I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting serve two masters in article marketing. In a nutshell, the problem is that we often want to use links in our articles to our “money pages” for the purposes of search engine optimization, but the readers are not yet at the buying stage in terms of their mental set as they are out gathering information (the reason they found our syndicated article in the first place).. In that article, I combined that conflict with another related issue: With good website design, each page should have a single purpose. That purpose is to satisfy our visitor’s desire. a prospect to our money (product) page until they already want to go there–in other words, they’re ready to buy.]
I did not offer a solution in that original article. Simply bringing the problem to the attention of article marketers was my goal in that previous piece. With this article, I’ll try to bring some resolution to the dilemma.
There are actually at least two solutions to the dilemma. One is to violate the rule of website design by letting our linked page offer two alternatives allowing our readers to satisfy their information seeking and provinding an opportunity to buy the product or service from the same page. Another solution to our dilemma is to include two different kinds of links from our distributed articles. One of those link types will take the clicker 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.
When presented with these two options, I recommend the second. 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. The only likely way we are going to attract those readers to our site is to offer them even more information than our article provides. I trust that I don’t have to tell you that we always must deliver what we promise our prospects. 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.
We also want to move them along that decision making continuum by implying that there is a product or service that will provide the ultimate solution to their current problem. 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 of first type of linked page, we will move our prospects along the decision continuum. Remember that the visitors have already been persuaded to accept our initial offer by clicking on our link, so they are in an agreeable frame of mind. We can now treat them as serious prospects and ramp up our selling strategy a bit. Consequently, we make our link to the actual buying page very prominent on this content page, 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. On the linked page, we’re selling our credibility and integrity. 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. Since the purpose of that link is primarily search engine optimization, it is especially important that our anchor (linking) text is at once an accurate description of the selling page and a useful long tail keyword with implicit commercial value.
We have different roles as marketers and writers. Wearing the marketing hat, our foremost goal is to make that sale, but as writers we worry about the quality of our prose even above its monetary reward. First we sell the article readers on their need for more information and convince them that they can find that information by clicking our link. Then, with the second link type, we need to demonstrate to the search engine spiders that we have provided anchor text that is an accurate 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.
Mail this postPopularity: 3% [?]
