Internet Marketing is Nuts!

Relationship Between Syndicated Articles and Linked Pages

I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting meet two objectives in content syndication.  Here's the issue 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 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.  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.

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.

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 (both learning more and buying) for our readers who click through.  The other is to provide two kinds of links in our articles.  One of those link types will take the clicker to a landing page dedicated entirely to providing valuable information (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.  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.

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.  Of course, we always follow through with our promises or we shall immediately lose credibility.  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.

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 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 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.  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.  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.  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.  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 revenue producing page to which that link leads.  Thus our anchor text and the landing page content must be similar.