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Hopefully you are already using online articles as a means to promote your web site. You are writing attention-getting, keyword-rich titles, descriptions that draw the reader in, and an article body full of interesting and useful information. If so, you are getting read. But are you getting the click through to your website? If not, you need to start working on those author's resource boxes.

The Perfect Resource Box

The whole point of the article is to get the reader to come to your website. That is accomplished in the only place there is normally a link to your site: The author's resource box. How, then, do you design one that get's the click? Try the following.

1. Give the reader a reason. You might have the best article in the world on horse grooming, and every reader sticks it out to the end. But if all that follows is your URL or the name of your site, not many people will be inspired to come visit. They need a reason, even if it is as simple as "Learn ten more horse grooming tips at..."

2. Don't boast. The reader of that article on bowling doesn't care how many trophies you've won. He just wants to know how to be a better bowler. Keep your biographical comments to a minimum - generally just a line to establish some credibility, as in, "Hank Oberlin won the 1998 World Bowling Championship. Learn what he did to boost his score at..."

3. Tease the reader. For my real estate articles, the authors resource boxes that get the most clicks, say, "To see a photo of the house they bought for $17,500, visit..." Aren't you curious what we could buy for just $17,500? Apparently a lot of readers are. Find something to tease them with if possible.

4. Offer a free gift. The word "free" still gets our attention even after generations of constant use in advertising. Offer a free report, a free e-book, a free newsletter, or even a free list of some sort. When I wrote an article about the importance of personally inspecting a home before buying, I offered a free home inspection checklist, and I linked straight to the page where it was to be found.

That last point is important. Apart from using the resource box to get the click, you should use it to get the click to the right place. Don't always link to your home page. You want the reader to land where they will be encouraged to stay a while, so sometimes you need to link to the most relevant pages.

This brings us to the other function of online articles. They optimize your pages for the search engines, and those links to interior pages help with that. It is also important to have the right "link text." This means the words that are actually made into a link. If you want your fishing site to be found when people search for "bass fishing," you should have that keyword as a link.

The bottom line? Online articles only generate direct traffic if they interest the reader and give him reason to click through to your web site. But they also help get you into the search results when people search for those keywords. The perfect author's resource box, then, has to take both of these factors into account.

Copyright Steve Gillman. Once I discovered the power of articles, I started making a lot of money online. Want do the same? Get your Free Online Articles Course at: http://www.999articles.com