Free Riches

I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting serve two masters in content marketing. In a nutshell, the problem is that we often want to use links in our articles to our “money pages” for the purposes of optimizing for search engines, but the readers are not yet at the buying stage in terms of their mindset as they are busy gathering information (the reason they found our syndicated article in the first place).. In that article, I combined that conflict 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. 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. One is to violate the rule of website design by letting our linked page offer two alternatives 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 link option or type 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; the other type of link leads to our “money page,” primarily for the purpose of search engine optimization. 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. 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. 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 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.

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. Once we have their contact information we can begin selling our product, subtly at first and then with increasing urgency.

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 implicit commercial value.

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 robots 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.