In some cases, we at Contitude are asked where to publish our content. In this blog post we will go through how we at Contitude see this and what we usually recommend our clients to do.
Where should you publish your content?
The main rule according to us at Contitude is that you should publish it in a channel that you own. The reason why you are better off publishing your content in channels you own is that you then have full control over the content you publish. This doesn't exclude channels like social media, campaign domains, news pages etc. But there are many advantages to publishing in channels you own and there are a lot of risks and downsides to publishing in shared/borrowed channels.
What is the difference between an owned and a borrowed or shared channel?
The only channel you own on the internet is your own website. For you to be the owner of it, you also need to be the owner of the domain. This may seem obvious, but sometimes you may find yourself in a situation where your company does not own the domain, but a web agency or similar owns your domain instead. It's not as common anymore but early in the history of the internet there were many web agencies that owned the domain names and registered them to themselves and then took care of the "client's" website. There are other examples of domains that you "borrow" e.g. blog networks where you get a domain that is "your business name.blogger.com", where you only borrow a subdomain and the owners of the main domain "blogger.com" can shut down your subdomain at any time.The common borrowed or shared channels otherwise can be social media channels that many people see as owned channels but are actually borrowed channels. If you build up an incredible network on Facebook for example, it can provide great opportunities to reach a wide target audience but you never know when Facebook will change its rules. It wasn't long ago that Facebook changed its algorithms so that a business page only reached about 5% of its followers without sponsorship. Social channels are also historically trend dependent with some channels being popular for a certain amount of time and then dying out and new ones coming in. Remember Myspace or Playahead? Those were incredibly popular before, say, Facebook took over.
What is the benefit of publishing your content on your owned channel?
The reason why we always recommend starting with your owned channel is that you can control everything yourself. On an owned channel you can always remove your content, you can always use it the way you want, you can control how your content is displayed etc.In addition to being able to control everything yourself, you also get all the benefits of good content yourself when you publish on your owned channel compared to if you publish on a borrowed channel. An example of this is SEO. For example, when you publish an article or blog post on your own domain, it will be indexed by search engines and drive traffic to your channel. For example, if you publish your article on social media, a news site or campaign page, you will contribute new visitors to that channel that could have ended up on your channel instead. There are some cases where it's good to publish your content on channels other than your own, but we'll get to that a little further down.
What are the risks and disadvantages of publishing your content on borrowed or shared channels?
The main disadvantage is that you can't control your content yourself. A well-known case where you can't control your content is on Youtube where advertisers couldn't control which videos you were associated with. It wasn't just a question of which video the ad played in, but also which videos were recommended around the video where the ad was shown. The knock-on effect was that many advertisers stopped advertising on Youtube for a period.In some cases, you may be offered campaigns from agencies where you have content produced and then published on the agency's own "campaign domain". The downside of this is that you do not own the content they produce and you cannot be guaranteed that your content will continue to be published and drive leads. Content that you publish are potential lead magnets that can drive in potential customers and leads for years to come. You want to be able to manage and control that yourself.
When should you publish content on borrowed or shared channels?
First of all, use all the channels you can to share the content you've published on your own channel. For example, you should always share your content on social media to maximise reach.When it comes to publishing content on borrowed or shared channels, guest blogging is a good example of when you should not publish on your own channels. Often the reason is to drive even more traffic to your own channel by reaching out to visitors who are on the website where you guest blog but who would not normally find your website. But also to be able to get a backlink from a ranked website to your own website which will be good for SEO. Read more about SEO and backlinks hereThereare certain channels where it is always good to publish content, e.g. big news sites like di.se, dn.se, svd.se etc. They often have many more visitors than you and it is also usually good as a showcase to be mentioned in several major news media.
Summary
The main rule is that you should publish your content in your own owned channel. You will be able to control how your content is published, when it is removed and what context it appears in.Publishing on your own channel also means that you will get the nice benefits of better SEO that over time has the potential to create good value for you and your company.However, there are times when it is good to publish your content on borrowed or shared channels. For example, guest blogging or being published by a major news channel.If you would like help figuring out where to publish your content, please schedule a brief meeting with us at Contitude via the link below.Book a meeting with Contitude
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