[Note for readers: This is the last post in a three-part series on how content marketing (particularly article writing) can play a strategic role in your online sales campaigns.

Part 1 is here: Invasion! Your Customers Are Coming!

Part 2 is here: Some Email Landing Craft Won't Make It]

In this post you’ll discover more about how marketers drive targeted traffic to an offer or landing page by using articles. (Press releases and blogging will get their own posts, as this one is already too long!)

These three content marketing formats act as the ‘silent reconnaissance’ pathfinders of an online marketing strategy by encouraging visitors to come closer and check out what’s been stashed away in the digital command post (i.e. those web pages you want them to see.)

Staying with the military metaphors for a while, it’s clear that some marketers have recruited (in many cases, “press ganged” would be a more appropriate phrase) two types of articles into their line up. These are:

1. Cannon Fodder (commodity articles)
2. Special Forces (premium articles)

1. Cannon Fodder Articles

Individually, these types of articles may have very limited firepower and range but collectively they add up to a formidable and automated traffic-referring force over time.

One well-known approach is to write (or outsource the writing of) a continuous stream of articles which, although usually readable to humans, are mainly for the search engine spiders to find and follow the keyword links back to specific (and related) pages on your own site.

This continues to work because Google and the other search engines still take into consideration the number and type of links in their index ranking algorithms – although, it should be pointed out, the details of these algorithms are as secret as the Coca Cola formula, and a lot more complex!

Alas, the problem with cannon fodder material is that lots of people are doing it.

And a sizable minority abuse the process by publishing unreadable garbage. This junk is often derived from legitimate articles and ‘spun’ in software so that multiple variants of the original article are produced.

“Article spinning! For what purpose?”, you might be thinking.

The perceived wisdom among some marketers is that Google ‘penalizes’ articles if they are distributed across multiple websites – the so-called “duplicate content” filter.

I guess it’s never crossed their minds how do the big news media sites survive unscathed with all that syndicated content they publish each day?

Anyhow, the main point is that well-written and SEO-aware content articles are out there competing for ‘link attention’ from the search engines in a sea of ever-replicating garbage.

2. Special Forces Articles – ‘Who Dares Writes’

Here’s where a premium article writing approach can come into its own simply by the exclusivity gained from having your work published on authority sites.

Of course, this is easier said than done and definitely a lot harder than churning out ‘content canon fodder.’ In many cases these articles will be of print magazine quality and are probably written by a professional freelance writer.

Getting published online requires persistence and patience in finding important and high traffic web sites that will accept them.

Do whatever you can to get noticed by these site owners in a positive sense. A good way to do this is to show genuine interest in their site by commenting on their blog, following their Tweets (and tweeting with them) and, once known, offering to guest write some posts or articles.

I definitely do NOT recommend that you fake an interest in what they’re doing because this will almost certainly backfire on you when you least expect it – a case of believing and drowning in your own hype is the probable outcome.

Conclusions

Most B2B information technology companies are unlikely to get sucked into the quagmire of writing and publishing poor quality ‘cannon fodder articles.’

They’ve invested too much in building a reputation for useful and top class content to have it trashed (probably by their competitors!) with GIGO content.

Namely, ‘Garbage-In-Garbage-Out’.

Much better to focus on the problems their prospects and customers – real, live human beings – want to know more about solving. That’s why a sustained strategy of publishing high quality content over time can deliver great results – leading to more click throughs, more signups and more customers.

Could you see yourself benefiting from a content marketing strategy that makes sense for your information technology business?

If ‘yes’, then get in contact today and we’ll pull up a couple of deck chairs and put a plan in place for you over a cool digital drink or two of ideas and brainstorming!

- Mark McClure

No! No! No!

I see this mistake a lot among prospects new to online marketing. (The headline came from a buyer looking for ‘SEO Sales copy’ on one of the freelancing sites.)

Many are confused on the fundamental difference between content pages and sales pages.

Then they read about the need to SEO this and SEM that…

… and end up jumbling together techniques that should mostly be kept separate.

“ON-PAGE SEO DOES NOT A CONVERTING SALES MESSAGE MAKE”

It can be a pleasant day dream to imagine sales pages cleverly constructed with keywords that drive them to the top of Google…

…where searchers hungry for solutions to their problems, have credit cards in hand as they squeal with delight at having found your masterpieces.

