SyndBuddy Review – How Does Joshua Zamora’s Content Syndication Tool Stack Up?

In my previous post, I told you about a special offer on Joshua Zamora’s SyndBuddy content syndication tool.

I didn’t own the tool at the time myself, but I bought it a couple of days ago, while the special offer was still on, so I could get an in-depth look at it and to review it for you guys.

One thing I have to point out is that the Special Offer is now over and SyndBuddy has increased to $97 (one-time payment), still down from the $197 full price.

The Problem With Building Backlinks

If you create any kind of content online like blog posts, guest posts, write content for article directories and so on, or you promote products or services either with direct links (to products and services you provide yourself) through affiliate links or through squeeze pages or landing pages, they all need web traffic.

The traditional way has been to manually build backlinks to that content and to post links to it on social media. Some of you may even use videos to drive traffic to your content.

Manual link building involves adding comments on other people’s websites, posting in related forums, creating videos, writing content for Tier 1 web properties that point back to your posts and creating content for Tier 2 web properties that link to your Tier 1 properties. It may also involve creating Press Releases and guest posts.

And it all takes a huge amount of time to do if you do it yourself. You pay for it with the time you put into it. And if you don’t put in the time, your posts and offers don’t get much exposure and you don’t earn money.

Outsourcing Link Building

One route commonly taken by webmasters is to outsource the link building task. Paying a professional may cost some money but it frees up a lot of your time that can be devoted to something else – some other aspect of your business.

Link building packages can be bought for as little as $5 on Fiverr but I don’t recommend it. You’ve no idea of the quality of the sites that will link back to your posts and offers.

And you may end up doing more harm than good to your site.

Links coming from what Google deems to be “bad neighborhoods” can seriously affect how your pages and site will rank.

This is a company that I can recommend for link building packages (and I’ve used them myself) if outsourcing is something you’re thinking of doing.

My SyndBuddy Overview

What Is SyndBuddy?

Syndbuddy is a tool that makes the exercise of building backlinks much easier, less time-consuming and less costly (if you regularly outsource link building).

Essentially what it boils down to is that other SyndBuddy owners (and there are now over 3,500) will share your links on social media and build backlinks to your content for you on web properties.

The Credit-Based System

It works on a credit-based system. Each link you want to promote will cost you a certain number of credits each time someone shares your link on social media or builds a backlink to your content.

Anyone who promotes other members’ content earns credits for doing so. If you were wondering what incentives members have to share your content, that’s the reason.

By sharing others’ links, you can always earn enough credits to cover the cost of promoting your own links.

If you need to, you can buy additional credits. There’s no option to buy credits in SyndBuddy itself and there’s no information about how to buy them in the Help or FAQ sections.

So I contacted SyndBuddy support about how to buy additional credits.

I got a reply in 9 minutes. That’s the kind of responsive Customer Support I appreciate.

This was their reply:

Once you log into your SyndBuddy account, you have 45 days to start sharing your own links or your credits will expire.

You don’t have to use all your credits in that timeframe, you just need to be actively adding your own links for others to share.

This shouldn’t be an issue as the only reason to get SyndBuddy in the first place is to use it to share your links and content!

SyndBuddy In Action

Here’s my SyndBuddy dashboard (click the image for a full-size view):

As you can see, it’s practically empty. This was my first time logging into the tool.

It shows the total number of shares (807,643) since the tool was first launched in July 2017. It also shows that I have 2,000 credits to use to promote my links.

At this stage, I hadn’t created any share campaigns yet.

At this point, I went off to watch the help videos on how to set up the different types of campaign – Social Signals and Social Shares.

An Inside Look At SyndBuddy

This video from SyndBuddy’s developer, Joshua Zamora, gives you an inside look at the tool and how easy it is to set up share campaigns.

He also talks about the buddy system that underlies how the tool should be used by owners…

As you can see, the tool is simple to use and setting up campaigns is a breeze.

Testing SyndBuddy Out

To start testing whether SyndBuddy is actually any good at getting my content shared, I decided to start with some Social Signal campaigns. These are easier to set up as there’s no need to enter any text (content) that talks about what’s at the other end of your link.

I began by sharing 7 links:

• The newsletter signup page for this site you’re on now – the objective here is to get subscribers. I’ll be using a unique tracking link to see how much traffic I get and what percentage converts to subscribers.
• The review post I wrote for the Wealthy Affiliate training course – here the objective is to convert readers into people who subscribe to the course.
• My LunarPhase Pro astronomy software sales page – this is a niche product and the idea is, of course, to generate some sales.
• This 47-second advert I created with Content Samurai for a webinar I’m promoting – again, the ultimate objective here is to get sales.
• This 15-minute video looking at how to build a mailing list with YouTube – which promotes one of my websites and its mailing list squeeze page.

I had intended creating two campaigns with direct affiliate links, but these kinds of links are not allowed.

SyndBuddy is about sharing content, not affiliate links, so that makes sense.

