I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting meet two objectives in content marketing. In a quick summary, the problem is that we frequently 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 purchasing stage in terms of their mental set as they are out gathering information (the reason they found our syndicated article in the first place).. 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. 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. With this article, I’ll try to bring some resolution to the dilemma.
Two ways to solve the problem present themselves. 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 filled with valuable, additional content 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. If we want to entice them to click a link to actually come to our site, we must promise even more information that is pertient to them. Of course, we always follow through with our promises or we shall immediately lose credibility. 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 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 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.
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 disturbing the flow 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. 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.
