Article Marketing - How to Track Your Success

Writing articles and submitting them to article directories, and ezine publishers takes a great deal of investment therefore you need to track them to determine their effectiveness.

Methods to track the success of your article marketing

Article directories

Most article directories (ie EzineArticles) display the number of visitors your article received. If you've written many articles you can quickly see which ones received the most visitors and/or comments.

Google

Enter your article title (with quotes) in the Google search box with quotes surrounding it. This shows all places your article appears on the Net. Before writing your content enter the title in Google first to make sure you are not duplicating someone else's article otherwise you will see their articles listed among yours.

Backlinks

Your resource box contains the URL to your web site. When your article gets distributed to other sites you receive incoming links from them. If you enter: Enter site:www.domain.com in Yahoo, it will display all the incoming links you have gained from other sites.

Site Statistics

Your web hosting service includes statistics for your web site. The stats reveal where your traffic is coming from. It displays the number of hits, visitors, external links, referrers (urls of people visiting your site) keywords and keyword phrases entered in the search engines. After submitting several articles for distribution, monitor your statistics. New keyword phrases that appear in your statistics can be used to produce new articles.

Tracking URLs

I've left this method last because I don't highly recommend it but it gives very detailed stats if you use an adtracker i.e., adtrackz. Set up a tracking URL in your ad tracking software that monitors the number of hits your article receives. There is only one problem with this method..if you stop tracking the article your visitor will receive a broken link when they click the URL in your resource box. Search engines do not spider broken links.

By investing a some time tracking your articles, you determine what sites are not producing results. Submit articles consistently to distribution sites to keep receiving traffic. Overtime you will see a steady increase in visitors.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Web Design, SEO, Hosting

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