One of the fundamental reasons why article marketing has become a popular and successful method of promoting both websites and people, is the bio, or resource box links in bio service. This is the area, usually at the end of the article, where the author has the chance to tell the reader a bit about themselves, where to find more information and possibly even how to contact them. The bio is valuable for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's a chance to establish your credentials; your credibility in the eyes of the reader. Secondly, the bio offers the opportunity to link directly to other sites on the web. In search engine terms, these are called back links and it's how your website gets found by others and ranked by the search engines.

Making sure your bio is giving you everything you need from it is therefore important. These are a few basic tips to get your bio knocked into shape and start getting some benefit from it.

1. Who or what is the bio about? Decide whether your bio will be promoting you or your website. If it's promoting you, you'll need to remember to include your name (or pen name) and start giving some thought to what you want to say about yourself in relation to the article. Maybe you'll highlight how much experience you have in a certain topic or what unique knowledge or advice you can offer the reader if they want to find out more.

2. Keep it short. Make sure your bio runs to no more than a few lines. If your bio is almost as long as your article, no one will read it and the benefit will be lost. Remember it's a teaser that should make the reader want to find out more about you or even make contact. If the bio is too long, the reader will get bored and probably just move on. Conversely, if you tell them everything in the bio, why would they need to look any further?

3. Use anchor text in your links. Many amateur webmasters include a URL. This is functional and will get the reader to your site if they click the link but the link has the ability to carry more value than a simple entry method for your site. Remember that the search engines use links to help rank and find websites. By using anchor text with words that relate to the subject of your article, not only do you establish the link, but you give the search engine some context for the link which will benefit your website in the search result pages. If you're unsure about using HTML tags, do some research on the web and look for sites offering tutorials on basic tagging and the use of the anchor tag.

4. Make it relevant. Make sure your bio reflects, in some way, the subject of the article. The reader will generally only continue on their journey to your website if they know it will be relevant to the subject they are reading about links in bio. The bio is your opportunity to signpost the way to more relevant, or at the very least, related information.