In a recent article I wrote about the conflict we face in trying to resolve a contradiction in article syndication. Here’s the problem boiled down to its core: Readers of our content are still in the early part of the information gathering phase of the buying decision continuum. Yet, because we want our links to optimize our money 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. 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. 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. Another solution to our dilemma is to include two different kinds of links from our distributed articles. One link option or type leads to a landing page filled with valuable, additional content (and an opportunity to learn even more by signing up for our newsletter); 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. 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 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. 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. They are no long “just readers,” they have become serious prospects. 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.
In our syndicated article we use our content to sell our expertise. 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. 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 commercial intent.
As marketers, all of our efforts are toward making the sale. As writers we must make the sale without disturbing the flow of our content. 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. Second we sell the search engine robots on the accuracy of our description of our selling page by making sure that the anchor text and the page match in meaningful ways.
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