Your resource box is the heart and soul of what makes article marketing stand out as the most efficient and effective way to drive traffic to your website.
The concept is simple, write a few dozen short articles averaging 300-900 words in length, on a topic that is useful to the people you want to do business with, post these articles online to any of the hundreds of of “item submission”. sites” or “article banks”.
Under the terms of service of these article banks, you allow other webmasters or newsletter publishers to reproduce your articles under certain conditions. These conditions include the requirement that they reprint your article unchanged and give you proper attribution as the author of the article. This includes your resource box at the end of your article.
Your resource box is the only place you can sell your article. The body of the article should have an unobtrusive and useful tone so that readers feel that they are receiving valuable information on a topic of interest to them. But the resource box is where you can tell about yourself, the services you offer, and it contains a link to your site that they can click to visit your website.
But how do you motivate readers to click on your link and go to your website? Here are some ideas to include in your resource box that will greatly increase the number of visitors you receive from each article you write:
- Offer to solve a problem. This should be easy since anyone reading your article is probably interested in solving a certain type of problem. In your resource box, you simply explain the solution more specifically and promise that they will find the solution when they visit your website.
- Make a promise. All benefits are promised. It promises to get something in return for clicking on its link. Think about what you do and come up with some very clear and specific promises that you can make. These are not always promises that your services can keep, but promises that they will get just for visiting your site.
- What changes do your readers want to make? The benefits are simply solutions or changes. Make a list of all the changes you can offer someone and choose the most concise and emotional change you can think of to put in your resource box.
- Use words like “find out” or “learn how” to get people to visit your website. People who read your articles online are looking for more information. How-to articles dominate article banks for the simple reason that people are looking for ways to solve problems and create change, as we’ve already learned from the examples above.
- Use the words “you can.” People may want to solve problems or create change, but they also have doubts that they can make these things happen. “You can” phrases are very motivating and help readers imagine themselves enjoying the solutions and changes your article promises.
- Put yourself in the minds of your potential visitors and make a “Want” list from their point of view. For example, if you are a lawyer, put yourself in the mindset of your potential clients. The “I want” that comes to mind might be: “I want to be compensated fairly for my pain and suffering”, “I want to expunge a wrongful criminal conviction from my record”, “I want to be paid for my lost wages from a employer who wrongfully terminated my employment and then spread false rumors about me in the workplace.
Writing a featured resource box takes a lot of work. Often, it’s more work to write the resource box than it is to write the article itself. But remember you’re not selling yourself in the article, you’re in the resource box. Make it shine and you’ll be rewarded with increased traffic and more customers who want to do business with you.