Pages Linked From Your Distributed Articles
Posted on September 5, 2009
Filed Under Outsourcing Involves Focusing! |
In a recent article I wrote about the conflict we face in trying to serve two masters in content marketing. Here’s the issue boiled down to its core: Readers of our articles are still in the early part of the information seeking phase of the buying decision continuum. Yet, because we want our links to optimize our income pages of the sites, the readers’ clicks on our article links will take them to a web page that assumes that they are ready to buy a particular alternative. 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.
I did not offer a solution in that original article. My purpose was to bring the inherent conflict to the attention of article marketers. Today, I’ll go that one additional step and give one answer to the quandary.
There are actually at least two solutions to the dilemma. The first option is to ignore the rule of website design for marketing purposes and have our landing pages attempt to offer two different objectives allowing our readers to satisfy their information seeking and provinding an opportunity to buy the product or service from the same page. 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; the other type of link leads to our “money page,” primarily for the purpose of search engine optimization. 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. I’ll explain why I believe that this approach is a workable solution, and then I’ll describe, in general terms, the landing page of each of those article links.
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. I trust that I don’t have to tell you that we always must deliver what we promise our prospects. Thus, our article marketing content must be interesting, accurate and informative, but it must leave the impression that we still have more to tell them. We must subtly persuade them that our site will provide all the remaining necessary information, and we make sure that link delivers them 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 making the implication that our product or service will be their ultimate solution, even after they have gathered all the necessary information, we have justified linking to our product or money page.
It is always easier to logically include both types of links within our articles if we syndicate directly to websites that are within our general niche category; in those cases we can make our links contextual within the article, itself. On the other hand, when we publish on article directories, we must make the connection between our informational link and our selling link more quickly as it must fit within our resource box and not within the article.
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 really put most of our efforts into getting them to give us contact information in exchange for a free buyers guide, a free report, or a free short course.
In our syndicated article we use our content to sell our expertise. 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 authors. Wearing the marketing hat, our foremost goal is to make a sale, but as writers we worry about the flow of our prose even above its monetary 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 linking text that is a truthful name for the content that we have on our selling page to which that link leads. Thus our anchor text and the landing page content must be similar.
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