When you’ve written a great article with a killer headline there are a few things left to do to get the most benefit.

Arguably the most important part of your article – or certainly the second most important part after the headline – is your signature, or resource box. You want to get people to your site. That’s kind of the whole point of your article, for most people.

To make sure your resource box gets read you have to make it interesting. Offering something extra that your reader wants is one way of doing that. It could be more information, a free report, an e-course. As long as it’s something that naturally follows on from your article it’s likely to make them curious.

So offer them something that makes them want to visit your site immediately.

Don’t make it hard work for them. I’d recommend you keep the resource box between 3 and 6 lines. And make them count. In general a lot of blurb about yourself is less interesting to your reader than it is to you. I don’t mean to be rude, but most people don’t care too much if you have a special interest in lace-making, they just care how they can solve their own problem! So give them what’s important to them.

Example?

Learn how you can get bumped from coach to First Class when you fly; visit…..

I don’t actually know how you can do that, but if I read an article that promised to tell me how to do it I’d certainly be interested. Which passenger wouldn’t? You could include a little bit of relevant bio if it’s done right, but don’t waste their time with unnecessary detail.

Another example?

Airline pilot of 25 years shows how you can get bumped from coach to First Class when you fly; read how at…..

That’s relevant bio information. Can I show an example that maybe isn’t so good?

John Noname is a respected author with over 20 years of experience. He writes on a variety of topics, including airline travel. Sign up to his newsletter at…

Sorry, but that doesn’t offer me enough to be bothered clicking through. What’s the benefit to me? I get to be on his newsletter? That’s his benefit, not mine.

My own early articles in the self-improvement field didn’t do very well on clickthrough, largely because my resource box was too much like the example shown! I know from personal experience that nobody really cares about my 20+ years’ experience in the self-help and self-improvement field.

As soon as I switched to telling people about the benefits they can receive, results changed. I don’t even mention my name now – nobody seems to care what I’m called. If my name were Tony Robbins then I might make a feature of it, but for most of us who aren’t that famous it probably doesn’t hurt to leave it out. Certainly, you don’t need to make it a big feature.

One other thing you can do, if you are submitting your article to several different sites, is to write a different resource box for each site. Knowing which type of resource box works for your particular niche is a good way of maximizing your returns, but you can only do that if you test different resource boxes. You might even want to have them point to a different landing page, so you get absolute figures.

Naturally, when you find out which type of resource box works best you use it more often. Your clickthrough rates could shoot through the roof if you test, test, test. Don’t forget that your keyword research will tell you the types of ‘anchor text’ you should be using in your resource box, so you should be able to come up with several different resource boxes if you do your research.

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Related posts:

1. Tips for writing a better article: Bum Marketing – Part 10
2. Tips for writing a better article: Bum Marketing – Part 9
3. Tips for Article Marketing Success – Part 2