The idea of article marketing story is to pre-sell the idea of the landing page by giving useful information and writing the article in a catchy way. It must create enthusiastic waiting mood and make the reader really to want something from the Author Box. When he has read your article, the reader is warm and eager to click your link. Your article marketing story has touched different sides of the topic and you have used maybe 500-1.000 words for that. When the reader has read that all, comes "The Moment of Truth", he clicks the link in the Author Box. What happens? What kind of an experience is coming? Excited or another kilometer long story, which repeats the same arguments, now maybe with other words. More reading, huh! No more thank you and he quits! Or something better. After reading the article marketing story he is eager to act, to do something. This is a moment, like in Xmas, when he deserves a surprise, a gift, a newsletter, income course or ebook. You have to make him even more excited. Now he is delighted and is willing to seek more surprises from your web site. Now you have his name and address in your opt-in list and you can put the autoresponder to work. This is the major idea of an effective landing page. The follow ups are very important and you can mail him a lot of useful, quality material concerning different aspects of your business. To be able to find a working landing page you can test different versions. Article marketing is a flexible media for this. You simply use different links in The Author Box and see how many of article readers will click the link and how many of them will fill in his name and email address. To increase the effectiveness of the landing page it is wise to change the copy and the gift or lay-out every now and then, because many visitors are repeated visitors. By changing the free gift you can give them fresh ideas and a reason to visit again. This is a real customer service. I want to stress the idea of the first impression. If the first impression is bad, it is almost impossible to change it afterwards. But another way round, if it is good, the visit experience will be good, which will lead to bigger website sales and repeated visits. The copy of the landing page must be short. You just thank the visitor and want to give him a useful gift. What a visitor must do is only filling his name and email address. Nothing else. He understands that those are required so that he is able to download something safely.