So how did Salary.com do it? Not by taking the usual dot-com marketing tack, spending millions on offbeat Super Bowl ads or promotional mass mailings of back-flipping toy dogs. Instead, Salary.com dramatically drove traffic by syndicating its specific brand of job information (proprietary compensation data on 1,000 positions plus a search tool called Salary Wizard) to other top career sites and major portals such as Yahoo. So far, Salary. com has signed up 150 syndication partners, which are generating "significant" revenue for the site in addition to big-time visitor increases, said Andy Linn, vice president of product management.
"Syndication works when you have content that adds value to the site," said Linn, who declined to discuss Salary.com's revenue or profit picture. "It improves the user experience, and as a syndicator of content it provides us a distribution network for our unique content."
Under pressure to find new revenues beyond online advertising, dot-com content sites are increasingly syndicating their content to other sites for a price. Syndication, experts say, offers not only a new source of revenue but also a way to quickly build traffic at a relatively low cost, particularly if e-businesses make use of a growing group of new online syndication networks. The trend even offers opportunities to non-content-driven dot-coms, which now have a chance to enrich their sites by adding syndicated content. Experts, how ever, offer a word of caution to dot-coms considering the syndication route: Always protect your brand by being selective about where and how your content appears.
