LAOT STUDIO™

I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting serve two masters in article syndication.  In a quick summary, the difficulty 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 buying stage in terms of their frame of mind as they are busy 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.direct 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.  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 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.

Remember that our distributed article attracted the readers because those readers intended to gather useful 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.  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 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.  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. 

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.

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 commercial value.

We have different roles as marketers and authors.  Wearing the marketing hat, our primary goal is to make a sale, but as writers we worry about the flow of our prose even above its monetary 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.  Then, with the second link type, we need to demonstrate to 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 similar.