In Article Marketing Consider Your Readership
Quite simply, 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. 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.
Unfortunately those two ways of achieving our single objective are not always complimentary to each other. 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. I’ll try to explain the contradiction with a bit of elaboration.
Often we pay the most SEO attention to pages that generate revenue directly. 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.
Let’s balance those two visitor mental frames against the way we typically sculpt a page on a business site. One fundamental rule of marketing that applies to a 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. 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 end. So, if we absolutely obey the marketing rule, it is logically impossible to both optimize our most important pages and satisfy the human reader of our article–can we?
That is the dilemma we face. Should we focus our article marketing efforts on SEO 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?
We must consider these options carefully in both our article syndication decisions and our copywriting decisions within the website itself.



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