Your resource box is the heart and soul of what makes article marketing stand out as the most efficient, most effective way to drive traffic to your website.

The concept is simple, write a few dozen, short articles that average 300 to 900 words in length, on a topic that is useful to the people you want to do business with, publish these articles online at any of the hundreds of "article submission sites" or "article banks."

Under the terms of service of these article banks, you permit other webmasters or newsletter publishers to reprint your articles under certain conditions. These conditions include the requirement that they reprint your article with no changes and give you proper attribution as the author of the article. This includes your resource box at the end of your article.

Your resource box is the only place you may sell in your article. The body of the article should have a low key, helpful flavor to it so that readers will feel that they are receiving valuable information on a topic of interest to them. But the resource box, is where you can tell about your self, about the services you offer and contains a link to your site that they may click in order to visit your website.

But how do you motivate readers to click on your link and go to your website? Here are a few ideas to include in your resource box that will greatly increase the number of visitors you get from every article you write:

1. Offer to solve a problem. This should be easy since anyone reading your article is probably interested in solving a certain type of problem. In your resource box, you just spell out the solution more specifically and promise that they will find the solution when they visit your website.
2. Make a promise. All benefits are promises. Promises to get something in exchange for clicking your link. Think through what you do and come up with some very clear and specific promises you can make. These are not always promises your services can deliver on, but promises they will get just for visiting your site.
3. What changes do your readers want to realize? Benefits are simply solutions or changes. Make a list of all the changes you can offer someone and choose the most concise, most emotional change you can think of to put into your resource box.
4. Use words like "find out" or "learn how" to get people to visit your website. People who read your online articles are looking for more information. "How to" type articles dominate article banks for the simple reason that people are looking for ways to solve problems and create changes, as we've already learned in the examples above.
5. Use the words "you can." People may want to solve problems or create changes, but they also have doubts that they can bring these things to pass. "You can" phrases are strongly motivating and help readers picture themselves enjoying the solutions and changes your article promises.
6. Put yourself in the minds of your potential visitors and make a list of "I wants" form their point of view. For example, if you are a lawyer, put yourself in the mindset of your potential clients. The I wants" you come up with may be: "I want to be compensated fairly for my pain and suffering," "I want to erase an unfair criminal conviction from my record, "I want to be paid for my lost wages from an employer who unjustly terminated my employment and then spread untrue rumors about me in the workplace."

Writing an outstanding resource box takes a lot of work. Often it is more work to write the resource box than it is to write the article itself. But remember you aren't selling yourself in the article, you are in the resource box. Make it shine and you will be rewarded by increased traffic and increased clients who want to do business with you.