I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting serve two masters in content marketing.  In a quick summary, the difficulty is that we often want to use links in our articles to our “money pages” for the purposes of SEO, 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)..  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.  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.  Another solution to our dilemma is to include two different kinds of links from our distributed articles.  One of those link types will take the clicker to a landing page filled with valuable, additional content (and an opportunity to learn even more by signing up for our newsletter); 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.  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.

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.  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.  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 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.  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 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.  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.  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 intent.

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 quality 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.  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 match in fundamental ways.

Tags: anchor text, Article Marketing, external link, link building, linking, linking text, traffic, website design