7 Tips - Creating Your Perfect Article Summary

Creating Your Perfect Article Summary - 7 Tips
By Christopher Knight

What should be in your article summary?

It's otherwise known as an abstract or article teaser. The purpose of your article summary is to entice a potential reader to read the rest of your article. It's a sales pitch for the benefits your article delivers and in many cases, it makes the difference as to whether your article gets read or bypassed.

Remove your "author/writer" hat and put on your "copywriter" thinking cap:

Here's what should be in your article summary:

• Should be 2-7 sentences in length
  
• Emotional benefits listed that speak directly to your target reader's interests.
  
• Reasons why your target ideal reader should continue reading your article.
  
• Mentions of at least 4-7 keywords relating to your article topic using keyword research tools.

Here's what should not be in your article summary:

• Do not repeat the title of your article or your author name in your summary. This is redundant.
  
• Leave out the sales pitch for yourself or your business.
  
• Leave out your URL and email address.
  
• Leave out any blatant self-promotion. You're here to do blatant article-promotion, not self- promotion.
  
• Never more than 2 paragraphs or 14 sentences.
  

7 Quick Tips To Help You Write Your Perfect Article Summary:

Tip #1) Don't start it with words like "This article contains this or that." Get right to the point and playfully tease your audience with the benefits that they will get if they take the next step to read the rest of your article.

Tip #2) If you don't know what to put in your summary -- use the first paragraph of your article. If you're a good writer, you already have your first paragraph loaded with hooks to grab the reader's interests to pull them into the rest of the article.

Tip #3) Your article conclusion paragraph can help provide clues for what should be in your article summary. Just don't give away the farm in the summary.

Tip #4) Your article summary is about the WHY, not the HOW. Sell them on why what you're presenting in the article is important to them and that they will learn the "how" if they continue reading.

Tip #5) Keep tips and strategies OUT of your article summary. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free. You're in sales mode, not teach mode.

Tip #6) Use smart keyword density research to ensure your article summary hits the key terms and keywords relating to your article. The worst thing you could do is include an article summary that uses 1-3 syllable words that barely mention your topic category. Be lavish with the rich use of buzz words and keywords that are related to your primary article topic. One word of caution: Write for the reader and not for the search engines. When you cross that line, you reduce your effectiveness over the long-term.

Tip #7) Originality matters. Your article summary should come from your brain. Never copy someone else's article summary or style if it's unique to them.

Creating Your Perfect Article Summary Conclusion:

Be brief and bold in your summary – promising the benefits your reader will get if they read on. This is your chance to pitch why your target reader will benefit personally if they continue reading your article. Unlike your resource box where you pitch yourself and your business or website address, the article summary is your article's only sales pitch. Leverage it well and don't waste the opportunity by overlooking this important article writing & marketing strategy.

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best quality original articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ expert author community. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links intact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

(c) Copyright - Christopher M. Knight. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Knight
http://EzineArticles.com/?Creating-Your-Perfect-Article-Summary---7-Tips&id=27387

Article Marketing For Bloggers - 4 Tips To Build Traffic For Your Blog

Article Marketing For Bloggers - 4 Tips To Build Traffic For Your Blog
By Christopher Knight

Bloggers blog. That’s what they do. A blog is short for ‘weblog’ and it’s really an online journal that can be updated easily and frequently without any knowledge of HTML code.

Traditionally, article marketing has been used by authors who are promoting their books or information products. Lately, I’ve noticed a growing trend of bloggers using article marketing to grow the traffic to their blog and you should too.

Three reasons why it makes sense for bloggers to engage in article marketing:

1) You’ve already got a lot of content produced in each of your blog posts. 200 words should be your floor for each article that you produce. In some cases, you already have enough words per post to create 10-50 articles instantly. If you don’t, then stitch posts together of a similar theme until you have 200+ word articles to put into article marketing distribution.

2) A blogger has the same traffic building problems that any typical website has, and therefore article marketing can help your blog in the same ways it can help a non-blog website. Benefits include qualified traffic coming to your site year round, quality backlinks being built without any messy recip-linking campaigns, and you’re expanding your reach to other experts that might not otherwise have found your blog.

3) Bloggers by nature are more Internet savvy than your typical author. With this said, most bloggers already understand how to create revenue with pay per click (PPC) advertising programs. As such, you already know how to produce keyword intelligent titles for their articles. This guarantees maximum traffic impact for each of your articles.

