You should have a well written resource box to maximize the effectiveness of each article.

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. Writing one that is 4-5 lines long woild be another way to look at it.

Does that seem about right 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 do not approach writing one that is 15% of the total article. Even on short articles of 300 words many of them are no more than 2-3 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.

A perfect example of the strategy top article marketers use is to write numbered list articles. 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 a resource box should accomplish the goal of getting the click thru to your website in the fewest number of words.

You can view how I write my own resource box at EzineArticles.com here:

http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jeff_Schuman

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