Article Marketing – The Resource Box: Do You Know These Essentials to Success?

By C Doug Mah

In order to be effective in article marketing, you need to be able to craft and effective resource box. We all take pride in our art in writing but to be brutally honest, all that art goes to waste if we don’t have an effective resource box. This article will provide you the key essentials for your resource box.

What Is The Resource Box
The resource box, or author resource box, or bio box is the section of the article right at the end that contains the “About the Author”. Your article content is the “give”. The resource box is the “get” – this is what you get in exchange for providing all that valuable content and this is where you want your reader to get to. Essentially, the whole reason for the existence of the article in the first place is to get the reader to read your resource box. This is where you pitch yourself and your website and blog.

Essential Items For Your Resource Box
These are the essentials for your resource box – what you’ve got to have:
1.) Your name. Duh! Seems obvious but some people do forget this. Have your name and title (if appropriate) as the first thing in your resource box.
2.) Your website or blog address. I would suggest that you put your address in two ways, a clickable link with anchor text and the fully written out address. (e.g. http://www.YourWebsite.com). You want your address fully written out because some article directories or ezine publishers will not include your clickable link (the html gets lost or they purposely get rid of it) and if that is your only link to your website, you’ve just lost out big time.
3.) Your unique selling proposition (USP). Here you want to provide your 1 – 3 sentence USP describing succinctly why you are unique and why the reader should care. This is your elevator pitch for the online world – make it count!
4.) Your call to action. This is vital. You’ve led with your valuable content which is the “attraction” in attraction marketing. You’ve built your credibility and you have further piqued the readers interest with your USP. The reader is now primed and ready for what you want them to do. This where you naturally lead them and ask for the sale. This is where you ask them to visit your website or blog and opt-in to your email newsletter.
5.) Your keyword phrase. This is not an essential in terms of getting reader action, but from a search engine optimization this is an important part of getting backlinks to your website and blog and also for the article itself to rank well in the search engines. Use your keyword phrase or a variation of it as your anchor text for your website/blog URL.

Things to Keep In Mind For Your Resource Box
1.) Make sure your profile is relevant to your article and your target market. You may want to tailor your resource box for each article.
2.) Don’t keyword stuff your resource box. This is the last place you want to use what is essentially spam.
3.) Don’t include a list of every website or blog you own. Keep it relevant to the article and your target market. The best advice is to provide one website or blog. Don’t dilute your credibility.
4.) You may want to consider having more than one pen name. This gets back to not diluting your credibility. If you are in more than one market or if you like to blog about personal interests that may detract from your business interests, you may want to set up different identities for each. This is more to prevent confusing your reader than to try to hide anything.
5.) Don’t include a list of every achievement you have accomplished to date. This is not your resume. And nobody cares anyway. As with anything in attraction marketing, if it doesn’t provide value or benefit, leave it out.
6.) Keep the size of your resource box reasonable in relation to your article length. 15% - 20% is a good target.
7.) Have one call to action. Treat your article and the resource box like a squeeze page – you want to funnel the reader down to one choice as to their next action.

Conclusion
If you include these essentials in your resource box and keep the other factors in mind, and provide valuable content in your article body, you will go a long way towards successful social marketing.

If your goal is to get into article marketing to help your business online, a great training ground is Renegade University. Mike Klingler's FREE membership site offers step-by-step, click-by-click, video tutorials on article marketing for network marketing.

About C Doug Mah


Doug is part of the “Super Guides” team with Renegade University and Renegade Professional, guiding and coaching in the area of internet attraction marketing.

Doug’s background is in finance and accounting in the corporate world. In the past 13 years, as a senior finance executive, he has helped grow and position 3 high-tech companies for acquisition. Having gone through the cycle of finding a new job, building a company, selling a company, integratng the company with the new company, and back to finding a job, and seeing what is happening in corporate America with the recent financial crisis and its fallout, Doug sees that future does not lie in corporate America. Developing your own business, You Inc., is the way to build your own economy of the future and secure you and your family financially.

For more tips and training on writing articles see Doug at http://RenegadeTrainerOnline.com/blog

Comments

[Pat Campbell]

Very helpful Doug. I will go back and be sure to have my website address written out in full in my resource boxes. I also learned more about effectively using my USP and making sure there is a call to action for the reader to consider.

Thanks,