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How to Test & Measure Your Article Marketing Results
By Eric Gruber, Your Article Marketing Expert | December 3, 2007
All good marketers know that they must test each message against a control to see if good results can become stellar results.
Did you know you can do this with the articles you submit online to the top websites, ezines and directories on the Web??
Here’s how.
Every article submission site will let you put in a few lines of self-promotional copy and a link to your website.
Most marketers make the mistake of using only one link that draws reader to one page. This might be helpful in building your lists, but it doesn’t do much for determining if you could do better than the norm.
Think of the possibilities for testing if you merely change the call to action and the landing page it leads to! That’s where the testing comes in.
Here’s How You Can Measure A/B Split Test With Articles – In Just 4 Steps:
Step 1. Write your promotional piece. For example, “Dan Janal, President of PR LEADS Article Marketing Experts.com has helped hundreds of businesses just like yours get the most bang from their marketing bucks with articles. For a free newsletter including tps on how you can increase your article marketing ROI, go to www.articlemarketingexperts.com/articlenewsletter.
Step 2. Now write a different call to action. “Dan Janal, President of PR LEADS Article Marketing Experts.com, has helped hundreds of businesses just like yours sell more books, products and services online with articles. For a free checklist on the best practices for article marketing go to www.IwantMoreProspects.com/10questions
With these first two steps, you can see that the call to action changes. Do people want a newsletter? Do people want a checklist? Of course, you can test anything, including asking people to buy one product, or a bundle of products.
Step 3. Create a landing page for each message above. A landing page is a page that is dedicated to one purpose. Whether you want to capture names and email addresses of each visitor or ask for the sale is up to you.
With this step, you could also test prices. People who go to landing page 1 get the product for $49.95. People who go to landing page 2 get the product for $49.95 plus free shipping. Imagine the possibilities. What would you test?
Step 4. Make sure each landing page has a way of measuring traffic and capturing names or sales. Now you have real numbers you can use to determine the effectiveness of each marketing piece.
For example, you could measure sales numbers or the ratio of visitors who place orders and become customers. For longer-range testing, you could measure the number of people who sign up for your newsletter or special report and then eventually buy from you once trust is established.
As part of our Best Practices at the PR LEADS Article Marketing Experts.com program, we submit one article to 100 sites and directories. We routinely suggest to our clients that they create four separate messages and landing pages. Each message is sent to 25 different sites. That way, we can test four different tactics to see which one has the best return.
By doing this procedure, we can test four different messages. Our clients will have the benefit of knowing which messages do best and which perform least. This is invaluable information, especially if you don’t want to blow your advertising budget on messages that don’t perform well?
And as a side benefit, we are creating four inbound links to internal pages, which is a good way for search engines to index more pages on your site! Of course, the more inbound links your site has, the higher it will rank on Google’s search engine.
The only way you will know if message performs well is NOT by the results, but by the results seen in comparison with other results.
In other words, let’s say you run a campaign and you get 1,000 new signups to your newsletter.
Sounds good.
But let’s test that against another message and you find that you get 2,000 new signups.
That’s quite a difference! Of course, you might get only 500 sign-ups and now you know not to use that message again.
Of course, these tactics should be used with any type of advertising you perform – from banner ads to Google ads to display advertising.
So why do we endorse this practice for article marketing?
Because, you are reaching your prospect in a totally different place. That’s because they don’t see articles as ads. They see articles as information that helps them get ahead in business and in life.
Furthermore, they see you as an expert who is willing to help them. That puts them in a totally different frame of mind than a casual web surfer who is on the guard against intrusive advertising, or who has placed mental filters against ads. The article reader can be easily converted to a client or customer because they want to work with a trusted source – the expert who writes articles!
That’s why you should turn your articles into a virtual test bed of marketing research.
Testing can be fun and profitable!
Topics: Breakthroughs |