Article marketing is about generating targeted traffic to a website. The majority of internet marketers submit their articles to Ezine Articles since they receive the most traffic and their web pages rank well on the search engines.

But if you look at the majority of the resource boxes on the website, you’ll notice that a lot of authors don’t know what they are doing. Normally they will mention what they specialize in, what their business does and then place a link to their website.

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Being a freelance writer myself and running a company with article writing as one of my services, I see a lot of clients’ resource boxes and give advice on what they should change.

Well I just found out something interesting which will make your articles drive a lot more traffic to your website

Here’s how I found about this improvement

I was doing research for my client’s articles and was browsing through the articles on Ezine Directories.
I was scanning the content and all the resource boxes, gathering information on what type of products and services the writers were promoting.

After scanning through 30 or more articles, there were about 2 links which I clicked through in the resource box. This only occurred to me after a while so I searched through my bookmarks and tried to find out what links I clicked on.

What I found was quite amazing. The 2 links which I clicked on in resource boxes had the same sort of call to action which appealed to me. This was:

“For more information, click on <<>>”

Without seeming too excited, I started to implement these changes for my clients. And the result is….click thru rates increased a lot. A lot as in nearly double the average number of clicks my clients used to have.

My explanation why this simple call to action works is because the reader is attracted to the content by its title. Even if they don’t enjoy the content or glance at it, they would love to click on links that will give them more information.

People are reading articles for information. So simply telling them that you have more of what they want is enough to persuade them to click on your link.

In my tests so far, I have found that this call to action works better than offering the reader a free download to a report or video. It is probably because people are so used to clicking on the words “Click here for more information”.

My tests have not been extensive but so far, it has worked with 4 of my clients I have tested with. Being a freelance writer has helped me a lot in understanding article marketing

Try it for your niche and let me know your results.

Article marketing is like painting. Anyone can write an article but it takes practice and it’s an art that you develop. I receive a lot of article writing projects and I found that not every client has the same view on what is a good article.

Without reading further, ask yourself what do you expect if you paid for an article. What do you consider is a quality article?

Here is what some of my clients think.

1. A good article is one which has lots of information and is written with excellent English. No grammar or spelling mistakes and written like a novelist.

2. A good article describes the information with very good English and uses complex words which shows that the author is educated and knowledgeable.

3. The article has break-through information which has not been revealed anywhere.

No, no and no. These are not the most important things to have in your article. You must understand what your objective is for the articles first of all.

Here is my answer for what I think is a good article.

- attracts the reader’s attention from beginning to end

- makes them think they learned something useful from the article

- user will click on your link in the resource box

- gives the reader a good impression of you or your business

To achieve these 4 factors, the article must be:

- free of grammar and spelling mistakes otherwise you’ll leave a bad impression (basic requirements)

- article is written in an easy to understand language which your targeted readers understand and written in a conversational way so that it keeps the reader’s attention

- article has 3 or more tips which the reader can use and learn right away

- the content of the article will lead the reader to think that they need a certain product or service to solve their problem

- the solution to solve the reader’s problem is offered in the resource box

There are many other factors that make up a quality article such as using the right anchor text in the resource box and the right keyword density etc…

But if a ghostwriter gave you the above qualities with each of the articles they wrote, they’ve done their job.