New supporting member feature: article resource box
When you write an article, Biznik automatically provides a link to your profile at the top and bottom of the article. And until now, we haven’t allowed additional footer information, because it conflicts with our business model (we want visitors to stay on Biznik as long as possible). However, we’ve had many requests from article authors that they would like to include what’s called a “resource box” in the footer of their articles, which allows them to give a brief bio and provide a direct link to their own website.
We’ve listened, and today we’ve added the resource box as a special benefit to supporting members only. The neat thing about the box is that, once you’ve added it on one of your articles, it will appear on all of them retroactively, providing you an inbound link to your site on every article you’ve previously posted.
Here’s how it works: At the bottom of every article, you’ll see a text area that you can edit, where you can provide your bio info.
After you’ve saved it, this is what it looks like:
The fact that we provide this for supporting members only fits within our tiered membership approach, in which Active members get enhanced profiles, and Supporting members get enhanced promotion. This provides a link to your own site, which amounts to enhanced promotion. You’ll also get a nice boost to your SEO from including these, too.
Tags: articles, author, business networking, resource box
July 25th, 2008 at 5:00 am
Dan, can supporting members put article resource boxes on past, already submitted articles?
July 26th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Joe,
All you have to do is update your resource box in one place, and it will automatically be applied to all your past articles. Pretty slick, hey?
July 30th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Anticipating the next question… the article writers will now want their resource boxes be specific to each individual article, since the articles presumably might be on somewhat different subjects and therefore the marketing impact of a resource box would be enhanced by being taylored accordingly. Will they be able to do that soon or will there need to be a effort to make the resource box applicable to all articles?
July 31st, 2008 at 9:17 am
Dan, I don’t see a link to Steve’s website in the above example. When I tried to add a link to my resource box, the formatting was stripped. How do you add the link?
July 31st, 2008 at 3:30 pm
@Dennis, So far what we’ve heard from authors is that they want to have one bio, and have it replicate on all of their articles, rather than have to put it into each one separately.
@John, You need to use the same Markdown syntax that we use in comments: [Biznik.com](http://biznik.com)