If you are already a blogger and are new to article marketing, here’s how you get started:

1) Produce a cache of 10-25+ articles from your existing blog content.

2) Submit them to the major article directories and any that are niche-relevant to your field of expertise. You may also wish to submit them to ezine publishers directly from your niche.

3) Rinse and repeat until you have 250-1,000+ articles in distribution this year. Hire a college student or editor if you don’t have time to get this strategy into practice as it’ll be well worth it.

4) Watch your traffic counter slowly rise, day by day as your articles work hard for you delivering qualified traffic to your website year round.

Article Marketing as a strategy will not break your traffic counter on your first month of investing in this strategy…but, I guarantee if you engage in this strategy, your blog will grow in traffic and popularity beyond the traffic you were already creating by simply blogging. You knows, you might even increase your sales, land a new job, or improve your rank in the search engines as a side-benefit from your article marketing strategy.

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best quality original articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ expert author community. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links intact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

(c) Copyright - Christopher M. Knight. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Knight
http://EzineArticles.com/?Article-Marketing-For-Bloggers---4-Tips-To-Build-Traffic-For-Your-Blog&id=18001

Article Marketing & Copywriting Secret: How To Make Your Article Title Sell

Article Marketing & Copywriting Secret: How To Make Your Article TITLE Sell
By Christopher Knight

Most authors are wasting their time producing dozens to hundreds of high quality articles that never reach a fraction of their traffic potential. It's a darn shame.

When I review the behind-the-scenes traffic statistics on over 20,000 articles that have produced over 1 million monthly page views in my article marketing lab...ONE thing is clear: All articles are not created equal even when everything about them is identical except for the TITLE.

The reason is probably not what you think.

If you've been schooled on traditional copywriting, you know that in the offline world, the headline determines as much as 95% of the success of the book or article. This statistic takes into consideration what makes the book title successful: Whether a human buys it or not.

Article Marketing on the Internet is a whole different story because of the way your articles reach humans who have an interest in them.

MYTH: Most people will read your articles because they came to a website and started browsing just like they do if they were to have gone to a local book store to find a book of personal interest.

FACT: Wrong! Most people will search the Internet using one of the major search engines and they will be putting in between 1 to 5 keywords that are related to the topic of the article or information they are looking to locate. The search engines will then deliver results that best match the human's interest.

YOUR GOAL: To have your articles show up in the search engine results for the keywords and topics that are most related to the content of your article.

HOW?

You must embrace this TITLE creation & traffic-building truth:

The first 3-5 words of your TITLE determine the success of your article in terms of how much traffic your article will generate back to your website. Success can only be had when you create keyword rich titles for your articles that match the most commonly searched keywords for your topic.

How to determine which keywords are rich and the right ones to use for your article?

You'll need a keyword research tool. Some are free and some are fee-based. Overture.com has a popular keyword research tool that shows you the most common search results from the Yahoo search engines directory. If you want to see what's on "Google's Mind" you can try one of their current beta tools called "Google Suggest":
http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&complete=1

Whether you use a web-based keyword research tool or invest in one of the more advanced application level software keyword research tools, it's critical that you learn know how to do keyword research.

A "Good" vs. "Bad" TITLE Example:

Here is an example of the difference between a non-keyword rich TITLE vs. a very keyword rich TITLE that is proven to perform better in terms of traffic creation:

Bad TITLE Example:

"Top 9 Ways You Can Acquire Fractional Jet Ownership"

Excellent Keyword Rich Title Example:

Fractional Jet Ownership - 9 Strategies to Help You Acquire Your Private Jet

Why is it more effective?

Because it does not waste the first 3 words of the title with meaningless garbage words like "top" or the number "9" or "ways"...and gets right to the important words that might be found when someone is using a search engine to research a topic related to your article.

You'll also notice in my example that I included the word "Private" Jet. Why? Because my keyword research said that people who search for fractional jet also search for the word "private jet" and therefore I wanted to boost the chances that my title would be found by a larger number of potential visitors to the article.

Two recommendations on what NOT to do:

1) Don't include garbage characters in your TITLE such as quotes, tildes, asterisks or anything else that a search engines has to work hard to discard in order to understand the TITLE of your article.

2) Do not engage in any search engine spam technique by having keyword rich TITLES that have nothing to do with the topic of your article. You'll only be hurting yourself as the search engines already aggressively filter out bad behavior like this.

