How to Use External Statistics to Measure Your Article Quality

Maybe you are new to article marketing, or maybe you are already an experienced article marketer,but did you know that there are ways in which you can obtain and analyse external measures of your writing quality? The best article submission services will give you a massive saving of effort, plus huge exposure across hundreds of publishers. It should also collate statistics for you about your article views, publishes and content feed links. This can provide you with a way of assessing your article quality.

The Limitations of Free Submission Software

You can use freely available software to do the article submission yourself, but before you spend time going through the learning curve, making mistakes and wasting effort trying to build the list of sites for submission, stop and work out the cost of that lost time and effort. Then you will probably have to compile the statistics yourself.

One way of getting an external assessment of quality is to monitor the clickthroughs you get – to your author profile and target marketing website, but there are other more important measures. The article directory should have these available.

What is ‘High’ in Quality Terms?

For the Author Bio, this can only be relative across your range of articles. Work with the 100/100/1 figure as a notional. That is, 100 views of your article leads to 1 clickthrough, and 100 clickthroughs lead to 1 sale. With well written articles, a good squeeze page and publishing in an active category, you should be outperforming this baseline.

For an article to be viewed by a reader, then your article title or headline has to be effective and encourage them to click through. So, you can write an effective article headline, you have grabbed the reader, then where next? Where then does our search for external quality measures lead us?

Article Statistics

If you use one of the leading article submission services or article directories, then statistics are available which enable you as the author to build relative comparisons and enable assessment of:

1. The relative popularity of your (the author) subject classifications

2. The relative popularity of articles within classifications

3. The average popularity of your articles.

This is done by using the ‘number of views’ and ‘number of re-publishes’ (where a ‘professional’ reader or editor has clicked the re-publish link to post your article on a website, blog or ezine). You can pull these figures into an analysis sheet – you may think that this is a bit over the top, but if you don’t measure it you cannot improve it! However, I do not do this on a day-to-day basis for my own articles – I just scan the numbers quickly as I already know what my key figures are.

If you are monitoring feed subscriptions as well, then these are time sensitive and eventually level out, whereas older articles naturally have higher viewing figures which continue to climb (or should do, anyway)!

Work Out What Works Well

When you have pulled your statistics together then you can start comparing and digging:

1. Which are the best and worst performing articles within a category?

2. Review the articles and edit if necessary to improve them (provided the directory publisher allows this).

There are further nuances to this, which can enable you to assess your popularity as an author and your popularity with professional readers – the ezine editors, blog and website content pickers who control the gateway to leveraging your article publishing efforts.

If you have just launched a new project, with a collection of supporting marketing articles, then you can monitor the stats and identify the hot topic or theme areas and trends within your set of marketing articles. Then you can focus your further writing even more, and testing your keywords further.

(c) 2010 Phil Marks