In a recent article I wrote about the conflict we face in trying to resolve a contradiction in content marketing.  In a quick summary, the problem 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 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 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.  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.  Another solution to our dilemma is to include two different kinds of links from our distributed articles.  One link option or type will take the clicker to a landing page dedicated entirely to providing valuable information (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.  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.  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.

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.  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.  We shall offer them a link to the page where they can actually buy, but we really put most of our efforts into getting them to give us contact information in exchange for a free buyers guide, a free report, or a free short course. 

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.  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.

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 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.  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.  Second we sell the search engine spiders on the accuracy of our description of our selling page by making sure that the anchor text and the page’s content match in fundamental ways.

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