This is an extract from our reference series guide - "The Internet - No Place for Dummies" Article Marketing and Article Syndication

Which comes first, the landing page or the article, is entirely down to you. I have landing pages created for a wide range of products and services, so I generally work in this sequence -

• Identify the product or service I'm looking to promote
• Create an effective landing page that will cause the necessary call-to-action
• Write an article or series of articles to drive people to the landing page
• Promote the article via syndication

To create your syndicated article you need to write in a fairly specific way. The style of writing is different than the style you might use when writing for your website or for an Article Directory. Most content we write for our own websites is clearly going to be self-serving. It promotes our products and/or services and that's its primary purpose. That same style can also get you in article directories, since mostly the verification process is quite loose if it exists at all.

But we need to create content which the owner of an active website, blog, newsletter, ezine etc, will want to publish on his/her own website. That means it needs to be informative and entertaining, and not self-serving.

Why do these people want to publish other people's content? Well, they're trying to provide informative content for their readers on a range of different subjects. So they're always looking for guest articles and posts to keep their readers informed and entertained.

It's important to understand how this type of article marketing is different than submitting your content to article directories. An article directory may get a lot of traffic, but they also have a lot of content. So the eye-balls on your articles sitting inside an article directory are going to be low. When your content is syndicated, you can end up being exposed to a large number of eye-balls. Furthermore, they're often highly targeted viewers since the website owner has carefully selected the content (your article) to match the interest profiles of the visitors to his/her website.

The keys to getting syndicated are -
1. Write well, grammatically
2. Write informative content which is not self-serving
3. Provide some level of entertainment for the reader, perhaps use some humor, or a little controversy, anything to get an emotional response from the readers

Of course you're asking yourself, “what's in it for me, the author?”. Well you're trying to make a connection with the reader and to lead them on to your website through hyperlinks in the body of the article, the author bio section, or both. Most article syndicators/publishers will allow you to embed a link in the article body, and almost all of them will allow you to create an author bio with a link back to your website. So you can make a connection with the reader easily by complying with the 3 simple points above, embed some form of call-to-action in the closing stages of your article, and use hyperlinks as the vehicle to get people on to your landing page.

Let's look at some ways of doing this.
1. In the article body you're providing information on a topic. Some element of that topic requires an explanation beyond the scope of your article, so you could place something like this in parenthesis [The subject of {topic} is quite in-depth and beyond the scope of this article, but you can learn more about {topic} here]. So the underlined text would be a hyperlink back to your information/landing page. Notice that you are also using keywords in your 'anchor text' links, which can help your SEO efforts.

2. I sometimes like to finish the actual article in the bio box, rather than just use the standard canned bio “Carl Hruza is author and publisher of....please visit his site here”. Sometime the bio box will get omitted by publishers, so this is a good strategy to ensure they use it, make the article incomplete without it. I know certain publishers don't allow that strategy, so you will occasionally see me use a conventional bio box.

3. I use the 'Part I of a II Part series' approach from time to time. It works like this – in the bio area, finish the article as mentioned in 2 above, then say something like... “But where does this leave us? to find the answer you'll need to read Part II of this article which you can access at the author's website [link].

So you're building ways to ensure your bio box is included (along with its link) and to get people to click through to your website. Learn more about article marketing and article syndication in our reference series guide here - Article Marketing and Article Syndication