I don’t remember how I heard of zimbio.com, but a few years back is when I started using them. If you don’t know, Zimbio is a collaborative online magazine with thousands of contributors. People either syndicate their blog content with them or directly write articles for publication. It is a very popular site that receives millions of views every month.
Zimbio mainly caters to celebrity or political news, but there are numerous subsections that cover just about every topic imaginable. If a piece you write makes it on the front page (it happened to me once) then it will be seen by thousands upon thousands of people.
When I first started using Zimbio, I saw it as a way to get my blog content in front of more eyes. At that time I had three brand new blogs, two of which received very little traffic. I figured syndicated my content at a popular site would be a good way to build recognition.
The way it worked
The way it worked was that my blog feed was fed to Zimbio and every time I posted something new Zimbio would auto categorize the article (if it could!) and publish it in the appropriate section. My new article would also appear on their site with a link pointing back to my site. I was building links and promoting my content at the same time.
I would check my stats during this time, and sure enough, a small amount of visitors were trickling in from Zimbio. I was thrilled to see that my brand new and obscure blogs were getting a little attention! I kept this going for quite a while, allowing Zimbio to republish every post that I churned out.
The honeymoon is over
Eventually I started to get this nagging feeling that perhaps everything wasn’t going as well as I had originally thought. Sure, I was receiving a small but steady flow of referral visits from Zimbio, but I was noticing something in the search engines that troubled me. Whenever I made specialized searches to see how my blog articles ranked, I noticed that the syndicated content would show up on the first page of Google, while my “real” blog piece would show up several pages or more later.
Trading a few visitors for search engine ranking wasn’t the only problem I was spotting. I also noticed that my attempts at building a community with my blogs were also being stunted. Comments were coming in, but people were making these comments on the Zimbio site and not at my blog so much.
By choosing to syndicate my articles at a site like Zimbio, I had fragmented my efforts at building my blogs. I traded a few incoming visitors for diminished search engine rankings and a split community. Instead of my blog receiving the search engine traffic for what I had written, Zimbio would receive it due to their much higher rankings. And people were more apt to comment on my articles at Zimbio rather than at my blog.
What seemed like a good deal for me in the beginning had turned into not such a good thing. I stopped my posts from being republished at Zimbio around this time and settled for my organic results instead.
Any blogger considering marketing their blog content out to other sites should consider these kinds of results for making their decision. While they may receive additional recognition and visitors, the loss of community and possible ranking issues could turn it into an expensive venture.