by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: April 02, 2009

A resource box is essentially the place at the end of many articles or other pieces of writing where we as the author give the readers a little bit more information about ourselves, what we do and perhaps from where we get the ideas for our writing. There are several considerations we have to be aware of when writing our resource box if we are to get the most out of its content in the long term.

We firstly have to be aware of the importance of the content of our resource box. It is all too tempting to focus purely on the content and quality of the article or piece of writing and be lacking in due attention to the resource box and the value it can potentially afford us.

The very first thing which should appear in our resource box is our name. It is surprising how easy it is to forget this "small" detail in terms of the bigger picture. We should try to ensure that we always include our name in the same format in resource boxes. For example, if we have a middle initial, we should either always use it or never use it. This avoids confusion among our readers as to what other works may or may not be ours and also stands us in the best benefit as regards such as online search engines.

We may then choose to include a link to another presence which we have on the Web. We should be very careful when choosing this link as it should both be the one most appropriate to the content of the article we have just written and the one most likely to afford us the most beneficial publicity in the light of same. If we have an expanded and topical blog on the subject of our article, this may be the link to use. What we must never do in this respect is include a lengthy list of links which will only irritate and confuse our readers, serving no positive purpose in the long term.

We then use a few sentences to tell the readers what we wished to achieve in the writing of the article and why we feel we are qualified to write on the subject. This should be very brief but also very carefully considered as it is not always easy to get our pitch across in such a small few words. It is something which gets easier with practise however and we will eventually get to the stage where these messages will simply flow naturally.

What we have therefore achieved by considering the above is to let our readers know who we are, what we are in relation to the subject of the article and, perhaps most importantly of all, where they can find out more about us and the subject in question.

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