Viral Marketing Lessons

In a recent article I wrote about the conflict we face in trying to resolve a contradiction in content marketing.  In a quick summary, the problem is that we frequently want to use links in our articles to our “money pages” for the purposes of SEO, but the readers are not yet at the buying stage in terms of their frame of mind 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.

I did not offer a solution in that original article.  Simply bringing the problem to the attention of article marketers was my goal in that previous piece.  With this article, I’ll try to bring some resolution to the dilemma.

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 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.  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.  I’ll explain why I believe that this approach is a workable solution, and then I’ll describe, in general terms, the landing page of each of those article links.

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.  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 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.  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.  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 commercial value.

We have different roles as marketers and authors.  Wearing the marketing hat, our foremost goal is to make that sale, but as writers we worry about the quality 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.  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’s content match in meaningful ways.