website owners are already republishing it (with or without credit) and getting traffic, links and social media shares that were supposed to be earned by you.
There’s no escape… Unless you give away your content for free and even encourage people to republish and reuse it. Jeremiah Owyang had a great saying regarding this:

If you love it, let it go

If you can’t prevent people from stealing your content, benefit from them reusing it. Make your content easy to embed and re-blog and promote your brand through embedded content.
And if we take this idea even further, not only should you encourage embedding your content, but also you should distribute it to third-party service and encourage embedding from there. The most obvious (and popular) choices to upload and embed your content from are:

• Youtube for videos (and here are other video distribution sites by the way)
• Flickr for images (and more image hosting sites);
• SlideShare for slide shows;
• Proprofs for quizzes
• Scribd for PDF files and documents (and here are 5 more document sharing websites)

Benefit #1: Increase your content exposure to the service users

One of the biggest benefits is added audience reach into communities loyal to the hosting site itself. All of the mentioned services are highly popular and have hundreds of thousands of users.
Exposing your content to them is GOLD. It means higher traffic, more attention and wider viral spread.
Of course, getting popular there is not easy: but the more you try, the better your chances are.

Benefit #2: Make your content “social-media-friendlier”

The users are just more willing to share the content from the sites they feel comfortable to use. Besides, most of those content hosting sites are social-media-friendly and encourage users to share your content.
ProProfs online testing site for example, prompt quiz takers to share their result right from the embed quiz:

Benefit #3: Repurpose your content

Those free content hosting sites give you great tools to make the most of your work by creating new content types:

• Create an embedded slideshow out of your photo collection;
• Create a .ppt slideshow out of your step-by-step guides;
• Create a pdf cheatsheet out of your data collection, etc

This will both increase your content exposure and (viral) reach and, well, re-purpose it. For example, I have mentioned this tip in one of my previous posts on adding “Save as PDF” button to your (most useful) posts:

• This makes it easy (as well as actually encourages users) to save your content locally for further reference (Then in case they have no Internet connection but want to kill an idle hour reading something useful, your article will get the second chance to get noticed);
• It makes your content print-friendly (which is essential for those who prefer to read “normal” books while traveling);
• This makes it easy to save an access from popular devices like iPad (which has plenty of widely used applications for reading .pdf files):

What are your thoughts on re-purposing your content to third-party services? Is it a win or a fail?
------------------------------------------------------

GREAT 2 SITES 2 JOIN-

1.


2.

Tweet