In Article Marketing Consider Your Readership

The only real reason that online businesses pour so many resources into article marketing is to get more traffic.  That’s why the better Internet writing services never lack business, and it’s why the top article directories never lack fresh content.

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, 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. 

Unfortunately those two ways of achieving our single objective are not always complimentary.  The pages that we want to optimize in the search engines may not be the same pages to which we would ideally send our article readers.  Let me explain this problem in a little more detail.

Often we pay the most SEO attention to pages that generate revenue directly.  We are optimizing, in those cases, for searchers who are in a buying state of mind. 

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.  A basic marketing principle of good website design for a business is that each page within our site should be constructed in a way that contributes to creating only one action on the part of the prospect.  That action might be buying or it might be signing up for our mailing list in order to receive additional information.  So, if we absolutely obey the marketing rule, we can’t possibly optimize our most important pages and satisfy the human reader–can we?

That is the dilemma we face.  Should we focus our article marketing efforts on search engine optimization or on sending our readers to a page that will give them what they actually want at this stage?  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?

As we develop our overall article syndication strategy and the tactics of writing a single article, we must be attentive to these competing options.

Tagged with: Article Marketing • Basic Marketing • Business Website • Decision Making Process • Directories • Gathering Information • Internet Marketing • Internet writing • Objective • Online Business • Principle • Readership • Real Reason • S Box • Search Engine Spiders • Search Engines • Searchers • States Of Mind • Traffic • Two Ways • web design • web writing • website design • Website Marketing • Writing Services

Filed under: Empowering

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