Wake up! Wake up!

The reality is:

• On-Page SEO does NOT compute on a direct response sales page.
• Off-page SEO (linking with relevant use of anchor text) works.
• Content pages teach/educate/entertain. Sales pages sell.

The solution is simple:

• Write some content pages from an SEO-perspective.
• Link these content pages to your sales (or squeeze) page.
• Forget about SEO for the sales page – focus on the copy!

SAME THING FOR EMAIL COPY?

You don’t need SEO when it comes to email copywriting (or autoresponder messages). The search engines aren’t ranking your emails.

And, in most cases, drop the idea that an email should be selling or converting. (This is another mistake I see business owners making – they want an email or two that will “make the sale.”)

The days are long gone when people viewed emails with doe-eyed delight.

Relentless spam has killed that particular e-Bambi

Instead, see your email marketing as a way to connect and communicate with your prospects and customers on a regular basis.

And where EVERY email is designed to ‘get the click’.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you take readers to a sales page EVERY time – especially if you have an email newsletter as part of your marketing efforts.

(But for some email marketing campaigns that’s exactly the purpose – get the prospect interested enough to click through to the sales page.)

However you do want to ‘train’ them to take some sort of action every time.

Why?

Because it’s in their best interests!

The information or product or service you have to share has been carefully chosen to help them. They’d be crazy not to click on your link.

That’s the type of ‘training’ I’m referring to.

(The alternative’s a response like – “Yawn, Y-a-w-n. Another useless email from markie sparkie.”

Result? They archive, delete or worse, unsubscribe from your list.)

Of course, you gotta deliver… trick people to click thru to crap-filled garbage and you’ll lose them forever.

DO THIS NOW!

Go look over your email messages and sales pages.

Have they been electronically lobotomized using SEM twaddle and clogged up with keyword cholesterol? Fix that and see your response rates rocket!

- Mark McClure

Article writing is one of the services I offer clients – but not just any old articles.

I’m not the quickest and I don’t compete with bottom feeders on cost or volume.

And you certainly won’t catch me “banging out” (as one buyer on a freelancing site memorably stated) 100 articles on “building rock solid abs” at less than I could make flipping burgers.

Anyway, RSI’s a painful and debilitating injury for some writers – and I value quality over quantity when it comes to word-smithing.

For those interested in the quality and penmanship that goes into every writing project the samurai writer gets involved with – including the humble, online article – here’s a mind map view (hosted on Flickr.com) of my creative writing process:

There are 7 main steps:

1- Research

2- Keywords (often clients don’t know what the optimal keywords are. I can do this research for them – for an additional per article fee basis.)

3- Article Type – I classify this as either ‘standard’ or ‘premium’. (Check out my ghostwriting page for more info.)

4- Write – Yes, even writers procrastinate and the first draft is the hardest. However, once something’s down on paper, the ‘word sculpting’ can begin.

5- Edit – This is where layout and style are tweaked and cleaned up. (Often I will take a break between steps 4 and 5. Editing is a tiring process and it’s easy to make mistakes.)

6- Proofreading – This is the one step I’m tempted to have someone else do! Going through grammar, spelling and punctuation can be mind numbingly dull but it’s important to do a good job.

(By the way, the ‘trick’ is to do each step separately. So I’ll check spelling first and ignore grammar completely. And I usually read sentences backwards word-by-word to catch spelling mistakes that MS-Word doesn’t automatically find.)

7- Release – This is where the article is packaged up and sent off to the client. One round of edits is included at no additional cost within 5 days of delivery. Few clients take this offer up – perhaps I’m doing something right!

By following steps 1 to 7, there’s probably at least 1 hour of work in each standard article I write.

With premium articles – especially ones where considerable research and cross-checking is necessary – it can be 2, 3 or even 4 hours of work for an excellent 1000 word, magazine-quality article.

If that’s the type of article quality you require, then contact me today!

- Mark ‘samurai writer’ McClure

PS - The first 5 people to leave a constructive comment to this post within the month of February 2009 will get any 1 standard or premium article for 50% off the advertised price.