Tip 1: Write your articles like sales letters. Now, you don’t want it to sound like a late-night infomercial, but you do need to understand that your article is more than just information. Your goal is to get the reader to click on your link, either in the article body or in your bio box.
Tip 2: Write a headline that arouses curiosity and makes people want to read your article. In general, readers find your articles via a search engine search. In other words, when they decide if they want to read your article, they can’t see the whole thing. They just see a headline and also a description. You want your headline to be a call to action. Something that’s going to interest people.
Tip 3: Make your articles at least 400 words long. If you want to publish your article on a lot of article directories (and you should), it needs to be at least 400 words long. A lot of directories don’t publish articles that are shorter.
This makes total sense. A directory makes money through traffic. They want readers to feel like they learned something, or at least made their lives better, by reading their articles. An article that’s less than 400 words just seems a little unsubstantial.
Tip 4: Make your bio box look like it’s part of the article. At the end of an ezine style article, there’s an author’s bio box. Although you can try to put links back to your website in the body of the article, not all directories allow that. The place to put your link is in the bio box.
Don’t think of the bio box like it’s an afterthought for your reader. Your bio box needs to fulfill the same function that a call to action does on a sales letter. This is so important, let’s spend some more time on it.
This is what you don’t want (but what you usually see).
“Joe Johnson is a career animal lover who has spent countless hours learning the ins and outs of the lives of ferrets.”
Okay, that was meant to be funny. But really. Looked at from your reader’s point of view. They are interested in themselves, not you. Unless you’re the inventor of the South Beach diet or someone with as much authority in your given niche, who you are and what you’ve done is secondary.
What’s primary is this. If you did a good job with your article, your reader should be thinking… ”Hmm...I liked that…I wonder what else this gal (or guy) has to say about all of this.”
That’s the kind of response that get the click. That’s what we call “pre-selling”! And, that’s what article marketing is all about—pre-selling your reader so that they click through to your money page.
A better idea for the bio box would be to make it essentially just the last sentence in the article, with a text link embedded in it. Something like this would be better.
Check out Raising Ferrets for Fun and Profit to learn more about these wonderful critters.
(Where the underlined part is a text link to your site.) If your article directory doesn’t allow text links (and there are still some that don’t), then just include the whole address so that your reader can cut and paste it into their browser window.
