Landing Pages Linked From Your Distributed Content

I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting serve two masters in content syndication.  In a nutshell, 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 purchasing stage in terms of their mindset as they are busy 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. 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.  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.  The other is to provide two kinds of links in our articles.  One link option or type 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.  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.  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 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 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. 

In our syndicated article we use our content to sell our expertise.  On the linked page, we’re selling our credibility and integrity.  Once we have their contact information we can begin selling our product, subtly at first and then with increasing urgency.

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.

We have different roles as marketers and authors.  Wearing the marketing hat, our primary goal is to make that 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 convince the search engine spiders that we have provided link 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 very similar.