Marbella SEO

I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting serve two masters in content marketing.  Here’s the issue boiled down to its core: Readers of our content are still in the early part of the information seeking stage of the purchasing decision continuum.  Yet, because we want our links to optimize our income pages in our sites, the readers’ clicks on our article links will take them to a web page that assumes that they are ready to buy a particular alternative.  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.]

My purpose was to bring the inherent conflict to the attention of article marketers.  With this article, I’ll try to bring some resolution to the dilemma.

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.  The other is to provide two kinds of links in our articles.  One of those link types leads to a landing page filled with valuable, additional content (and an opportunity to learn even more by signing up for our newsletter), while the other link category will direct the visitor to a product (or purchasing) page.  Of course we must make clear from the context of the link what the landing page will offer.

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.  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 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.  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 of first type of linked page, we will move our prospects along the decision 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.  Consequently, we make our link to the actual buying page very prominent on this content page, 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.  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 value.

As marketers, all of our efforts are toward making the 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 match in fundamental ways.

I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting serve two masters in content syndication.  Here’s the issue boiled down to its root: Readers of our content are still in the early part of the information gathering phase of the buying decision continuum.  Yet, because we want our links to optimize our income pages in our sites, the readers’ clicks on our article links will take them to a web page that assumes that they are ready to buy a particular alternative.  In that article, I combined that conflict 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.  My purpose was to bring the inherent conflict to the attention of article marketers.  With this article, I’ll try to bring some resolution to the dilemma.

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 link option or type leads 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.

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.  Of course, we always follow through with our promises or we shall immediately lose credibility.  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.

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 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.  We have already made progress by getting the readers to click the link in our syndicated article.  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 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.  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.

The second type of link from our article marketing content leads directly to a product page.  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.

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.  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 revenue producing page to which that link leads.  Thus our anchor text and the landing page content must be very similar.