Competing Goals in Article Marketing
Quite simply, we put a lot of effort into article marketing in hopes of achieving one simple objective: Get more traffic!
Our articles accomplish this in one (or both) of two ways. First, readers might click the links contextually embedded within our articles or within the resource box at the article’s end, and, second, search engine spiders will find our link and assign greater import to the linked page within our site, thereby eventually providing us with visitors who come from searches.
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 (or perform whatever our desired, money-making action happens to be).
On the other hand, the readers of our syndicated articles are, typically, at a much earlier stage in the decision making process. They are usually at a stage of beginning information gathering. Indeed, it is because they are gathering information that they found our article in the first place.
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 pet their dogs, we focus all our energy on that page toward achieving that single objective. So, if we obey the marketing rule to the letter, we can’t possibly optimize the most prized pages on the site and simultaneously satisfy the [human |]reader[| of our article]–can we?
That is the seemingly unwinnable choice that faces us. Should we direct our article marketing strategy on SEO or on sending our readers to a page that will offer them what they actually want at this stage? Should we incorporate two objectives within a single page on our site, or ought we make a choice to abide by common sense marketing principles?
As we develop our overall article syndication strategy and the tactics of writing a single article, we must be attentive to these competing options.
