Interpreting Your Article Marketing Stats

You’ve probably heard just about every internet marketer say “test, test, test everything.”  Well, I was just thinking about approaches to article marketing and the whole testing thing.  Do we write article after article, throw them out there, and hope something good will happen?  Are we taking the time to analyze our stats? Are we testing our articles?

 I confess I don’t always take the time to completely test or analyze what I’ve got but when I do, here’s what I try to look at:

I write articles on various niche subjects.  Which subjects get the most hits?  Why?  Are they the subjects I tend to be more interested in and thus write articles with more passion?  Are they the niches that I make the most money on in affiliate products or AdSense?  Are they just more popular niches or have the more pressing problems?  Was it because they were timely (season or holiday related)?

I primarily submit my articles to Ezine Articles and a few other article directories that relate more to a specific niche, like LadyPens.  The stats I look at are Ezine’s stats and my websites’ stats.

Another thing I look at is which categories get the most hits.  There are times when my article could fit in 2 or 3 different categories but I have to choose one.  Instead of playing pin the tail on the donkey, I look at the resultant article hits and website hits I get according to the category I submitted the article to.  Hope that makes sense.

While I’m talking about categories, I would like to say that if there is a main category, such as “Health and Fitness” I will submit to that rather than a subcategory under it.  I believe more people start their reading in the general category and don’t go much further.

Ezine Articles gives you stats that tell you how often your article has been read on their site, how often it has been downloaded, and how often your bio link has been clicked on, but that’s just a start.  You don’t know how many times it’s been copied and pasted onto another website.  There are 2 ways I check on this.

1.  I use Google and Yahoo to see where my article is being published by putting my title or an original sentence from the article in quotes and searching.  It’s pretty cool to see your article on legitimate sites (with your bio intact) across the Internet.  After I’m done feeling all important and branded, I analyze which articles are being picked up the most.

2.  I check my website stats for the hits from other websites.  One of my first articles was picked up by a well-trafficked site and I got 500-600 hits from that site.  I check out these sites and sometimes leave a big juicy comment as a “thank you.”  Also, when I look at the sites I think about why they might have chosen my article and how I can work future articles into something that could benefit me and them again.

I don’t have the time or desire to get too anal about it, but I do think it’s important to look at these things and ask why.  This is especially true when you’re just getting started with article marketing.

From there the logical thing is to test.   I test article titles,  keywords, article length,  bios,  landing page (squeeze page vs. blog vs. website vs. sales page), and which article directories get me the most traffic.  As I tweak things, is my AdSense revenue going up?  Are my conversions on the mark?  Is my opt-in list increasing in size?

The reason to analyze your stats and test everything with article marketing is because when all is said and done, you’re in this to make money.  

Some people would rather go the quantity route and write tons of articles and not bother to analyze what works because they know the more they write, the more chance they have of some of them hitting the mark.  I’ve not tried it, but I’ve heard it can work.  Personally, I would rather write fewer articles that are written with a formula that proves successful for me. 

I’d love to hear what’s working for you and what your testing has shown.  Leave your comments!

Related posts:

1. Article Marketing – Did I Do It All Wrong?