Relationship Between Syndicated Content and Linked Pages
In a recent article I wrote about the conflict we face in trying to serve two masters in article marketing. 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 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. 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.direct a prospect to our money page until they already want to go there–in other words, they’re ready to buy.]
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 filled with valuable, additional content (and an opportunity to learn even more by signing up for our newsletter), while the other link category will direct the visitor to a product (or purchasing) page. In these cases, our anchor text must make clear what to expect on the landing page.
I recommend the second of those two options. 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. 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 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 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. They are no long “just readers,” they have become serious prospects. We shall offer them a link to the page where they can actually buy, 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. On the linked page, we’re selling our credibility and integrity. 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. 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 disrupting the prose 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 spiders on the accuracy of our description of our selling page by making sure that the linking text and the page’s content match in meaningful ways.
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