I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting meet two objectives in content marketing. Here’s the problem boiled down to its root: Readers of our content are still in the early part of the information gathering stage 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. 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. Simply bringing the problem to the attention of article marketers was my goal in that previous piece. With this article, I’ll try to bring some resolution to the dilemma.
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 leads 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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 of first type of linked page, we will move our prospects along the decision 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. 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.
We establish ourselves as experts in our distributed content, so we are “selling” that expertise to our readers. 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. 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 value.
We have different roles as marketers and writers. Wearing the marketing hat, our foremost goal is to make that sale, but as writers we worry about the flow of our prose even above its financial 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 demonstrate to the search engine spiders that we have provided linking text that is an accurate 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.
