How to Measure the Quality of your Articles

Author: Phil Marks

If you are starting to use article marketing, or you are already an experienced article marketer, then there are ways in which you can obtain and analyse external measures of your writing quality.  Those who are serious about article marketing will usually be using an article submission service. The best submission service can offer a massive saving of effort, plus massive exposure across hundreds of publishers. A really good submission service will collate statistics for you about your article views, publishes and content feed links. Let us look at how statistical information can provide you with a way of assessing your article quality.

The Limitations of Free Submission Software

You can of course use freely available software to do the 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, then stop for a moment and work out the cost of that lost time and effort. Then of course, you will probably have to compile the statistics yourself.

The most obvious 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.

What is ‘High’ in Quality Terms?

In terms of Author Bio, this can only be relative across your range of articles. As to your website, then work with the 100/100/1 figure as a baseline for measurement. 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 in an active category, you should be outperforming this baseline.

To get an article viewed by a reader, then your article title or headline has been effective to some degree and pulled them in. Let’s assume that 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?

Using 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 reader has clicked the re-publish link to post your article on a blog, website or ezine). You can pull these figures into an analysis sheet - you may think that this is a bit over the top, but you know the old saying – if you don’t measure it you can’t improve it. However, I don’t do this on a day-to-day basis for my own articles – I just scan the numbers and take it from there, 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 (well, we certainly hope so anyway)!

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 - many do).

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.

If you have just launched a new project, with a collection of supporting marketing articles, then you can monitor these figures and pick out the hot topic or theme areas within your set of marketing articles, and then focus your further writing even more.

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© 2010 Phil Marks