Secret Cash Recipes

I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting resolve a contradiction in article 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 optimizing for search engines, but the readers are not yet at the purchasing stage in terms of their frame of mind as they are out 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.

I did not offer a solution in that original article.  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.

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 allowing our readers to satisfy their information seeking and provinding an opportunity to buy the product or service from the same page.  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 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.  In these cases, our anchor text must make clear what to expect on the landing page.

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.

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

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.  Then, with the second link type, we need to convince the search engine spiders that we have provided anchor text that is a truthful 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 similar.

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