Before you read this post, please answer the poll about article marketing above.

The author block is the most important component of your article marketing campaign ... and the piece most overlooked by the writer. Here's what you need to know.

When you write an article and submit it for publication, you have an opportunity to tell the reader about yourself in the author block. This is exactly what most authors do, and it's a big mistake. The author block provides you with an opportunity to do so much more. Let me explain.

There are multiple goals you want to accomplish with article marketing. They include:

• Positioning yourself as the expert in your field.
• Driving readers back to your website or blog.
• Getting your website ranked high in the search engines results page.

You accomplish the first goal by writing a good article. You accomplish the second and third goal in the author block.

An effective author block accomplishes three things.

1. It tells the readers why you are qualified in your field.
2. It provides a call to action encouraging the reader to visit your website or blog.
3. It uses keyword rich anchor text linking back to your website or blog.

Here's a good example of an effective author block.

Notice three things about the text in the author block.

1. The text positions me, Bob Sommers, as the expert when it comes to building Weebly websites. I'm the author of the video program.
2. The text provides the reader with a reason to visit our website. Learn to build and promote your own free website by clicking on one of the links.
3. And finally, notice the anchor text I used in the author block. Weebly website and Weebly help. When you use your keywords as the clickable text in your author block, it helps you rank high for those terms in the search engines.

For more information on how to use article marketing to build your reputation, popularity and traffic to your website, please watch our 12 part video series entitled Article Marketing for Professionals.

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Great post!

So often you will see author blocks linking back to their site using useless terms such as "click here" or "available here."

Sadly it's also not that rare to see author blocks with no links back to the authors site.

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Hey Josh,

speaking of links..

just clicked your 'blog' link and got a 'page not found' message....twice!

what gives, dude? : )

gary

Thanks for the heads up. No wonder the traffic to my blog was down.

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The quality of your article is all that matters to me...

Thanks for the tips. I was actually just working on a post for my own writing site about the author block. Your tips really opened my eyes about the things that I currently do wrong!

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