Answer:
This is a very important question, but there is not one simple answer to the question. There are many ways to track the results of your article, and I will explain them here.
Before we get into the discussion of HOW, I want to briefly talk about your Article Marketing ROI (Return On Investment).
There are five metrics by which we can measure the success of your articles. Depending on our individual goals, the metric that you take to heart may be different than the metric I use. It is entirely dependent upon your goals in your Article Marketing activities.
- Number of Publications - This number represents online newsletters, websites, blogs and forums that published an article. In my world, online newsletters are the most important, because online newsletters give me access to thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of prospects in one day.
But this number is an overall number, measuring all of the locations --- online newsletters, websites, blogs and forums --- where an article may have been published.
- Number of Inbound Links - This number is a subset of the Number of Publications. It only reflects publication in websites, blogs and forums, but it looks more closely at how your article may have been published.
Links are the grease that keep the Internet moving, but some webmasters do not understand the value of grease in their equipment. Some webmasters seek to hog all of the link value for themselves, keeping internal links live and external links dead. Life is too short to worry about these jerks... Besides, most people that I have seen doing this kind of stuff don't survive online for long.
Either way, with this metric, we want to count the number of links we have received from our articles. We want to know how many new links have been developed for our websites. (For MY own articles, I don't care much about this number. It is just one more way to measure an article's effectiveness. You may think this number is the most important, and that is fine --- that is just not my way.)
This metric actually has two subsets also. We want to get an idea of how many of those links are Plain Links and how many are Keyword Links. (Once again, for MY articles, this is just another number to help me measure the popularity of my article.)
- Visitors at Your Website / Phone Calls - Now we are getting closer to the numbers that matter to me.
In some cases, we can measure the article by how many visitors (prospects) the article delivered to our website. In other cases, we measure how many phone calls we have received from people who read the article (prospects).
In a nutshell, we are looking at the ability of our articles to put our target audience in front of our sales pages --- giving us the opportunity to present to them what we sell.
- Visitors that Converted to Buyers - This is where I start getting excited about Article Marketing. How many people was my article exposed to? How many of those people visited my website? How many people called me to ask questions? How many of those people have bought what I am selling?
All other metrics we measure are a lead up to this. Number of Publications, Number of Links, and Visitors to our Website only give us an indication as to how successful we might be at this step.
But I want to know how many sales were generated from my articles. (Not every article makes money, but I have enough articles in the wild that I will make enough money to make the process worthwhile to ME.)
- Dollars Generated - This is the metric that makes the world go round...
How many dollars were generated from my articles? How much did I spend (article writing and distribution) to get those dollars into my business?
Did the process generate a profit for my business?
In my case, I have not had a J-O-B since March of 2005. Does Article Marketing permit me to make a profit? Without a doubt, yes.
But, we are not talking about me. We are talking about YOU.
At the end of the day, week, month and year, this is the metric that I encourage you to adopt as the true measure of whether your Article Marketing is working for you or not.
If Article Marketing is not generating a profit for your business, then you should stop doing it.
But one article is not a true measure of whether the process is profitable or not. I have had several articles that did not produce results. But I have had several articles that made my month or year for me.
Not every article will be a winner, but if you have enough articles out there, you will win the Article Marketing game.
Some people want me to believe that my way of Article Marketing is wrong, because as they say, Article Marketing is to be used to generate links to one's website to increase rankings in Google.
The truth is that I steadfastly refuse to let Google tell me how to market my websites. ;-) If I get the Google Love, that is great, but if Google turns against me at some point in the future, I don't want to be left without an income.
The truth is that this website averages 22,000 visitors per month, every month. Yet, only one-third of that traffic arrives from Google. This means that if I relied only upon Google to deliver traffic to my website, I would have to turn away 14,600 visitors per month, every month.
It is also true that I market this website almost exclusively through Article Marketing. I do not use PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or any paid advertising to promote this website. My traffic is organic, and +90% of my non-Search Engine traffic is the result of articles that I have written to promote this website.
It is also true that I have thousands of Top 10 and Top 20 listings in Google. What may surprise you is that although I generate 7,300 visitors per month from Google, one of my most important keywords for which I hold a #1 ranking in Google, only delivers about 65 visitors per month on that keyword... So much for #1 on an extremely competitive keyword. ;-) The WOW FACTOR just is not there.
I get Google Love on this website and many of the websites that I own and operate, but at the end of the day, I cannot rely upon Google to bring me prospects.