So in place of those links, I shared these links:

• A post on Steemit about me resurrecting my first computer, a ZX80 – votes on Steemit posts earn you money.
• My review of a new cryptocurrency tool – again, the aim to to hopefully generate a sale or two.

I selected these seven links to see which ones would get the most social signal shares. From that, I’ll have a better idea of the types of link to share in the future so that I’m not wasting credits on campaigns that won’t generate the right kind of, or enough, traffic.

The successes I’ll roll out into Social Share campaigns as these cost more credits to run and take more time to set up.

Following the video above, I created each campaign to get 20 shares each over 4 days (5 shares per day) and to get shares from all available networks.

Each Facebook Like, Google +1 Share and Twitter Tweet costs 2 credits. A Facebook Share costs 3 credits. Each YouTube View is also 3 credits.

Here’s how my SynBuddy dashboard now looks, showing 4 of the 7 campaigns I created (click the image for a full-size view):

As you can see from the screenshot, I have 2,000 credits to start with.

Sharing Other Members’ Content

The other half of SyndBuddy is in sharing other members’ content. This is how you earn credits.

If you don’t share, your credit balance will eventually drop to zero and you won’t be able to get others to share your content.

So not sharing others’ content is counter-productive.

In order to be able to share others’ content, you need to hook up SyndBuddy to your various social media platforms.

These accounts will be used for both Social Signals and Social Shares.

This is the Accounts screen where you can add those accounts (again click the image for a full-size view):

There’s a sizeable number of social media sites available (Services) on this page:

To add an account, simply give it a name, select the service/platform you want and click the Add button. You’ll then see a message asking you to confirm that you’re authorizing SyndBuddy to use that social media account.

I was surprised that Google+ and YouTube were missing from the list but it seems that you only need to be logged in to a Google account (GMail, Google+, YouTube, etc) to be able to share to these particular services.

One Google account generally gives access to all your Google services.

Here’s what my Social Signals share page looked like when I first opened it. These are content that I’m being asked to share, along with the number of credits I’ll earn if I do share them:

In bold text, above the share buttons on this page, is the title of the content you’re being asked to share.

The three clickable icons to the right of the title are:

• Load a new campaign – if you don’t want to share the current one or you’ve done all the sharing of this content that you want
• Ignore this campaign – simply ignores the current campaign and won’t present it to you again
• Report this campaign – if you feel there’s something untoward about the campaign (like it’s Adult content or a direct link to a product or service), you can report it

Below that is a link to the actual content so you can review it and decide if it is something you’d like to share.

You can use the Category Filter to  select categories you’re interested in.

You also have to remember to click the Filter button to list items from your selected categories. The screen contents don’t update automatically as you add/delete categories.

Here’s an example of sharing the above content to Google+:

This content is in the Science niche as you can see from the filter I selected.

When loading new content to share, I did find this page quite slow to load. That may be a temporary glitch though.

My Results

After several hours, none of my content had been shared. This could be down to timezone differences and times when people are at their PCs or on their mobile devices.

But it may be an indication that I need to add more links into the system for sharing or that what I’m trying to share doesn’t appeal to other SyndBuddy members. This will be something to keep an eye on.

I’ve already added 17 new credits to my balance from the few shares I’ve already done for others’ content so I don’t think there’s a need to be cautious about running my balance down to zero.

Update #1: It’s been a day since I posted my 7 links and two of them have received multiple shares. Here’s what my SyndBuddy dashboard looks like now:

The most shared link was my 47-second ad for a webinar, the second for a newsletter signup page. Clicking the Magnifying Glass icon for a campaign opens up another page that shows the type of shares that campaign received. Here are the shares and their costs for the webinar ad link:

Update #2: I’ve now been using SyndBuddy for 3 days. After my first tentative steps in using it, I’m now promoting about 25 URLs.

This is how my dashboard looks today:

10 of my URLs have been shared by other members. None of the URLs have been shared the maximum number of times per day I set (5), but will continue to be shared over the coming days (and possibly weeks) until each have been shared a total of 20 times. I set that number. I could have set a higher or lower number of shares per URL.

Final Thoughts

As you can see above, the early results are starting to come in. The shares will help me to promote my posts, squeeze pages and videos.

Creating a social share signal takes about 30 seconds now. Paste in the link I want to share, write a short description, select the total number of shares I want and the maximum number per day to receive and click the social networks I want shares on.

I have been sharing other members’ content too. My credit balance has dropped from 2,000, so I need to do some more sharing to bring my credit total up.

I haven’t played around with the Social Shares module yet, but that’s next on my list of things to test.

Click Here To Check Out SyndBuddy…

Don’t forget to use Coupon Code sb40 at checkout to save 40%

All the best,

Gary Nugent

P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:

Tagged with: backlink building • building backlinks • content syndication • Joshua Zamora • link building • sharing content • social media • social media marketing • SyndBuddy

Filed under: Website Promotion