Freelance Writers: Could You Be Hurting Your Career by Using/Not Using a Pen Name? How to Determine When and When Not To
August 31, 2010
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Now, on to today’s post.
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Last week, I received the following email from a fellow freelance writer about pen names. She wrote:
QUESTION
Hi there Yuwanda,
Did you use a pen name early in your writing career, or is Yuwanda Black your real name? I write for Helium, Brighthub etc under a pen name. These sites actually have a spot where you can actually put it in. But I wonder as I move forward with my writing career whether it’s ok to keep using the pen name, or will I look unprofessional, or does it not matter as long as I’m upfront with the client.
thanks for sharing
L-
MY ANSWER
I fired off a short answer, as I didn’t have time to get into detail, and I wanted to save my longer response for this week’s newsletter. The short answer I gave was:
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Article Marketing Tutorial: How to Write a Resource Box That Increases Traffic & Generates Sales (Part III of III)
July 11, 2008
Learning how to write a resource box that increases traffic and generates sales is something I recently learned, and I’ve been marketing with articles since 2002. For years, I did it all wrong.
Note: This is Part III of III of Inkwell Editorial’s article marketing tutorial. Read Parts I and II.
With hundreds of articles circulating on the net, I often wonder how much more traffic my sites would have had and how many more sales I could have generated had I known what I know now. But, as the famed poet Maya Angelou says, “When you know better, you do better.”
Article Marketing: Definition of a Resource Box
For article marketers, the resource box is the most important part of the article. It is the main reason you slave over good content and give it away for free, after all. If you’re new to article marketing, you may be wondering, “What is a resource box?”
A resource box is the part where you get to promote yourself, your product/service and/or your website/blog. A good one will do all three. It’s included at the end of published articles you write. See the end of this article on how to get high-paying SEO writing gigs for an example of a resource box.
Resource boxes can be long or short. Most fall within the 3-6 line range. The length is often determined by the restrictions of the article directory you submit your article to.
Now that you know what it is, you may be wondering how to write an effective one. There are 4 keys to writing an resource box that increases traffic and produces sales. They are:
4 Keys to Writing a Resource Box that Increases Web Traffic and Produces Ongoing Sales
Following are four things every effective resource box should have. It took me years to learn this, but I’ve definitely experienced the positive results of “getting it right,” so to speak.
1. Benefit to Readers: I used to write resources boxes that included more like a professional bio. They were all about my credentials. Readers don’t care about that as much as they care about what your credentials can do for them. This is a critical distinction.
So offer a free report, a more in-depth article on your website about the topic at hand, a free podcast – whatever it is, make it something the reader is interested enough to want to take action to get.
If your article has done its job, it’s already whetted the appetite of the prospect; your resource box should deliver on that.
2. Links: Article directories limit the number of links you can use in the body of your article; some don’t allow you to use any at all. They require you to put all links in your resource box. Usually, article directories allow anywhere from one to three links in the resource box. Do your best to use al of them. Speaking of links . . .
3. Link with SEO in Mind: This can get a little complicated if you don’t understand, but bear with me for a simple explanation. The whole idea of article marketing is to generate traffic and make sales, right? The links in your article and/or its resource box do that. How?
When search engine spiders crawl the web and index the information found on each page (whether it’s a blog or website), one of the things that tell it what that page of information is all about is the words that make up a clickable link.
To use an example, if I were to offer a free ebook on article marketing with this article, I would make the link to the words “free ebook on article marketing” like this in my resource box:
Example 1: Get a free ebook on article marketing to learn more.
I WOULD NOT WRITE:
Example 2: To get a free ebook on article marketing, click here.
Making the words “click here” in Example 2 linkable tells the search engines nothing about what the page is about. But, the words that make up the link in Example 1 tells search engines exactly what the page is about.
To remember this SEO tip, try not to ever make the words “click here” linkable. Links should be a description of what the page/article is about.
There’s one more tip about linking, which is the fourth thing that makes a resource box effective.
4. Home Page Link: One of the links in your resource box should always be to your home page. This is extremely important because one of the benefits of article marketing is building backlinks.
What are backlinks? Backlinks are simply when another site links back to your site. They drive traffic and position your site as an authority site. For a fuller explanation on why and how, read more about backlinks and the benefits of article marketing.
The benefit of article marketing is that each time your article is published on another website, another blog and/or in someone else’s e-newsletter, is that it creates another backlink to your main site. This can gain you thousands of backlinks pretty quickly. If you have a good navigation structure and an enticing home page, users will want to hang around to locate more information.
Backlinks push your site higher in rankings, which means more traffic. More traffic equals more sales. And, that’s what article marketing is all about.
Free Article Marketing Tutorial
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