I recently wrote about the difficulty we face in attempting serve two masters in content marketing.  In a nutshell, the difficulty 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 mindset as they are busy gathering information (the reason they found our syndicated article in the first place)..  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.

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 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 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.  I trust that I don’t have to tell you that we always must deliver what we promise our prospects.  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 always easier to logically include both types of links within our articles if we syndicate directly to websites that are within our general niche category; in those cases we can make our links contextual within the article, itself.  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 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. 

In our syndicated article we use our content to sell our expertise.  What we sell on our linked (landing) page is our integrety, by establish our credibility.  Once we have their contact information we can begin selling our product, subtly at first and then with increasing urgency.

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