Article Marketing: What Is Success?

In response to a “contest” over at EzineArticles.com for the authors’ most successful articles of 2007, I looked over my statistic reports for all of my articles posted with EzineArticles over the past year.   One of the first things that struck me was that I could consider a few different articles as being the most successful depending on what my definition of success is.

One article got the most views.  A different one was picked up by the most ezine publishers.  Still yet another had the most clickthroughs to my site.  And still another had the highest clickthrough percentage.

Before deciding if your articles are successful, make sure to define what success is.  This is also something you should decide before you start your article marketing.  Knowing what you goals are will help guide you on what kinds of articles to write, what your call to action is going to be, where you should submit them and how to measure your success.

Some common goals in article marketing are:

• Branding - This is difficult to measure.  The idea with branding is to make people aware of you, your company and your brand.  The more times they see you and your brand, the more aware they are that you exist. 
• Lead Generation - This is very measurable using a call to action that requires readers to give you their contact information in order to receive something from you such as a newsletter, e-book, or white paper.
• Increased Website Traffic - It is very easy to measure the traffic to your web page that is driven by your articles.  You can do this using a tracking program such as Google Analytics or special urls that are used only in your article marketing.  Many article directories also have url click counts that allow you to see how many people are clicking the url in your resource box.
• Increased Business/Sales - This can also be measured if you track the people that come to you from your articles and what they do or buy afterwards.  Depending on your business this might be measured in speaking engagements, product sales, new clients, book deals, or any other number of new business opportunities that come your way.   I would say that regardless of what most of the more specific goals are in article marketing, they all lead to this one.
• Sharing Of Knowledge/Helping Others - This is not easily measured.  Except in the case where people contact you to tell you how much your article helped them, you may never know.  All that you can do is count your article views and hope that most of those people got something from what you had to say.
• Establishing Yourself As An Expert - This in some ways relates to branding.  Your goal here is to brand yourself as an expert in your field that people look to for answers, advice, and help.

As for the article that I chose as being the most successful for me in 2007…  I chose the one that had the best clickthrough percentage.  When an article gets a high clickthrough percentage it means that it is successful on a number of fronts. 

1. I successfully targeted my market.  The title of the article is Virtual Fax: The Business Traveler’s Companion.  The title and subject matter are extremely targeted.  If someone takes the time to read the article, they are definitely in my target market and they will find the information relevant to them.
2. I was successful at providing quality information.  With a high clickthrough percentage generated, it means that the information in the article is helpful.  They then clicked through to the website to learn more.
3. A level of trust was successfully earned or the reader would not click through to the web site.
4. A successful call to action was included.  The call to action is clear and benefit oriented, urging readers to click though to the web site.

So while this article did not produce an extremely high number of views, the people that did read it were highly targeted and also motivated by what they read to click through to my web site.

I would say that most businesses that use article marketing have a number of goals in mind that contribute to improving their business as a whole.  What are yours?

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