I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting resolve a contradiction in article marketing. In a nutshell, the difficulty is that we frequently want to use links in our articles to our “money pages” for the purposes of optimizing for search engines, but the readers are not yet at the buying stage in terms of their mindset as they are out gathering information (the reason they found our syndicated article).. I pointed out that this is compounded by the marketing commandment that any effective page should satisfy the major goal of our website visitor–at that time.
Simply bringing the problem to the attention of article marketers was my goal in that previous piece. Today, I’ll go that one additional step and give one answer to the quandary.
Two ways to solve the problem present themselves. One is to violate the rule of website design by letting our linked page offer two alternatives (both learning more and buying) for our readers who click through. The other is to provide two kinds of links in our articles. One of those link types leads to a landing page dedicated entirely to providing valuable information and an opt-in form encouraging the visitor to get even more information by signing up for our list, while the other link category will direct the visitor to a product (or purchasing) page. Of course we must make clear from the context of the link what the landing page will offer.
I recommend the second of those two options. Allow me to elaborate on why I endorse this approach and what the respective landing page for each type of link will contain.
Recall that the readers of our syndicated article want to gather information. If we want to entice them to click a link to actually come to our site, we must promise even more information that is pertient to them. Of course, we always follow through with our promises or we shall immediately lose credibility. In order to encourage our readers to actually click our link, we must give them truly interesting and valuable information the first time, while simultaneously leaving them with the impression that there is still more to learn. Hence we link to a content page.
At the same time, within the syndicated article, we let our readers know that once they have gathered all the information they need to make a buying decision, they will find the product or service that will solve their problems right there on our site. By including that information, we have an opportunity to link to one of our selling pages largely for the purpose of search engine optimization.
It is easiest to achieve the task of incorporating these two types of links within articles that we syndicate directly to other sites within our niche, because we can place those links contextually. However, if we limit our article distribution to article directories, we can still accomplish our task by cleverly using a well written resource box to provide the rationale for linking to both kinds of pages.
On our content landing page, we focus upon bringing our readers much closer to the buying decision end of the decision making continuum. We have already made progress by getting the readers to click the link in our syndicated article. We can now treat them as serious prospects and ramp up our selling strategy a bit. We shall offer them a link to the page where they can actually buy, but we focus primarily on getting them to take one more small step by asking for the contact information in exchange for the promise of even more valuable content.
We establish ourselves as experts in our distributed content, so we are “selling” that expertise to our readers. What we sell on our linked (landing) page is our integrety, by establish our credibility. Once we have their contact information we can begin selling our product, subtly at first and then with increasing urgency.
Remember that the other type of link takes the clicker (or the search engine robot) to our page where we directly sell our product or service. The primary purpose of that link is increasing our SEO, so we must be especially careful to research and have anchor text that is a long tail keyword with implicit commercial intent.
We have different roles as marketers and authors. Wearing the marketing hat, our primary goal is to make a sale, but as writers we worry about the flow of our prose even above its financial reward. So our first objective is to convince the article readers that they need more information, and that the necessary information can be found by clicking our link. Then, with the second link type, we need to convince the search engine spiders that we have provided anchor text that is a truthful name for the content that we have on our revenue producing page to which that link leads. Thus our anchor text and the landing page content must be very similar.
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This post was written by plrpro on July 19, 2009
