Thinking About the Pages Linked From Your Article Marketing Content
I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting serve two masters in article marketing. In a nutshell, the problem is that we frequently want to use links in our articles to our “money pages” for the purposes of SEO, but the readers are not yet at the purchasing stage in terms of their frame of mind as they are busy 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.
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.
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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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 increasing revenue through a sale. As writers we must make the sale without disturbing the flow of our content. 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. Second we sell the search engine robots on the accuracy of our description of our selling page by making sure that the linking text and the page match in fundamental ways.