You spend your valuable time writing articles. Or you spend your hard-earned money hiring freelancers to write quality articles. But do you know what your “article ROI” (Return on Investment) is?
It’s criticial for affiliates to start tracking the results of every single article and resource box. All it takes is 4 simple steps…
1 – Are you always driving traffic to an offer page? If your resource box is sending visitors to your home page or an “About the Author” page, you’re probably seriously missing out on sales, opt-ins, or other results from your article marketing efforts. Rethink your resource box strategy, and write it more like a PPC ad than an “aithor box.” Send visitors to a page that gives them something to do – perfeably something that ultimately generates sales.
2 – Are you using unique tracking URLs in your resource boxes? Using tracking URLs in your resource box allows you to count the number of visitors and/or sales your article is generating. To comply with the requirements of most article directories, you’ll need to send your visitors to a top level domain page you actually own or control. So your best bet is to send your visitors to unique offer pages you’ve created on your domain.
3 – Are you tracking all the action links on your offer pages? Here’s where learning to append TIDs to your URLs comes in handy, or you can use a service like Hypertacker to create tracking campaigns for every single link on your pages. And don’t forget to add tracking for hyperlinked images, such as ebook covers. You want to know exactly what every visitor is doing once they land on your page!
4 – Are you calculating the dollar value of each article? With those unique URLs in your resource box and on your web pages, you now know how much traffic each article is generating, as well as how much money each article is making. So if you get 500 newsletter sign ups from an article that cost you $25 in freelance fees, you’ve spent just 5 cents per opt-in, which is a terrific value. Or if that same article generated $125 in sales, you can calculate the ROI:
$125 Income / $25 Cost = 5, for an ROI of 500%
You can also calculate the average earnings for an article in a given niche, like this:
You earned $125 in commissions within seven days of submitting five articles, so…
$125 Commissions / 5 Articles = $25 per article
Since you can roughly expect to earn about $25 for every article you submit within about a week, you now know how much you can afford to pay a freelancer to write one article in this niche. This also allows you to predict your break even point on each article.
As you can see, if you’re an active article marketer, tracking is vitally important – especially when you’re testing out a product. Even though this isn’t PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, where you PAY every time someone clicks a link, you need to track so you know which niches and products are worth your time and energy.
[...] If you want to work out how much your articles are worth, this is a useful blogpost Do you know how much your articles are worth [...]
[...] But for article marketing, email marketing, and other forms of online marketing (such as blog or forum marketing), it’s vital that you develop a way to measure the cost of intangibles, such as the time you spend writing articles or managing JVs. (Read our article on “Do You Know How Much Your Articles Are Worth?” for ideas on how to track the return on your article marketing.) [...]
[...] But for article marketing, email marketing, and other forms of online marketing (such as blog or forum marketing), it’s vital that you develop a way to measure the cost of intangibles, such as the time you spend writing articles or managing JVs. (Read our article on “Do You Know How Much Your Articles Are Worth?” for ideas on how to track the return on your article marketing.) [...]
[...] But the same rule also holds true if you’re doing article marketing, blog monetization, or opt-in marketing. Your investment may be in site or blog development, outsourced writing, list building, or a combination, but all of these efforts still cost you both time and money. (Read our post “Do You Know What Your Articles Are Worth?” for a way to measure the ROI of article marketing.) While content and email marketing can be much more forgiving when it comes to ROI, it’s still a fact that some of the offers you promote with these methods will be winners… and others will be underachievers or outright losers. Some programs may offer excellent products, but you suffer leakage through phone orders or parasite affiliates who could be cannibalizing your traffic. [...]
[...] But the same rule also holds true if you’re doing article marketing, blog monetization, or opt-in marketing. Your investment may be in site or blog development, outsourced writing, list building, or a combination, but all of these efforts still cost you both time and money. (Read our post “Do You Know What Your Articles Are Worth?” for a way to measure the ROI of article marketing.) While content and email marketing can be much more forgiving when it comes to ROI, it’s still a fact that some of the offers you promote with these methods will be winners… and others will be underachievers or outright losers. Some programs may offer excellent products, but you suffer leakage through phone orders or parasite affiliates who could be cannibalizing your traffic. [...]