I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting serve two masters in article syndication. Here’s the problem boiled down to its core: Readers of our articles 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 income pages in our 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. In that article, I coupled that complexity with another related issue: With good website design, each page should have a single purpose. That purpose is to satisfy our visitor’s desire. In other words, we should not [deliver 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. My purpose was to bring the inherent conflict to the attention of article marketers. With this article, I’ll try to bring some resolution to the dilemma.
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. The other is to provide two kinds of links in our articles. One link option or type will take the clicker to a landing page filled with valuable, additional content 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. 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.
Remember that our distributed article attracted the readers because those readers intended to gather useful 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. 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.
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 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. 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. 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.
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. After they have signed onto our mailing list, we can actually begin selling our product by building our relationship with our new prospects and then more blatantly recommending our product or service.
The second type of link from our article marketing content leads directly to a product page. 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.
As marketers, all of our efforts are toward increasing revenue through a 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. Then, with the second link type, we need to convince the search engine spiders that we have provided link 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 very similar.
