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Article Writing- How Long Should Your Resource Box Be

By Jeff Schuman

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 11Jun2009 Word count: 435 Viewed: 453 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

To maximize the effectiveness of each article you need to have a well written resource box. The resource box is where you get a chance to sell yourself, your business, an offer, and so on.

One problem I think many of us as writers have is how long should our resource box, or bio box as it is called, be? Let's take a look at that by analyzing what the experts do and say.

Christopher Knight of EzineArticles.com fame says resource boxes should be no more than 15% of your total article. This would mean in a 400 word article you would want it to be no more than 60 words. Another way to look at it is it would be 4-5 lines long.

Does that seem like a reasonable length to you?

One thing you can do is look at some of the expert authors in various article directories and see what they are up to. The authors who write the highest numbers of articles know what works when it comes to crafting a bio box that gets results.

It is interesting to see how short many expert authors keep their resource boxes. Many of them are coming nowhere near writing one that is 15% of the total article. Even on short articles of 250 words many of them are no more than two lines long.

So why is that?

You really need to understand the primary purpose of your bio box. Your primary goal is to get the click and nothing more.

Many article marketers use articles as a form of lead generation or traffic generation. You can see this in the type of articles they write.

Numbered list articles are a perfect example of the strategy top article marketers use. They understand that most readers are only going to skim an article and look for the highlights.

Their goal is to take the reader through the article as quickly as possible and lead them to the resource box. If the reader is scanning an article they are not going to want to read a long bio box.

This helps explain why short resource boxes are the choice of top article marketers. It should include your name, website address, an offer, and a call to action. Your ability to do that in the fewest number of words possible increases the chances of getting your reader to click on your website URL.

Based on what I see top article marketers doing then I would say resource boxes should only be as long as necessary to accomplish the goal of getting your reader to click through to your website.

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