YOUR INTELLIGENT KEYWORD RICH TITLE COPYWRITING CONCLUSION:

If you want to maximize your results from any article marketing strategy, you must master keyword research so that you can create keyword rich and intelligent article TITLES. Your pay off will be massive amounts of traffic to your articles and website thanks to the search engines who love smart keyword rich TITLES!

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best quality original articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ expert author community. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links intact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

(c) Copyright - Christopher M. Knight. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Knight
http://EzineArticles.com/?Article-Marketing-and-Copywriting-Secret:-How-To-Make-Your-Article-TITLE-Sell&id=20000

HTML Skills Essential For Article Writers

Essential HTML Skills For Article Authors - 7 Tips
By Christopher Knight

Many successful authors close their mind to learning HTML because they figure they don't need to know it. I've been in technology, marketing and writing on the Internet for a decade+ now and I too shut my mind to learning HTML... until earlier this year. My thinking was that HTML coders only make $8-$10/hr and why would I want to learn a skill that I can outsource to someone who specializes in HTML coding?

Guess what? You don't have to learn more than 15 minutes of HTML knowledge to significantly improve the quality of your articles. In today's issue, I'm going to show you the top 7 easy-to-learn essential HTML skills that can help any article author make better looking articles before the day is over.

The 7 HTML "MUST KNOW" article author skills include how to format a URL or an email address, how to enhance your text with BOLD, ITALICS, or the UNDERLINE font attribute and how to set up a bullet or numbered list in HTML.

1. How To Make A URL/Website Address "Linkable":
   
   
   
   
   

   This:

   <a href="http://EzineArticles.com/">http://EzineArticles.com/</a>will create this: http://EzineArticles.com/
   
   
   
   
   

   Just substitute your website address from the above code and now you know how to "link" up a website address. Some like to create anchor text links. Here is the code to create links out of keywords:
   
   

   
   
   
   <a href="http://EzineArticles.com/">Ezine Articles</a>will create this: Ezine Articles
   
   
   
   
   

   One Note: Use anchor text links *sparingly* when submitting articles to directories as some have limitations on the number of times the same URL can be linked up. For example, with EzineArticles.com, you are only allowed to have one URL in a given article that is the same and your article could be rejected if you have two links to the same URL regardless as to whether you linked it up like the first and/or second example above.
   
   




2. How To Make Your Email Address "Linkable":
   
   
   
   
   

   This:

   <a href="mailto:youraddress@your-domain-name.tld">youraddress@your-domain-name.tld</a>will create this: youraddress@your-domain-name.tld
   
   
   
   
   

   One Note: It is never a good idea to put your email address in your article because your email address will get harvested by spammers who use web email extractor bots to scour the Internet. Better to put a link to your contact information if you must.
   
   




3. How To Make Something BOLD:
   
   
   This: <b>Make my words bold</b>will create this: Make my words bold
   
   
   



4. How To Make Something ITALICS:
   
   
   This: <i>Make my words italics</i>will create this: Make my words italics
   
   
   



5. How To Make Something UNDERLINED:
   
   
   This: <u>Make my words underlined</u>will create this: Make my words underlined
   
   
   



6. How To Make A Bullet Point List:
   
   
   
   
   

   This:

   <ul><li>First bullet</li><li>Second bullet</li><li>Third bullet</li></ul>will create this:
   
   
   
   
   • First bullet
   • Second bullet
   • Third bullet
   
   

   
   
   

7. How To Make A Numbered List:
   
   
   
   
   

   This:

   <ol>
   <li>First point</li>
   <li>Second point</li>
   <li>Third point</li>
   </ol>will create this:
   
   
   
   1. First point
   2. Second point
   3. Third point

By opening up your mind to allow yourself to learn the above 7 essential HTML tips for article authors, you can improve the quality of your articles immediately.

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best quality original articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ expert author community. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links intact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

(c) Copyright - Christopher M. Knight. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Knight
http://EzineArticles.com/?Essential-HTML-Skills-For-Article-Authors---7-Tips&id=7185

Microsoft Word Smart Quotes And Article Marketers Don't Mix

Microsoft Word Smart Quotes and Article Marketers Don't Mix
By Christopher Knight

By default, Microsoft Word automatically changes straight quotation marks ( ' or " ) to curly (smart or typographer's) quotes as you type. This is fine if you are only authoring your works for applications not relating to article marketing. When smart quotes are converted to HTML, the quotes are converted to non-standard characters which end up littering your document with question mark symbols and/or other garbage code.