I am not going to play slave to master Google. I am not going to tell Google to go away, but I am not going to play the game as if they are my only hope and salvation for a prosperous tomorrow...
Google is not in business to make you or me rich. Google is in business to make Google rich.
If you spend any amount of time reading my comments, you will get the idea that I don't want to put all of my own eggs in the Google basket. I have seen too many people do that and lose their butt when Google stopped pimping their website.
When you make yourself a slave to Google, you should not be disappointed if your income dries up, after Google slaps your website. Google is looking out for Google, as it should be.
While Google is looking out for Google, you should be looking out for you!
How To Actually Track An Article's Results
There is not a single, sure-fire, 100% approach to finding where your articles have been published. I wished that there was, but there is not.
We generally advise a three-step approach for "getting an idea" where your articles have been published.
- Publishers Will Sometimes Tell You That They Have Published Your Article and Where - When we started The Phantom Writers in 2001, almost 90% of the people who published the articles we distributed would send a notice to the author that they had done so.
But that was so long ago.
These days, fewer than 5% of publishers who publish your article will notify you of that fact.
When we distribute your article, we send with your article a "public contact email address". The purpose of doing this is two-fold. First, we want to give publishers a way to contact you to let you know that they have published your article.
While this is an important goal, the primary reason we require a "public contact email address" with the articles we distribute is to allow publishers to contact you with questions they might have about your article.
I was contacted by a publisher one time who told me that she wanted to publish my article, but she would need to eliminate one paragraph in my article to allow her to publish the article. I reviewed the article and decided that the requested change would not detract from my overall goals. I advised the publisher that so long as that was the only change she wanted to make, then I would not be opposed to the change.
The publisher followed my advice, eliminating only the paragraph she had problems with. She published my article in her newsletter the next day - a newsletter serving 350,000 readers. My response on the article was good, and I had a very profitable week that week, due to the publication accepting my article.
This is only one example of how the inclusion of a "public contact email address" helped me to get a larger audience for my article.
Either way, if you don't give publishers a method to contact you, then they cannot ask questions, and therefore, you will lose those additional publication outlets.
The "public contact email address" is not as useful as it once was, but it still remains useful to you, in that it allows the few publishers who do contact authors to notify them of publication to do so.
We recommend that the address that you make available for this purpose is not a primary email address, but instead, one that can afford to be spammed, as your "public contact email address" will eventually be spammed.
We do allow for an email forwarder from our domain, pointing to your email address. This is useful so that when your email starts getting overwhelmed with spam, we can simply turn off the forwarder, to immediately reduce the flow of spam to your email address.
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Search Engines - You can use the search engines to find "some" of the copies of your article in the wilds of the Internet.
To the right, you can see an image that represents the Article Reprint Tracking Tool that I provide to my clients. It appears in the right-hand sidebar of every article posted to my article directory since May of 2006.
Prior to May of 2006, all articles were hard-coded, instead of put into a database. (I still kick myself for having designed this website that way back in 2001, but I cannot undo the past.) Only half of the 2800 articles that were hard-coded have been migrated to the current format, so I am unable to add this tool to all of the article pages.
As a client, you simply need to navigate our directory to your article, and then click on your choice of the search engine names. Each link is pre-configured to bring up the search results for your particular article --- so that you can see how many pages the search engines are displaying as having your article on them.
The search engines cannot tell you about a copy of your article on the Internet, until the search engines know it is there.
While many websites are on the daily crawl schedule of the search engine bots, many other websites are on the 30-day or 90-day crawl schedule. So, in essence, an article published on a website today, may not be found by the search engines until three months from now - if ever at all. Yes, some websites don't let the search engines crawl them.
If the search engines cannot see your article on someone's website, they cannot tell you about it.
It is also true that even if the search engines do know that your article is on a particular website, that they may not tell you anyway. All three of the primary search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing, seldom show you all "known copies" of a particular article on the Internet.
Google is the worst. They show only a small sampling of a particular article on the Internet.
Yahoo will show you a few more copies of your article on the Internet, but they will also show you a lot of what I refer to as "junk copies" - not to imply that your articles are junk. What I mean by that is that we utilize Yahoo Groups and Google Groups to handle part of our article distribution process. If it were up to me, neither Google, Yahoo nor Bing would show us those copies of the article that went through Yahoo Groups and Google Groups. But they do.
Yahoo will show you more copies of your article on the Internet, but they will show the Yahoo Groups and Google Groups copies of the article in greater frequency than the other search engines will show you them.
