All Entries in the "Author Resource Box" Category
What Should Your Resource Box Consist Of?
Your resource box is the small paragraph at the bottom of your articles that lead visitors back to your website. The point of article marketing, after all, is to drive traffic to your website by being a useful resource and providing useful information to your article readers. The author resource box is your chance to ask for something in return for the value you’ve given in the article.
So what you should go into your author resource box? It is essential that you get the following information in your resource box in as few words as possible:
- At least one reader benefit for clicking the link and visiting your website. It could be a free download, a discount on your service, or anything that tells the reader what he or she will get out of clicking your link.
- A link back to your website. At least one, but no more than three. Many article directories will not allow more than three links in your resource box. Some won’t allow more than two. I personally believe that one is often better. But it should lead to a landing page that will earn you some income.
- A call to action. Don’t just assume readers will click your link. Provide a call to action and a reason for clicking.
If you give a clear benefit and an incentive for clicking your link and ensure that you provide real value on the other side of it, article marketing can pay off for you. It all boils down to how effectively you use your resource box.
Article Marketing Secret: Who Is Your Target Market?
Many people question as to what topic they should choose to write their articles… Fortunately, the short answer is simple… Write articles that appeal to your target market. But what does that mean exactly?
I always pose this set of three questions, when I am talking to clients about what they should write about:
- What do you sell?
- Who is most likely to buy what you are selling?
- How can you “answer a question” or “solve a problem” to help those people who are likely to buy what you are selling?
What Do You Sell?
Maybe you sell widgets, cell phones, car parts, or marketing services… It does not matter what you sell… There will always be a topic that you can write your articles about.
Do keep in mind that the point of article marketing is not to directly sell your products, but rather to educate, inform, or entertain your reading audience. So long as you stick to the idea of educating, informing, or entertaining your readers, you will never have a shortage of people who want to read the articles you write.
However, if you keep your focus on trying to overtly sell your products or services in your “article” copy, then it will be difficult to find publishers who WANT to publish what you have written.
This is important to note, in that publishers NEED content, but publishers tend to be very picky about the content that they want to share with their readers. In order for a publisher to become or remain profitable, he or she must always serve the desires of his or her readers. And readers do not want to be sold to, preached to, or criticized. Instead, readers want to improve their lot in this life and solve the problems that they face.
If you keep the needs of the publisher foremost in your mind, and the wants of the reader, then article marketing is a great tool that can help you to earn thousands of dollars.
If you lose focus of what publishers and readers want, then all you can hope for is a few links from your articles, from a few websites that very few people visit or read.
Who Is Most Likely To Buy What You Are Selling?
Just because you sell cars does not mean that anyone who has a drivers’ license is in your target market. Let us put this statement in perspective.
- If you sell $2000 cars, most of the people in your target market are the poor – including those in poverty and students.
- If you sell $10,000 cars, your market is mostly families in middle-class America. Occasionally, you will find the college kid coming to your store to buy a car for college, and sometimes you will see a bunch of tire kickers who can only pray to get financed.
- If you sell brand new cars, your target market will again differ by what kinds of vehicles you sell. A Cadillac-buyer is different from the SUV-buyer and the economy-car buyer.
There is not a car dealership anywhere in the world that tries to target its advertising to everybody with a pulse and a drivers’ license. It just does not happen. Either the dealership talks about its available cars and the benefits of owning a specific car, or the dealership points out that they can finance anyone.
Once you understand who is most likely to buy what you are selling, then figuring out what to write about has been made much easier.
Help Your Readers Solve A Problem
Before you start writing your article, you should try to get into the heads of the people most likely to buy what are selling. Those people as a general rule have common problems for which they seek solutions.
One way to get a handle on what those problems might be is to review the email correspondence and phone calls you have taken from your clients. If you read that email all at the same time, certain questions will be asked over and again. In fact, you might even have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page on your website that you can reference at this point in the brainstorming session.
Your email and phone correspondence and the FAQ page on your website can lead you to a better understanding of the kinds of questions your customers are always needing to be answered for them.
Once you have achieved the understanding of what problems your customers seek to have solved for them, then you have to come to the magic formula for writing articles that find wide publication and a large readership.
In your article, present your readers with the questions that people have, and then present answers to the questions and show people how to solve their problems.
In doing so, publishers who have heard the same questions you have heard will be strongly inclined to publish your articles. And when publishers agree to publish your articles, you will be able to reach the publishers’ readers and a huge network of already targeted people who are very likely to buy what you are selling.
Understanding The Mechanics Of Article Marketing
When you write your articles, it is important to remember a few key points while writing the articles. Those key points are:
- The title serves to get your article opened, so it needs to be good.
