Handling the Pages Linked From Your Article Syndication Content
Saturday, November 14th, 2009I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting resolve a contradiction 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 purchasing 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 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. a prospect to our money (product) page until they already want to go there–in other words, they’re ready to buy.]
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. 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. Another solution to our dilemma is to include two different kinds of links from our distributed articles. One link option or type leads to a landing page dedicated entirely to providing valuable information 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.
When presented with these two options, I recommend the second. Allow me to elaborate on why I endorse this approach and what the respective landing page for each type of link will contain.
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. 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 making the implication that our product or service will be their ultimate solution, even after they have gathered all the necessary information, we have justified linking to our product or money page.
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 our content landing page, we focus upon bringing our readers much closer to the buying decision end of the decision making continuum. We have already made progress by getting the readers to click the link in our syndicated article. We can now treat them as serious prospects and ramp up our selling strategy a bit. 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.
In our syndicated article we use our content to sell our expertise. On the linked page, we’re selling our credibility and integrity. Once we have their contact information we can begin selling our product, subtly at first and then with increasing urgency.
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. 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 intent.
As marketers, all of our efforts are toward making the sale. As writers we must make the sale without disrupting the prose of our content. 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 convince the search engine spiders that we have provided anchor 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.