How to Republish Our Blog Posts

Just follow five guidelines to put our content on your dairy website.

An unexpected thing happened after we launched the U.S. Dairy Exporter Blog in February. Our blog's editor, Mark O'Keefe, set up a “Google Alert” to notify us whenever the blog was mentioned online.

These alerts revealed that dairy trade publications were not just referring to our blog’s market analysis, research and news. They were copying and pasting our blog posts verbatim, in their entirety, as articles published on their sites.

Our initial reaction was this: “Our content should draw people interested in U.S. dairy exports to our blog and usdec.org, not other websites.”

Then it hit us. This could be a good thing.

We contacted Dave Natzke, editor of Dairy Herd Management, one of the publications running our posts, to see what he thought.

“Dairy Herd Management has always looked to share USDEC information,” said Natzke. “We see the impact exports have on domestic milk prices and find the U.S. Dairy Exporter Blog an important source of information to share with our readers.”

We appreciate the compliment, and respect the work of dairy trade publications we have partnered with for years. But why should we allow our content to attract eyeballs to sites other than our own?

“We have an audience that doesn’t go to blogs all the time so we’re another means for you to get your information out there,” said Natzke.

That makes perfect sense. It's why we are making an offer today to all dairy websites reaching U.S. processors or farmers -- our primary target audiences.

To our friends in the dairy trade media, we modify Rodney Dangerfield’s famous punch line to say: “Take my blog post—please.”

To USDEC member companies looking for relevant content for their websites, to cooperatives looking for export information for their newsletters and to dairy bloggers seeking guest posts, consider our blog a shareable resource.

The first thing you should do is subscribe here to get our blog updates delivered directly to your inbox.

Then follow these five guidelines when you republish:

1. Cite the source, using our USDEC name and logo. Branding isn’t just for cattle.
2. Link to the post on our blog: We would appreciate some of your readers checking out what we have to offer.
3. Retain the byline. It helps establish USDEC staffers as industry thought leaders and gives Google another item to include when people search for us by name.
4. Republish our entire post. It has been said that writing is 1% inspiration, and 99% elimination, but we’d like to do the eliminating ourselves. If you want to excerpt let us know what part you want to use and we'll say yes or no.
5. Publish  hyperlinks in the post. If you do, we’ll get some traffic coming our way. If you don’t, our blog editor may get hyper about no links.
6. Don't reuse stock photos. Some stock photo services troll the Internet so their copyright attorneys can go after violators of their fine print. If we use a stock photo we will tip you off  (see bottom, left, of this post for example).
7. Bottom line: If you use our content give us the appropriate credit.

Suggested attribution language: This article first appeared on The U.S. Dairy Exporter Blog, a publication of the U.S. Dairy Export Council. 

The reuse of our blog posts happened spontaneously, but it's actually a marketing strategy called “content syndication,” a fancy name for republishing.

We didn't create this blog with that strategy in mind. Instead, we saw it as a key component of a larger plan to become our own online publishing house. Nonetheless, we are convinced this new content sharing strategy is a win-win.

Dairy websites win by getting free, accurate and insightful content from the go-to source of information on U.S. dairy exports. We win by reaching a broader swath of our target audience. 

Our new motto may be this: “Replication is the highest form of flattery.”

So go ahead and republish our blog posts.

The U.S. Dairy Export Council is primarily supported by Dairy Management Inc. through the dairy farmer checkoff that builds on collaborative industry partnerships with processors, trading companies and others to build global demand for U.S. dairy products.   

Image copyright: 123RF Stock Photo