Article Marketing: How to Write a Sales-Producing Resource Box

Three of the last four posts I’ve written here on blogging tips have been on the topic of article marketing. This topic sparked a lot of interest, based on the number of emails asking for more information that I received directly, and in the comments section.

Hence, I thought I would wrap up this “unintentional article marketing series,” by talking about the most important part of the article, your resource box. After all, you give away the free content because of this all-important article marketing tool.

Article Marketing: What is a Resource Box?

This is the “About the Author” part of your free articles. They can be as short as one line, or as long as 10 or more. How long they are depends on the restrictions of the article directory you’re submitting to – and of course, your imagination.

Mine usually top out at between 3-4 lines. Anything longer just gets to be obnoxious in my opinion. I’ve seen resource boxes longer than the articles they’re attached to – really!

How to Write a Traffic-Generating, Sales-Producing, Make-the-Reader-Click Resource Box

There are four things I think every resource box should have to be effective. They are:

1. Reader Benefits: Offer a free report, a more in-depth version of the subject you’re discussing, a downloadable podcast, etc.

The idea of article marketing is to whet the appetite of the reader in the body of the article enough so that when they get to your resource box and see that there’s “more,” they will want to click through to your site to get it. This is why free informational reports work well.

2. Site Links: Your resource box should always include a link through to your website/blog. Article directories allow anywhere from one to three links. Make it your business to use all of them, which brings me to my next point . . .

3. Use Proper SEO Link Structure: What I mean by this is, don’t make the words “click here” linkable if you can help it. Why not? Because when search engines index information, one of the things that helps them to identify what a page is all about is the words that form a link.

So for example, if I was offering a free report about article marketing with this article, I would NOT say write “Click here” for a free report on article marketing (with click here being the clickable link).

I would write, Read this “free report on article marketing” (with free report on article marketing being the clickable link). This way, when search engines crawl the text, they’ll know that the page is relevant to the subject of article marketing.

4. Link to Your Main Page: Always make one of the links in your resource box a link to your site’s home page (using the advice just above). Why? Because you want to build backlinks to it. It’s fine to link to internal pages, for example, to point readers to a more in-depth discussion on the topic at hand that’s on your site.

But, you want as many links to your site’s home page out there as well because backlinks are what make a site an authority site. Every time your site is published by another newsletter publisher, in another article directory, on another blogger’s site, that’s another backlink to your main site.

FYI, if you missed the three article marketing posts I mentioned above, they are (in order of first appearance):

How to Stretch Your Articles into Dollars, 09 Jul 2008

How to Increase Ebook Sales with an Article Marketing Blitz, 16 Jul 2008

Article Marketing Directory No No’s, 30 Jul 2008

Good luck with your article marketing campaign. Now, what in the world will I talk about next week?

Written by Yuwanda Black from Inkwell Editorial
Posted on August 6th, 2008 and filed under Promote your blog
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