Why Article Resource Boxes Gain Importance
Last week, Mark McCullagh from NewSuccessOnline made an interesting comment about the effective use of resource boxes when submitting articles. His comment referred to the policy change regarding the number of links that are allowed in the body of your articles at EzineArticles in 6 Great Free Resources.
Allowing less links in the body of your articles not only may improve the quality of the content, but also means that your resource box is gaining importance to entice readers to follow up on your messages. It’s kind of a one-shot gun.
I wrote about using resource boxes before in Your Article Resource Box - How To Maximize Its Use, but I challenged Mark to write a guest post about it.
He did!
Thanks Mark.
Here’s the post.
Enjoy!
How To Write a Resource Box to Optimize Your Article Marketing Strategy.
A well-written resource box is one of the key strategies in article marketing.
The resource box allows you to:
a. create a “call to action” to drive traffic to a website or sales page
b. create backlinks for SEO
The first important aspect of the resource box is that it should flow naturally from the article itself. In other words, it should be very relevant to the article.
Here is a simple 4 step process to create an article and resource box that flow smoothly and optimize your results.
1. Research your niche.
Your content must provide readers with:
- a cure for their pain
- an answer to a common question
- a solution to a problem
- some form of pleasure
The bottom line here is to put yourself in your readers’ shoes (or mind).
2. Keyword research.
Once you have established a topic, do some research to establish the keyword phrase that your reader would most likely type in the search box on Google when looking for information.
Note the following:
- that there is sufficient volume for the keyword phrase
- who ranks highly for that phrase and what they are saying/doing
Long-tail keywords are usually your best choice.
3. Write the article.
- use your keyword phrase in the headline and in the first sentence
- address 3 to 5 points from step #1
4. Write the resource box.
- use the keyword phrase you are targeting as anchor text
- one link to your sales page
- one link to your main website or blog
- include a call to action
The important point to keep in mind here is that the links should be very relevant to the content of the article.
Let’s look at a practical example:
Niche: golf
Keyword phrase: “hit longer drives”
An article has been written describing 5 ways you can hit longer drives.
This has created interest in the reader, they want to find out more, so the resource box will look like this:
Gary Fairway makes it easy to learn how to [hit longer drives] with his step-by-step videos available free on his [Golf Tips] website.
Here, “hit longer drives” is anchor text linking back to a page that offers ONLY what it has described: videos on driving a golf ball.
This will help the “Golf Tips” site rank higher in the SERPs for the search phrase “hit longer drives.
Takeaways
Avoid weak resource boxes.
A mistake I see many people make is writing like this:
“Gary Fairway writes about golf on his GolfTips site”
This accomplishes nothing.
Your resource box is an opportunity to sell yourself.
So get creative:
- write articles that create interest/curiosity
- invite the reader to find out more
- send them to your sales page/opt-in page etc.
- use anchor text for your targeted keyword phrase
Mark McCullagh is the author of the NewSuccesOnline blog where you can discover internet marketing strategies that work, especially for network marketers.
Tags: article marketing, bio box, resource box
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May 29th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Great info. I havent’ submitted any articles in over a year so this was good to know for my next bunch of submissions.
May 29th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Hey, thanks for the info on creating successful resource boxes! I definitely need to give my boxes more thought…
May 29th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Thanks Case.
I’m glad you found my article suitable for posting here because you always offer such good, practical information.
Mark
May 29th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Thanks for the great article Mark. I’ll have to check out ezine again. I haven’t posted anything in some time.
May 30th, 2008 at 7:00 am
Great post! Creating a valuable resource box is very important in article marketing. Its a very simple technique that is too often overlooked.
May 30th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I just started article marketing and thankfully knew enough to create the ideal resource boxes. I usually stick with two links in the resource box, one to the homepage of your site/blog and one deeplink to an internal page, both using keyword-rich anchor text relevant to the pages you’re linking to
May 30th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
I work for a company that does a lot of article writing, and the information in this post tells me I need to go back and check our articles and possibly make changes. Thanks so much great article very helpful!
May 31st, 2008 at 10:47 am
thanks for sharing the article case! some great tips there, I think I will try out article marketing soon! cheers
May 31st, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Thanks for the great article clarifying on how to make the most of your resource box. Although traffic from article sites is usually small, it’s also very high quality.
June 1st, 2008 at 5:43 am
Step number 2 in the article suggests that we use long tail keyword phrases and I certainly had already done that. I optimized my site to a four word Phrase. I then read the new rule Ezine Articles brought in. All anchor text in the body and resource box, was to be limited to Three words! This shoots my strategy down in flames.
Other than that the article has made me see how dry my resource box is. I will spice it up a bit using the recommendations and hope that the rest of the ezine publishers do not copy Ezine Articles.
June 2nd, 2008 at 4:28 pm
I find that many article marketers use their box like something in the line of :Marc is an author for such and such website « link - find out more about him.. Where I think, the resource box should be used more effeciently. Inviting the reader to come over with some sort of benefit for him or her. I found that to be working better. I also found a new article directory, maybe people are interested. it is on world-publish.com and looks promising. Thanks for your post.
June 2nd, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Im starting to write articles and put links in them and I noticed it makes a differrence in my rankings.
June 4th, 2008 at 8:34 am
That is a nice tip on how to wirte a good article and how to make the best out of resource boxes. I used to add one or two links in my articles, at most three links.
This tip make me to understand better how to make use of resource boxes effectively.
June 5th, 2008 at 5:51 am
As someone who spends 15 minutes writing an article and around half an hour trying to come up with something that sounds natural in the resource box, this post is invaluable.
I’ve printed it out and will be referring to it each time I write an article (at least, unti lit becomes second nature).
June 11th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Great post! Thank for useful information. Creating a valuable resource box is very important in article marketing.
June 20th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
This is a fantastic post about making the most use out of the resources box with article submissions. I’ve been using creative yet insightful anchor texts when submitting to places like Ezine and Article Marketer.
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:41 am
Thanks for the in-depth guide.
I find it is important to make sure that your keywords surround your own text links in the resources section, and if possible write a slightly modified resource box for each article you distribute.
Also, make sure that one of your links point at the most relevant page of your website for that article, and not simply at the homepage each time.
~Jeremy
August 10th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Articles submission is the easier way to gain one way links, if you are good at writing interesting articles on your niche. Try it.