In a recent article I wrote about the conflict we face in trying to serve two masters in content syndication. In a nutshell, the problem is that we frequently want to use links in our articles to our “money pages” for the purposes of SEO, but the readers are not yet at the purchasing stage in terms of their mental set as they are out gathering information (the reason they found our syndicated article).. 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.
My purpose was to bring the inherent conflict to the attention of article marketers. 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 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, 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.
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.
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 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 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. 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. 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. We can now treat them as serious prospects and ramp up our selling strategy a bit. 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.
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 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 spiders 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.
