In Article Distribution Consider Your Readers
Putting it in the most direct way possible, we put a lot of effort into article marketing in hopes of achieving one simple objective: Get more traffic!
Our syndicated article help us in this way in two potential ways. On the one hand, we can receive visitors directly from those articles when the readers click a link in our resource (or author’s) box, and/or, alternatively, the major search engines can notice our article link and give greater important to that landing page on our site. This latter option leads to more traffic, eventually, by sending us visitors who have found our page in the search engine results.
Trying to maximize our results from those two methods causes a problem. The pages on our site to which we might want to send the article readers may not be our most desired pages for maximizing our search optimization resources. Let me explain this problem in a little more detail.
We normally want to give our greatest SEO love to our most competitive pages. Those are often the pages that directly generate income. With those pages, we try to reach search engine users who are already in a mindset to buy.
Our distributed article readers are not yet in they buying frame; instead they are usually at a stage of beginning information gathering. That’s why they came to our article rather than going directly to a store or service provider.
Now, hang onto those two competing states of mind for a moment, while we consider how we construct pages on a business website. One fundamental rule of marketing that applies to a good website design for a business is that any given page should be directed toward moving the visitor to one and only one action. Whether that action is to buy our product, sign up for our mailing list or scratch their noses, we focus all our energy on that page toward achieving that single end. So, if we absolutely obey the marketing rule, we can’t possibly optimize our most important pages and satisfy the reader of our article–can we?
That is the dilemma we face. Should we focus our article marketing efforts on search engine optimization or on providing a landing page for our readers that will offer them what they truly desire at their current stage of decision making (or procrastination, in some cases)? Should we abide by the simple, common sense marketing rule, or should we magically try to successfully incorporate two disparate objectives within this single site of the page?
We must consider these options carefully in both our article syndication decisions and our copywriting decisions within the website itself.