When in doubt, don't allow your Ezine Articles to contain smart quotes:

Most articles that are put into article marketing distribution eventually end up being sent to an email newsletter audience. Email newsletter servers have near zero-tolerance for MS Word smart quotes; they will not recognize them as valid ASCII characters (because they are not valid). They are a figment of the Microsoft ASCII imagination. In most cases they will show up as garbage code; thus making you, and your article, look like a real novice lacking proper formatting skills.

At risk are: quotes, apostrophes, double dashes, and 3 periods in a row.

This is what smart quotes looks like when properly displayed:

“smart quotes” aren’t very smart…

This is what STANDARD quotes looks like when properly displayed:

"smart quotes" aren't very smart...

This is what smart quotes looks like when NOT properly displayed:

“smart quotes” aren’t very smart…

Do you see the downside potential of leaving smart quotes in your articles that you put into distribution? Standard quotes use the lowest common denominator in the ASCII character standards world and this ensures that your articles will look great in any HTML or TEXT format.

How To Disable Microsoft Word’s Smart Quotes:

1. On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect Options, then click the AutoFormat As You Type tab.

2. Under Replace as you type, select or clear the "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes" check box

Alternatively, you can copy your entire MS Word document over to a non Microsoft text editor (EditPlus, UltraEdit, TextPad, etc) and do a simple search and replace. Search and replace the smart quotes into standard quotes, apostrophe’s, dashes and dots if applicable.

Caution For Authors Who Do HTML Code For Their Articles in MS Word:

Unless you have smart quotes disabled, it should be noted that smart quotes are not valid HTML code. Therefore, don’t even consider using MS Word to do HTML code unless you have the smart quotes feature disabled.

Article Marketing Smart Quotes Conclusion

Smart quotes are best left for e-books, physical books in print, PDF documents and any non-HTML related document. If you want to increase the portability of your ezine articles, do the smart thing and turn off Microsoft Word’s smart quotes or do a search/replace before you upload your next article to the web.

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best quality original articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ expert author community. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links intact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

(c) Copyright - Christopher M. Knight. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Knight
http://EzineArticles.com/?Microsoft-Word-Smart-Quotes-and-Article-Marketers-Dont-Mix&id=15624

Article Writing Mistakes

Article Writing Mistakes - 7 To Avoid
By Christopher Knight

Making your articles available for reprints by other ezine publishers and webmasters is the cornerstone strategy in building an avalanche of pre-qualified visitors to your website.

If you want your articles to be picked up and massively distributed by others, here are 7 common mistakes to avoid:

Article Mistake #1 Too many grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors.

In addition to having your article proofed by others, you may also want to be sure that you have clearly defined paragraphs. Nothing is worse than a big blob of text with 20 run-on sentences.

Readers no longer read articles in depth and often only 'scan' your article. They want small bites of information that can be easily digested… also known as "info-snacking."

Keep your "voice" in the same person throughout the entire article. If you are using the first person voice (I, me) or the second person (you, we, us) or the third person (they, them, he, she)…be consistent by staying in one voice for the entire article.

Article Mistake #2 Too much hype, bragging and self-promotion.

If you are as good as you know you are, there is no reason to fill the body of the article with hype, gratuitous links to your site or blatant self-promotion. Readers are smart and will see right through your "hype-veil."

Better to only sell or pitch your company in the RESOURCE BOX below the body of the article. Research I've done indicates that the resource box often gets a 3% CTR (Click Through Rate). Be sure you take advantage of that by not selling hard in the body of the article.

Article Mistake #3 Content based on what you need to learn, not what your reader needs.

Put yourself in your reader's shoes and ask yourself, "What does this article offer me?" Research what your reader wants to read by doing survey's with your own audience or do keyword search engine research to find what people are looking for.

Article Mistake #4 Making your article broad or superficial in content.

It's better to go in-depth on a narrow topic. Define it. Explain it. Relate to it. Use bullet points or numbered lists. Offer a secret or expertise that you have around the topic. Be original in covering your topic as narrowly as possible in a way that has not been done by others. Brevity is golden.

Article Mistake #5 Headline and article summary does not grab readers' attention.

The headline is often ~95% of the initial reason why someone might read your article or pass it over for another article. Don't bore your audience out of the gate with a dull headline or worse, a boring introduction to the article.

If you have to use two sentences to make your headline, you're thinking too hard. Keep it simple and make it brief. Use keyword research tools to optimize your article title.

Article Mistake #6 Plagiarizing or 'buying articles'...

