We're all aware of the benefits that come with writing guest blog posts and with article marketing in general. It can be a terrific way to send some extra traffic to your website via your author bio box. Many writers simply link directly to their website. But there are better ways to go about promoting yourself in the author biography section.
Recently, I've been testing a number of different approaches and found that three methods in particular are highly effective. Each has its own particular advantages and drawbacks, but they're all guaranteed to bring you some extra page views each month.
Direct Keyword Targeting
One method which many fail to capitalise on is the SEO-friendly, keyword-based link. That's where you pick a keyword that shows up a lot on your own blog, and hyper-link it to a category tag on your site. For instance, if you've got a site with a category of “Jack Russell Terrier Puppies”, you'd include that phrase in your bio and link it to the category page for that phrase on your website. With this approach, you're using the link solely for it's SEO benefit, rather than to hope for clickthroughs. People from what I've seen rarely click on such links (an easy way to test – run your link through an SEO Friendly redirect such as bit.ly and view the results).
As such, these links are great for guest posting on blogs with very few readers, but have strong page strength, as well as blogs that are likely to be syndicated.
Free Subscription Sign-Up Links
Another way to boost traffic to your own site is through the use of sign-up links. If you publish a weekly e-mail newsletter, you could link to the sign-up page. Or, if you've recently written a free e-book, you can direct traffic towards the opt-in link for that. You get a lot more click throughs, but it's not quite as SEO friendly as the approach mentioned above.
Furthermore, clickthroughs don't always lead to sign ups, as you're requiring people to make an (admittedly small) investment. Nevertheless, this could be a long term source of traffic for your site via an email subscription.
Promote Your Twitter ID
If you know what you're doing, Twitter is an incredibly effective way to market just about anything to your audience, provided you've actually got something to say. You can get a lot of people to at least listen to your message by including your Twitter ID in your bio so that they can follow your feed with the click of a mouse button. You wont see immediate results, but you'll probably get even more opt-ins than you would with a free e-book or newsletter.
However, you're not only relying on your savviness, but also your user's savviness. If your readership doesn't have twitter or facebook (and – believe me – some don't!), then having a twitter ID or a Facebook Fan Page link on the bottom of your page may not be the best idea.
In Closing
Which route you decide to take depends on you, but I'd suggest you use one of each. If you're allowed to include three links, there's no reason not to include your Twitter ID, a direct keyword link, and a subscription opt-in. Obviously, you'll have to do some field-testing of your own to see what works best for you. But by employing one or all of these methods, you can use your author bio box to substantially increase traffic to your page effortlessly.