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.

Content is important, but links are even more so!

I am sure that by now you have heard the old phrase content is king.  There has been a lot of questionable material being offered to people and I am offering you a way to avoid the whole mess.

I realize this report isn't exactly what you've heard regarding blog marketing before, however it is factual.  I will not tell you the names of sites.  I have to protect them as they are not mine.  I will explain to you that content is NOT King but ONE WAY LINKS ARE KING.

I have taken it up. A new challenge. My client's pages could not go to the first page of Google. I went to work to get it done.

As with any new client I take a look at what they're already doing and I was appalled they even were able to get the rankings they currently had.  All the pages were nasty, poorly written content that looked to have been written by someone who does not speak English, or by someone who English no speak.  Some of it even looked like it had been spun from a content spinner and not well-written human variations of each sentence but a cheap piece of crap article spinning software.

To highlight just how bad the previous SEO guy had done, he put these crappy pages up in some very competitive keyword markets somehow expecting them to rank highly.  It was clear to me with only a moments glance there was no hope of that ever happening.

Sadly, a middle schooler could duplicate his work very easily using a free article spinner from download.com and a few minutes of his or her time.

The internal site structure was mixed up, the internal links had errors like 'home' as anchor text, the sitemap was missing, and you don't even want to know what was coming in from other sites.

What is the result then? If content was king, these pages cannot be on the first page of ANY search engine. Why speak of Google?  After doing my research, what were the results?

All of the sites had mucho one way links to their domain even if they were trashy links from low quality and low authority websites.  Next I took a look at their poorly ranking pages to see if there were problems immediately apparent and sure enough there were because these pages had no or very few incoming links.

In a fortnight I became a hero.You know How? I copied the links from other pages. Now my client is able to be on the first page of Google for the  sites he hired me for.

My main goal was to raise their rankings faxed because most of these were crap domains.  But once I had good rankings I then went back in and started building links from high quality domains.

You can probably guess I got a full-time Search engine optimization company blog marketing gig.  These guys weren't business idiots they just didn't know what they were doing from a search engine optimization standpoint. So go out and get lots of high quality links even if you content isn't that great.