List Building - How Important Is Your Byline?

When you're writing articles for the purpose of driving traffic to your list building squeeze page, you will always include a blurb at the end about yourself---the author. But how important is that couple of sentences to list building?

Extremely important.

The source box, where you give the information about yourself, should send people to your squeeze page so you can constantly be list building. And, you want to use the links you put into them to get your list building page ranked higher in the search engines.

Here's an example of one that I like to use:

Tellman Knudson is CEO of OvercomeEverything, Inc. and a master of list building. Create a monster list through his premiere list building course, My First List at http://www.myfirstlist.com /

Sometimes you aren't allowed to use code, so it's important to include the URL for your list building page. But sometimes, you can use HTML, so you'd want to use "anchor text," which is text that is hyperlinked, to someplace else. Here's what I mean. (Since the following will be picked up as code, I've made a couple of adjustments):

(Open your link with a <)a href="http://www.myfirstlist.com/">Start List Building in Only Nine Hours)

That way, when the text shows, it will be underlined and in blue. Links should always be blue and underlined because that's what people have been trained to click on. Even complete and total online newbies know to click on an underlined, blue link.

But you shouldn't use the same signature file, AKA source box, AKA resource box, each time you submit an article. Why? Because you want the one-way links pointing to your site from all over the Web to seem natural. Search engines don't like to think that we're trying to manipulate their results by throwing out tons and tons of anchor text links that all say the same thing, and it could cause your site to be penalized. So, vary your signatures.

You can use the same one for five articles or so, and then, switch. Or, at eZineArticles.com, they allow you to upload three different signatures and choose which one you want to use each time. That's great, but be sure to change all of those occasionally, too..

One great way to find out which sites have your articles and how many links are pointing back to your list building site, is through SEO Elite, a bit of software from Brad Callen at Bryxn Software. It hunts for links to your list building page and tells you what anchor text is used in the link. You can use this to balance out the use of your anchor text links.

Writing articles is one great way to drive traffic to your squeeze page and they allow you to start list building very quickly. Once you've written the article, don't dash off a signature to go with it. Give it some copy oomph by using your keywords wisely. Taking the time to prepare a good pitch in a sentence or two is an art, but one that you can grasp quickly. You can do it!

Tellman Knudson is CEO of OvercomeEverything, Inc. Learn how to build a powerful and responsive list quickly through his premiere list-building course, MyFirstList.com.