Article Surfing Archive

Many authors who write articles fail to fully utilize their "author resource box" at the bottom of their articles. This tutorial will help you create an author box that will stand the test of time.

What qualifications do I have to show you how to format your author resource box?

My company owns and operates 5 article directories that have over 10,000 articles listed online. I've seen every type of article submission there is. We typically get 100's of submissions every single day!!!

Convinced? Let's move on!

"About The Author" is the reason why you write articles in the first place. It's your own personal dedicated section that gives you the tool to promote anything you want. Failure to promote yourself properly might result in loss of potential business.

About The Author - Dos & Don'ts....

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Ex1: "For more information visit mysite398u5.com"

This form of promoting yourself is a huge mistake! First of all, many directories automatically activate your link ONLY if it is formatted properly. What I mean by that is that you need to add "http://" in front of the link. Without using http:// your link may not actually be activated by the article directory site. As you can see above, I didn't use http://www.mysite398u5.com !

Second, this style of "about the author" is terrible. Granted, if your reader wants to keep reading about the topic you wrote, they MAY visit your website. Once they get there, then what? If you want to use a simple "one liner" like the above example, at least send your visitor to another article that relates to the one you provided. This way, your visitor won't feel lost looking around your website for more articles. On another note, if you send your visitor to this page... (Ex. http://www.mysite398u5.com/my-articles.html) you can then promote your products and services around your articles. You've now sent your visitor to read more articles while at the same time promoting more of your products and services!

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Ex2: "Martin Lemieux is the owner of Smartads, he helps people promote their business online."

Whoops, where is the authors website? I've come across many articles that didn't utilize the power of marketing through their author resource box. Instead, they decided to add a link near the top of the article which MANY article directories are against. If you promote your business in the "body" of the article, your running a chance of alltogether loosing the promotion for your business. Make sure to promote your business in the appropriate section of your article (at the very bottom).

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Ex3: "This article is a copyright of my company."

"Note to the editors: You may reprint this article as long as you activate one link, the article remains exactly the way I submitted it, and so on..."

Where is the promotion? Oh wait there it is, below all the copyright information, below everything else. Copyright information should be the very last thing people will ever read. Most website owners know enough to pay attention to the bottom of the article for your copyright information. Why would you use your valuable promotion spot in order to warn people that this article is yours? Promote your business first, then worry about telling webmasters about your reprint guidelines.

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Ex4: "."

This is THE MOST COMMON mistake authors do. Making sure that you properly format your HTML link is crucial. Not all article directories will fix this grave mistake. There's a proper format for creating a link, here it is...

Text Line

Real simple. Any variations from this example will result in a loss of your most important commodity, the link pointing to your site!!!

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Ex5: "www.Yoursite2032.net." & "emailme@something203.com."

Most article directory websites will activate your website links for you if they are properly displayed. Adding a "." beside the link, can sometimes de-activate the link alltogether. This happens because the article directory system thinks that your link is part of a sentence, not an actual link to be activated! The same applies for your email account, refrain from adding a "dot" in front of, or behind your email account, simply add a space if you need to.

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Now that we've seen some samples of things not to do, let's move on and actually creating a great resource box!

Here's an outline on the information that should be found in your resource box:

1) Your name
2) What you do, who your company is
3) Where people can find more information about you
4) Give away a free gift (if you want to)
5) A product or service
6) Copyright information

That's it! Let's see this in action....