Bing will also show you several copies of an article, and once again, they will only show you a portion of what is out there.
No matter which company you employ to distribute your articles - this is not a problem exclusive to my company - the search engines will only show you a percentage of the existing copies of your article, as they have them documented in their databases.
Google will show the smallest percentage of the copies of your article, but Yahoo, who shows you more, may not be showing you all of the links out there pointing to your website.
- Website Statistics: Referring URL Logs - Most everyone who owns a website has access to Website Statistics. If you do not, you should consider a different web hosting company.
Not having Website Statistics is like running a cross-country marathon with a blindfold on your eyes. Watch out for that tree! Boink...
Insider your webmaster's control panel, you should see something similar to this image:
This is the standard format for Cpanel Version 3. Your webmaster's control panel may be different in its layout, but this should give you the general idea as to what you are looking for.
For the average webmaster, the icon you will want to click is Awstats. Doing so will take you to a page where you can click the magnifying glass that is on the same line as your domain name.
Once you have opened that window, you will see something that looks like this:
(This has been miniaturized so that you see what it looks like.)
Below are the real traffic statistics from ThePhantomWriters.com for the month of November 2009 --- 2.5 days before the end of the month.
When you scroll down the page, you will find a section titled, "Connect To Site From", which will detail "Direct address / Bookmark / Link in email...", "Links from an Internet Search Engine" and the information we are chasing, "Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)".
The image below is pulled from another of my websites - the numbers are blacked out because they are not pertinent to this discussion. The actual section shown here is the "Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)".
As may be obvious in the image, all of the Links From An External Page are hyperlinked, meaning that you can click on them and go to the web page shown.
For the sake of figuring out where your articles are published, you should at least click a few of these links, to see if the reason for the click to your website was a copy of your article on that web page.
Notice: Often times, many of the URL's seen in this list will be bogus.
* Internet spammers have software that will send fake URL's to this Log on your website, for the purpose of attracting YOUR attention.
* If someone is searching for something from one page within their browser, and opening links in a new window, then it is possible that the page that was open in the other window before the user clicked your link will show up as a Referring URL, even though it was not.
* In some cases, your link was on that page, but as in the case of a blog, the post with your link on it may have migrated into an internal page of the website.
In the previous bullet point, I had mentioned that I believe the search engines are showing less than the existing number of Article Reprints and links to your website, because...
By tracking the URL's that sent traffic to my website, I know that in the first eleven months of 2009, "Total: 18280 different pages-url" sent traffic to my website - with about 20% of those being fake URLs. Take away the 20% of bogus URL's, and there are still 14,624 URL's that sent traffic to The Phantom Writers in the first eleven months of 2009.
In some years, the number of links sending traffic to my websites are far more than what Google and Yahoo are showing as the number of links to my website.
2009 is the first year, in all of the years that I have been tracking this, that Yahoo is actually showing more inbound links for my website than what the number of links that had sent me traffic during the year.
These are my inbound link numbers for thePhantomWriters.com, as of Nov. 28,2009, according to the search engines:
(As you can see, Google is WAY LOW in their counts, with 190.)
(But Yahoo is tracking nearly 230,000 links to my homepage.)
Of course, Inbound Link numbers are much different from Article Reprint counts, but I believe this gives you an idea as to what you should expect from the search engines, when it comes time to count the number of reprints of your articles, according to the search engines.
The only number that I truly trust in this process is the Number of Web Pages Sending Traffic To My Website, as documented in my Awstats Statistical software.
But, I also know that even after I trim the fat from the "Number of Web Pages Sending Traffic To My Website" according to Awstats, the 80% I come up with is probably lower than reality, since not every link created will send traffic to my website, every month or every year. Some of those links out there to my website just don't see enough traffic to justify a click to my website.
We are finally at the end of the story in our original question, "Once an article has been distributed, how do I track the results of my article?"
Like I said, there is no easy answers when tracking down this information.
The best you can hope for is an estimation of how many reprints of your article are out there on the Internet and a "general idea" of how successful your articles were in promoting your business.
Now that we have come full circle, now you might be able to better appreciate my belief that the only metric that really matters to me is how many dollars an article has added to my bottom line --- my article's ROI or Return On Investment.
If you are like me, then perhaps you have realized that the answer to this question is not a simple answer, but your Article Marketing ROI is perhaps the best metric to track in determining the real value of your Article Marketing efforts and my services.
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