Successful Article Marketing Is In The Tracking

Successful Article Marketing Is In The Tracking

I submit articles to a lot of article directories and through http://www.isnare.com. A lot of the articles are my own, but most of them are ghostwritten for clients. Isnare and other article directories do an ok job of tracking how many views your article has had at their directory, but that's where it stops.

Plus, once you submit to any article directory, how do you know where else that article was reprinted? Clients ask me about this all the time.

Sure, you can search for your article title in Google and get a lot of results and sift through them to find which search engine listings are your article and which are just web pages that are related to the same phrase used in your article title, but is that the best method for tracking how well your articles are doing out there?

Submit and forget is the normal approach taken to article marketing. You just keep producing new articles and have "faith" in the system and that your articles are getting widespread distribution. For years, this was the approach I took to article marketing as well.

Since then, we have developed ways to do more with the content that we wrote or paid to have written for us.

For starters, those old articles you own and have already submitted are still good, useful content. You can continue to distribute them to other article directories they have not already been submitted to. You can offer them to be printed on other websites for a link back in your bio. You can break them into parts and reuse them on your blog as part 1, part 2, part 3, and so on.

The content you wrote or paid for still has value beyond the one time they were submitted to directories. How many articles do you have on your hard drive right now that you could be using?

Another method you can use is to place a tracking or serial number into each article. Use something unique as an identifier. Something with numbers and letters. Before you develop your serial numbers, search them in google and if you get a no results page, your serial number is perfect.

You can place the serial number into the actual body of the article or into your author bio. Anyone reading the article will ignore it, but you will be able to search Google for that serial number later and you will start getting results that are your own.

With this method you can track which article topics get the widest distribution, track which websites and blogs reprinted the article after finding it in article directories, and which distribution method got you the most bang for your buck.

Stop guessing and start tracking and you will improve your article marketing results tremendously!

BONUS : Superchery

The best way to cheapen anything is to overuse it ...

I recall a sports clip from many years ago, where a veteran basketball player near the end of his career was reminiscing about his prime and comparing it to the supporting-cast status he was about to assume with his latest team. He made a comment along the lines of "I've been a superstar; it's fine with me if I don't have that role anymore."

Perhaps he thought he was being humble. For my part, I thought that if I didn't remember him from a fairly illustrious college career, I wouldn't have picked him out of a lineup of one.

Superstar?

This word took flight in the 1970s, as far as I can tell. It was originally intended to draw a distinction between well-known people and really well-known people, usually from the sports or entertainment industries. However, I think most would agree that the term reached its zenith when Andrew Lloyd-Weber and Tim Rice affixed it to the title of their most famous rock opera, 'Jesus Christ Superstar.'

Admittedly, a reference like that set the bar quite high for anyone else who might want to be affiliated with the designation. But to me, this is the way it should be.

For the past decade or so, especially in the USA, 'superstar' has been so watered down that even pop dictionaries have begun to pull back on its significance. Any notable of the moment seems to qualify. However, for the most part, unless they're like the basketball player mentioned above and actually believe the hype, they're not the root of the diluted definition.

That distinction is reserved for our contemporary wordsmiths, the writers and broadcasters of our time.

There's a reason such a seemingly innocuous bit of pedantry merits notice. The Longer Life site promotes factors which can improve your quality of living. To me, that implies that certain standards of competence must be maintained. In the bell curve of daily existence, there must be sentinels whose very actions exemplify and maintain quality in their area of expertise. This is how a culture advances.

The impact of wordsmiths in any culture is enormous. Not only do they chronicle every aspect of it, they influence its nature and perceptions. The prominence of their vocations ensures they are very aware of these realities.

Thus, there should be little or no tolerance for rendering the tools of their trade --- words and grammar --- in diminishing contexts.

Thus, in this instance, a 'star' is recognized by anyone who follows his profession. A 'superstar' is recognized by anyone. David Beckham is a superstar. So is Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Maria Callas.

So is Ernest Hemingway.

His work is proof that it's not the tools you use, but how you use them. He's what Hunter S Thompson and Richard Farina almost were. More importantly, he did his part to keep the bar raised high.

That Hemingway immersed himself into every aspect of that word is a backhanded tribute to his zeal for both his times and his craft.

It's what we should expect from a superstar.