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Making Your Resource Box ... Work!

By Steve Shaw

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 05Sep2006 Word count: 808 Viewed: 8309 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

I see many free reprint articles where the author is missing out on countless high quality visitors simply because their resource box at the end of the article is not constructed effectively. This article will give you three main check points to ensure your resource box is always working to its maximum efficiency.

1. Ask Them To Click.

Seems very simple doesn't it? But it really is that simple. Unless you ask the reader to click on the link you have presented to them, they often just won't.

Of course you don't need to use language as direct as 'Click here' as this can often put the reader on the defensive whereas you are looking for a cooperative mindset where they click through because they want to. You can do it in a very subtle way, while still guiding the reader into clicking the link.

In fact, you have to tell them exactly why they should click the link.

For example, I often use an arrow before the link ("=>"), and use phrases such as "For further information, go to ...", or "Find out why ... at ...".

To illustrate the point, the following resource box offers no incentive whatsoever for the reader to click the link:

"Steve Shaw develops systems and software to help you succeed in your online business. [link here]"

By editing it in a simple way you can significantly increase the number of click-throughs:

"Steve Shaw develops systems and software to help you succeed in your online business. Find out more about how to publish articles for profit online with his popular free ecourse, available at: =>
[link here]"

You can see immediately that you would be far more likely to click the link in the second version of the resource box. Why?

- You can find out more about a topic you are interested in. - It's 'popular', which plays on the herd instinct. - It's free - you are not expected to commit to or pay anything.

So, three reasons why you would be more likely to click through on the link.

2. Relate it to the article.

I see many resource boxes that bear little relation to the content of the article, and unfortunately for the author, they are not going to maximize their results from the time they spent writing the article.

The content of the article is what attracts readers to it, i.e. you have a targeted readership based on it's content. The resource box should then play to this interest in order to encourage them to click through on the link. Otherwise, you lose the interest of the readership - they may have enjoyed your article, but you get nothing back in return.

This means in turn that the content of your article should relate to the content of the web site that you want to link to in the resource box.

As a simple example, if you write an article on fishing, the readers of the article will quite obviously be highly targeted for fishing. If your resource box then asks you to click through to a site about stamp collecting, you're playing on a chance that those interested in fishing will also be interested in stamp collecting, and you can bet it will be a very small minority.

You needed to write about stamp collecting in the first place so that the resource box was relevant.

You also need to relate the resource box directly to the content of the article, so that clicking through is a natural follow on to the content of the article. So use phrases such as "For more information", "To find out more", and so on.

3. Use A Single Link.

Too many authors use more than one link in the resource box, and this simply dilutes the effectiveness of having a single link. You don't have the space in a resource box to provide encouragement to the reader to click through on more than one link, and by providing more than one you can simply confuse the reader, i.e. there is no natural follow-on link to click after reading the article, so they will often not click at all and go elsewhere.

Many authors simply list two or three links in the resource box, which I consider a fairly pointless exercise.

Instead, stick to one, and focus all your efforts towards encouraging the reader to click this link. For maximum effectiveness, avoid hyped up or promotional language; just offer them further information that will be of interest to them.

Of course you can see below my own example of a resource box that utilizes all three points above. And by asking visitors to sign up to an email list, I don't just get a single click-through and then lose the visitor for ever, but build up the repeat visitors that are the life blood of any business.

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