- The body of the article answers questions and sells readers on your credibility in the marketplace.
- The article should be easy to read, and it should easily carry the reader to your About The Author information at the end of the article.
- Once at your Resource Box (About the Author information), the role of the Resource Box is not to sell your products or services, but to get the reader to visit your website, where the real selling will take place.
Using the formula that I have outlined here, you are sure to find success with your article marketing endeavors.
Sure, I know some people might be thinking that the only reason for article marketing is building links, so all this extra effort would be unnecessary. But let me tell you something that I learn from time-to-time…
Did you know that if you write an article that gets published in a large newsletter that you can in fact earn $10,000 plus in sales from that single article? This is a lesson that I have learned more times than I can count. And to be honest, it is a lesson I like to learn.
Consider this… You can spend a few dollars and very little time to create an article that will generate a few back links, hopefully helping you to rank in the search engines for your target keywords. Or, you can spend a few more dollars and a little more time and create an article that could generate back links for the search engines AND find a wider audience for your article in newsletters – newsletters that could potentially deliver thousands of visitors to your website and generate thousands of dollars in sales in the next couple weeks. Which strategy makes more sense to you?
If you are wondering if I practice what I preach, then read this article again and then see my resource box below. I provide article distribution services to my customers, and my customers frequently ask me what they should write about in their articles and how to best construct those articles to reach a wider audience, and more specifically, their target audience. If I have answered these questions to your satisfaction, then visit my website and let me help you to promote your articles too.
About The Author
Bill Platt has been writing about article marketing and SEO for a number of years. If you have written an article that you feel is good enough to get publication in a major newsletter or website, then you owe it to yourself to use Bill’s article distribution service at http://www.thephantomwriters.com/ If you are interested in learning about coop article marketing, then visit Bill’s newest website: http://www.sponsorarticles.com/
Use Articles To Think Outside The Resource Box
To be effective at article marketing you’ve got to think outside the box – the resource box, that is.
Too many article marketers spend all their time thinking about getting the visitor to their website, and it shows in their articles. The article tends to be one long advertisement for the author’s services. But before put that resource box on, really put some thought into your articles. That’s where you earn the reader’s trust.
Until you’ve earned that coveted trust there is no sense in asking for a reader to visit your website. You must first establish yourself as an authority in your field. It is likely that you won’t do that with one article. But you certainly won’t do it with one article that reads like a sales message. Take the time to give. Your knowledge. Away.
By focusing on giving instead of getting you prove to article readers that you are someone who cares about their needs. They will trust you more and be willing to listen to what you have to say. Eventually, you might get their business. But trust, and authority, begins outside the resource box. Just like in baseball, batters are made outside the box. In article marketing, authority is established outside the box. The resource box.
TwitWall: One More Article Marketing Tool You Should Try
I recently discovered a new article marketing tool. It’s called TwitWall and if you are a Twitter user, and if not you should be, then you automatically have a TwittWall that you can post to.
TwitWall is essentially a blog for Twitter. Since Twitter limits your tweets to 140 characters, an enterprising entrepreneur created TwitWall to allow Twitterers a way to write more than 140 characters if they need to. TwitWall allows you to post thoughts that cannot be condensed to 140 characters and sends an automatic tweet to promote the posts each time you make one. Here’s how you can use it for article marketing:
- Write an article
- Perform your normal article marketing routine and distribute your article
- Post your article to your TwitWall
It’s really that easy. Be sure to include your author bio or a link to your website at the end of your articles on TwitWall. You can see a sample article on my TwitWall here.
Which Pages Should Your Promote With Articles?
Article marketing isn’t hard, but for the new Internet entrepreneur it can be confusing. What exactly should you promote with your articles?
Well, let’s start with the basics. You know about keywords, right? Your keywords are your stepping stones. Essentially, they are the brick and mortar of your Internet business. You build your website around them. You write your blog around them. You run your PPC campaigns around them. And, yes, you should write your articles around them.
The best way to conduct your article marketing campaign is to match your article keywords with your landing page keywords. So, for instance, if you run a health store and you have a landing page that promotes a multivitamin – let’s call it “The Ultimate Multivitamin” – and your primary keyword for this landing page is, you guessed it, “multivitamin”, then your article should be optimized around a keyword that is complimentary for the primary keyword on your landing page. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it is optimized for the exact keyword, but it should be close enough that there is a complimentary element there.
Your author resource box is actually where you’re going to make your article marketing money. Your primary keyword, “multivitamin”, should be used as anchor text in your resource box. And that should link to your landing page.
This is the very basic idea behind article marketing. It works for those who have tried it. And it can work for you too. Find out more about article marketing from an article marketing consultant.
