The Connection Between Distributed Content And Linked Pages

18 August 2010
Posted in Link Popularity

In a recent article I wrote about the conflict we face in trying to resolve a contradiction 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 gathering stage of the purchasing decision continuum. Yet, because we want our links to optimize our money 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. In other words, we should not deliver 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. 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 opt-in form encouraging the visitor to get even more information by signing up for our list; the other type of link leads to our "money page," primarily for the purpose of search engine optimization. Of course we must make clear from the context of the link what the landing page will offer.

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.

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.

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 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.

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. 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 implicit commercial intent.

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