Ready, Set, ... Hold on a Minute!

You have your article written and you broke it into the parts listed in my post "Writing Articles - The Elements of an Article." Congratulations!

Before I can let you submit an article, though, you must consider two very important parts of your article. Do you know what they are? Right. The beginning and the end, but not the introduction and the conclusion, I mean the very beginning and the very end: the title and the resource box.

Write a title that sells

While many people focus on 3 steps or 7 steps or even 100 steps or tips, I want you to


put your keyword(s) at the beginning of the title. Unlike browsing at a bookstore under a category for titles that catch your eye, people looking for an online article will type keywords into a search engine and see what comes up. By putting your keywords at the beginning of the title, you increase the chances of your article being found by the search engines.

For example, instead of writing "Top 10 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website," write "Increase Traffic to Your Website - Viral Marketing is the Key." If you can include two related keyword search terms in your title, two things will happen: 1) Your article can be found using either the term "increase traffic to your website" or "viral marketing," two very hot topics these days; and 2) it is more likely that a reader will read the article once it's found because they see two terms they are interested in - increasing traffic and viral marketing.

For a good article on writing titles, see Article Marketing and Copywriting Secret: How To Make Your Article TITLE Sell, by Christopher Knight.

Carefully consider and construct your article resource box

The author resource box is perhaps the most important part of the article as far as your marketing efforts go. Yes, it is important to write an attention-grabbing headline and make sure your content is good, but there are two goals of your resource box that you must know about: 1) it provides a backlink to your website, and 2) it gives readers an opportunity to visit your site, which in turn increases your traffic and eventually your page ranking.

Most of the directories I submit to allow href tags in the resource box, but be sure to check the guidelines of the directory you are submitting to before including the href tags.

The resource box should tell about who you are and compel the reader to click through to your website. Most of the time it pays to start out with your name, as in

Mary Smith is a self-made millionaire who helps people get out of debt and live debt-free. Get out of debt and become a millionaire at GetOutofDebtandStayThere.

Read the section How To Make A URL/Website Address "Linkable" in the article concerning HTML skills. My only change would be to insert the keywords as your target instead of re-entering your web address. For example, instead of

Mary Smith is a self-made millionaire who helps people get out of debt and live debt-free. Get out of debt and become a millionaire at

<a href="http://GetOutofDebtandStayThere/">GetOutofDebtandStayThere</a>.

which results in

Mary Smith is a self-made millionaire who helps people get out of debt and live debt-free. Get out of debt and become a millionaire at GetOutofDebtandStayThere.

write:

Mary Smith is a self-made millionaire who helps people get out of debt and live debt-free. <a href="http://GetOutofDebtandStayThere/">Get out of debt and become a millionaire</a> at GetOutofDebtandStayThere.com.

which results in

Mary Smith is a self-made millionaire who helps people get out of debt and live debt-free. Get out of debt and become a millionaire at GetOutofDebtandStayThere.com.

This example puts the link around your keywords, rather than your web address.

Don't be overwhelmed

While even these two parts of the article might seem overwhelming, they don't have to be. Look at other examples of titles and resource boxes to get your footing then start working on them.

You can change your resource box for future articles, and I have changed mine as I learned more and saw how others wrote theirs. You will get better over time at writing and linking.

If you have any questions on how to write the best titles and resource box for your articles, leave a comment and I'll get back to with suggestions.