Online content syndication used to be a simple business. You chased licensing deals with the major U.S. portals, outsourced your reprint business and deflected any unauthorized re-use to your legal team for action. At renewal time, you were either in a ‘data-free zone’ with zero insight on licensee usage or you spent several painful weeks analyzing data that never quite gave you the right answer.

But everything has changed. You need a strategy to participate in the phenomenal growth of social networks and blogs. International growth is exploding – how can you quickly build a licensee lead pipeline? Finally, where can you find a scalable solution to keep track of the bad guys who continuously grab your articles without permission?

But where to start? Here are 8 practical tips to supercharge your content syndication business.

1. Create a content usage feedback loop. Without feedback on the specific articles and genres of content being used by your licensees, you are flying blind. Improve your product and your customers’ satisfaction by reviewing licensee usage in as much detail as you want.
2. Monitor actual usage vs license terms. How many articles do your licensees use every day? Are articles being used on multiple domains? Is usage compliant with the time period restrictions? Our customers tell us that as much as 30% additional revenue is there for the taking.
3. Get your licensees to link. A link back to your site will help your search engine positioning and signal to Google that your article is the original. More info at the Google Webmaster blog.
4. Give users a reason to click back to your site. If your monetization strategy depends on attracting visits back to your site, make sure that the amount of content included in your RSS feed is optimized. If I can read 100% of your content on several different blog sites why would I want to click?
5. Don’t miss the branding opportunity. Many RSS feeds make use of the format’s <image> sub element to enable your logo to be displayed along with your article to achieve greater brand exposure.
6. Watch your search rank. Hundreds of thousands of sites exist for the sole purpose of re-using professionally-produced content to siphon off traffic and ad dollars. Take action to protect your revenue stream.
7. Participate in the long tail. It’s big, and it can be monetized. Your content is appearing all over social networks and blog. Using established licensing platforms like iCopyright and others, you can tap into long tail growth.
8. Implement usage based billing. With web-wide visibility of your content’s usage, you can open up new market segments with a more flexible pricing structure. Instead of all-or-nothing, you can create your own content-vending machine.

Content is still King and it’s an exciting time to be a syndicator. You just need the tools to make sure you are collecting value for every instance of your content across the Web.