It's ok to research the Internet for article ideas, but it's not ok to copy word-for-word of any article. Paraphrasing can also be classified as plagiarism. Be original. Let the words flow from your mind into your article. You will sleep better at night and your articles will have a higher value in the marketplace.

Buying articles is not a great idea…especially if you do not get an exclusive license to use them. What good is the same article if thousands of people call it their own? If you do outsource your article writing to ghost writers, make sure you have an exclusive right or license to the works.

Article Mistake #7 Don't burn out the RESOURCE BOX by overloading it.

The RESOURCE BOX is your pay-off for giving your article up for free reprints, but don't abuse the welcome mat by including a dozen website addresses. Stick with one website URL or two at the most and you'll find your article may find a higher distribution rate.

If you want to be really tacky, include an affiliate link in the RESOURCE BOX. A better strategy is to have a domain name registered for every affiliate program that you pitch and include the domain name that rewrites or refreshes to your affiliate link. This is much less tacky and looks more professional.

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best quality original articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ expert author community. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links intact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

(c) Copyright - Christopher M. Knight. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Knight
http://EzineArticles.com/?Article-Writing-Mistakes---7-To-Avoid&id=7709

Publisher Ethics For Reprint-able Articles

Publisher Ethics For Reprint-able Articles
By Christopher Knight

Let’s Discuss Publisher Ethics:

If you are an ezine publisher or webmaster that likes to use supplemental content from the many free articles available for free reprints on the Internet, this article may save you from a very expensive copyright infringement lawsuit. Stealing articles by violating the posted reprint rights is copyright infringement theft. Read on…

Article Reprints Universal Law #1

Don’t assume that you can reprint any article at any time without checking the publicly posted terms of service for reprint rights. If a website does not post its reprint rights policy, you must assume that you do not have permission to reprint the content.

Article Reprints Universal Law #2

While an ethics discussion might take “morality” into consideration, you must take legality into consideration first. Violating an articles copyright is an illegal act. It’s intellectual property theft.

Article Reprints Universal Law #3

Planet Earth is a very small planet. Do not assume that you can evade infringement just because you’re not based in the country of the authors that you reprinted without permission. You can not hide. Every web server has an IP address and every IP address has a commercial Internet Service Provider managing it. Every ISP has an AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) that almost assuredly denies illegal activity to be performed by any of their clients.

Article Reprints Universal Law #4

Consider your article source very carefully. Just because an article directory gives you unlimited reprint rights does not mean they have the legal right to give you rights to reprint the content without further author permission. When in doubt, poll a dozen of the authors of the site and make sure that they agreed to allow their articles to be reprinted.

Best way to determine the legitimacy of the site that is offering the reprint rights is to contact the owner of the site and ask him or her where they got the right to publish the content that they are offering you to reprint for free. Proceed very slowly and with caution when in doubt.

Article Reprints Universal Law #5

Unless you get specific permission, assume that you do not have any right to alter the content in any way without further permission from the author of the article you wish to reprint. You should also not assume that you can change the reprint rights to suit your particular web or ezine project. For example, if an author only gave limited reprint rights, you should not assume that you get lifetime reprint rights.

Article Reprints Universal Law #6

If you are following a reprint rights policy that is publicly posted on a website, it would be good to download a local copy of the reprint policy to prove that you had the right to reprint the content without further permission. It is also a good idea to visit the reprint rights policy on a monthly basis to make sure it has not changed.

Article Reprints Universal Law #7

Get to know copyright law 101… specifically, section 504 of the Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code (http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#504).

Bottom line is that you could be liable for up to $150,000 USD in copyright damages for EACH copyright infringement.

One more point: Copying an entire article does not constitute fair use. You can safely consider copying a few sentences or perhaps a paragraph may be considered fair use, but in no case does the "fair use doctrine" cover reprinting an entire article without attribution or following the posted reprint rights policy.

Article Reprints Conclusion:

Do the right thing.

You know what it is.

Follow the reprint policy or ask the author for permission for each and every article that you wish to reprint.

It’s the right thing to do and instinctively, most people know it.

Failure to comply with the reprint rights policy that is posted by an author can invite copyright infringement lawsuits that may have a strong financial bite on your future.

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best quality original articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ expert author community. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links intact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

(c) Copyright - Christopher M. Knight. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Knight
http://EzineArticles.com/?Publisher-Ethics-For-Reprint-able-Articles&id=10128

Article Marketing 101 by Christopher Knight of EzineArticles

Article Marketing 101: The Perfect Author Resource Box
By Christopher Knight

If you want to really make your article "SELL" then you've got to craft the perfect RESOURCE BOX. This is the "author bio" that is below your article body and it's also known as your "SIG" (short for SIGnature).

