This article continues the series How Authors Can Sell More Books with Article Marketing started with: Part I: The Big Plan and Part II: The Ezinearticles.com Submission Process. This article follows Part III, on How Authors Can Source Content for Article Marketing, and Part IV, Linking Strategies.
One of the reasons I like posting my articles at Ezinearticles.com is the metrics they make available to authors. These statistics allow you to see exactly how different articles perform, and provide some surprisingly detailed feedback on the way you’ve put your articles, links and resource box together.
Ezinearticles.com Metrics for Article Marketers
The first thing you’ll find when you log in is a link to the New Stats Overview which lands you in the new Dashboard view of the stats area. This area collects Article, Keyword and Author stats and presents the summaries on one web page.
Here’s a look at the dashboard’s top section, showing the Article Stats: (You can click all these screenshots to get a look at what I’m referring to in the article.)
I’m interested in three things in the Summary:
- Views—this is good for raw exposure.
- Publications—each article published is another one-way backlink to my blog, part of the payoff I’m looking for from this experiment.
- URL clicks—this is the other key metric of how many people were curious or engaged enough, or needed more information and thought to click through to my website, thus becoming visitors.
These represent the core of my motivation for engaging in article marketing to begin with. I’ll be watching these closely as the experiment moves forward. The chart of Click Through Rate I don’t concern myself with at the moment, but I’m always interested in the Top Five Articles on the right. This gives me some indication of what people are searching for, and which articles were the most appealing.
Keyword Analysis
The next section in the Dashboard is probably the biggest reason I created this whole article-marketing series. Here Ezinearticles.com shows the top five keywords (search terms) people used to find my most-viewed article, “Writers Ask: How Long Should My Book Be?”
I can see from this chart that the headline itself was a pretty direct hit for many searchers, which undoubtedly helped this article rise to the top.
Learning to use these statistics to find, target and evaluate keyword strategies is going to become one of the most important marketing tools nonfiction authors posses. Digitization means that more and more content moves online where discoverability—how easy it is for searchers to find your content—will be critical. It doesn’t replace your other marketing; it’s an integral part of your marketing.
Each article has a linked page from the keyword analysis to a detailed examination of day-by-day and keyword-by-keyword reporting. If you want to drill down, go right ahead.
Author and Article Stats
The bottom section of the dashboard has a summary of Author Stats, but clicking the link to the Author Stats page shows that this is mostly a compliation of statistics already presented elsewhere.
These are the basic exposure metrics, but there’s one further chart that gives a ranking within your chosen subject areas.
This is a direct comparison with other authors posting articles to the same subject categories. For instance, there are 533 authors who have published articles to the “Writing and Speaking: Publishing” category, and 527 of them have posted fewer articles than I have.
Is this useful? Looks mostly like ego stroking, since I can’t see how it would affect the goals of my article marketing experiment.
Leaving the Dashboard and going to Author Tools / View My Article Reports you get a summary screen that’s really useful to see all your articles at once.
Here the chief statistics for each article are collected and you can sort them and export them for further analysis if you like.
If you’re interested at all in using Ezinearticles.com for an article marketing effort of your own, I encourage you to explore the site. There’s a huge number of resources in a very deep site, most of it focused on helping authors write and submit better articles. You can get a pretty good education right here.
The Backlinks Come Home to Roost
I said one of the purposes of article marketing was spreading content for the purpose of getting links, the backbone of any website’s authority and influence. Here you can see a result from a search I did on “How Print-on-Demand Book Distribution Works.” By searching on the exact title it was easy to find the articles that had been reprinted from Ezinearticles.com:
I checked out this site and it’s an AdSense publisher, trying to get clicks on Google ads from people searching on certain terms. Frankly, this is not a high-quality link, but it is a link. Time will tell whether the article marketing strategy continues to work, in this niche, at this time.
Of course the links you get from publishing the original article on Ezinearticles.com also gives you a link, and a high-quality one. It’s one of the highest-rated sites on the internet.
I should note here that even more detailed statistics are available if you’re willing to upgrade from the free account to a “Premium Membership.” However this costs a hefty $97/month, and is clearly more than I need for this experiment. After all, part of the attraction of article marketing for authors is that it can be done for no investment other than your time.
This is the last article in the series about article marketing for authors. I’ll continue to post progress reports for my little case study. As of today I have about 30 of my planned 100 articles up on the site, and more in the works. It should be interesting, and I’m sure I’m going to learn a lot from the keyword data that Ezinearticles.com will continue to collect for me over the months.
Takeaway: For nonfiction authors in a well-defined niche, article marketing may represent a viable way to build authority, traffic, and book sales from a few hours of their own work. Stay tuned to see how my results work out.
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