Here are the essential items that should be in your RESOURCE BOX:

• Your Name: You'd be amazed at how many folks forget to include their name in the RESOURCE BOX. Your name and optional title should be the first thing in your resource box.
  
• Your Website Address: in valid URL form. Example: http://Your-Company-Name.com/
  
• Your Elevator Pitch: This is 1 to 3 sentences that encapsulates the essence of what makes you and your offering unique. Also known as your USP (Unique Selling Proposition).
  
• Your Call To Action: You've got them warmed up and now it's time to lead them to BUY from you or visit your website. This is where you "Ask For The Sale." Best to only give (1) specific call to action
  

Here are some optional items you could include in your RESOURCE BOX:

• Your Ezine Subscription Address: While getting your interested visitor to surf your website is nice, capturing their email address can help you begin the confidence/trust process. If you're going to do this strategy, include a URL for your ezine subscription address and do not use an email address for the "join" address.
  
  
• Your Contact Information: Such as your business phone number or how to reach you for interviews or your press/media kit. Keep in mind that article marketing is a timeless strategy and you may not have an easy ability to retract what you put in your article once it hits major distribution.
  
  
• A Free Report: This could also be part of your call to action or your free bonus report that further enhances your credibility as the expert on the topic of your article.
  
  
• Your email autoresponder: I'm not a big fan of this strategy due to the fact that spammers will text-extract your autoresponder address and add it to their spam list. Perhaps this strategy was best for the 1990's and has now run its course.
  
  
• An anchor URL that is related to one keyword or keyword phrase that you want to build SEO strength for. Example: if I wanted to build search engine relevance/strength for the term "Article Marketing," I'd link up that term in my resource box to my website. This is an intermediate to advanced level strategy and should not be abused by over-doing it. Keep it simple.

What NOT to include in your RESOURCE BOX:

• A listing of every website you own. There is no faster way to dilute your credibility than by posting a half dozen irrelevant URLs that have nothing to do with each other. Best to only post ONE URL that is related to the topic of your article.
  
• A listing of every accomplishment you've achieved to date. No one cares. Keep your resource box brief and to the point. Yes, your resource box should be benefit oriented so that the reader finds value in reading it rather than your ego being justified.
  
• Advertisements or pitches for products that are not relevant to the topic of your article.
  
• Keep the size of your resource box so that it's no larger than 20% of your total article size. Too often I see resource boxes that are 50% of the size of the total article and this is abusive.

Your Perfect Resource Box Conclusion:

The BODY of your article is where you "GIVE" and the RESOURCE BOX is where you get to "TAKE" for your article marketing gift of information. The resource box is the "currency of payment" you receive for giving away your article. Be sure to include your name, website address, your unique selling proposition as briefly as possible and a simple call to action.

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best quality original articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ expert author community. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links intact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

(c) Copyright - Christopher M. Knight. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Knight
http://EzineArticles.com/?Article-Marketing-101:-The-Perfect-Author-Resource-Box&id=17172

Where Should I Start in Article Marketing Christopher Knight?

I have decided to start my journey into article marketing with someone whose opinion I value and that person is Christopher Knight.

Who is Christopher Knight? This is the information from His article page over at EzineArticles which he founded:

"Christopher M. Knight is a seasoned entrepreneur who excels at creating & leading high-performance Internet startup companies with an obsession on delivering a fast and positive end-user driven experience. He and his team achieves this thanks to daily innovation, creative solutions based on user feedback, and a high commitment to exceed the expectations of their stakeholders. He attracts "A"-level achievers to quickly execute the companies objectives, implement quality control assurances -- while he steps out of the day-to-day operations to focus on the long-term client opportunities, relationship-building and new product development".

He has written 21 articles over at EzineArticles and I am in the process of gleaning from each one. I have decided to be one of the top article marketers on the internet and this is where I am starting. Some of the article topics are:

"Authors With Multiple Brands - Secrets to Managing Multiple Topics When Writing Articles"

"Write and Distribute Your Articles Instead of Building Feeder or Mini-Sites"

"Article Marketing 101: The Perfect Author's Resource Box"

There are 18 other gems like this over at his page. Here is the link to Christopher Knight's articles. I intend to feature them all here so stay tuned!