With so many different things to manage, I often find myself overlooking the seemingly simple stuff that you kind of think should take care of itself. Article marketing is a huge part of my business – both in the creation of original content for my own network of sites, as well as offsite content creation to drive traffic back to my little slice of the online universe. As those of you who have worked with me personally will attest – I’m a huge believer in unique content – I don’t (and won’t) use article spinners, PLR articles and other mediocre methods to generate copious amounts of crappy content. Why? For the most part – I can write an article faster than most people can spin one ( that is fit to be published) mostly because I have a hyper active imagination, phenomenally fast fingers and incredible amounts of Caffeine pumping through my veins 19 hours a day.

Over the last few weeks though – I’ve seen a dramatic drop in some of my affiliate commissions from articles I have syndicated to the various online directories, and while I’ve been sort of aware of it in the background of my daily awareness – I’ve never gotten up the motivation to see why. Here is another good example of how laziness and being wholly unprepared comes back to bite everyone in the ass.

One article submitted to Ezine Articles using one of my pen name accounts generated a SIGNIFICANT amount of commissions for a given clickbank product – it had a good title, solid, informative content and resource box pointing back to a highly optimized landing page – all a reasonably easy way to make a nice living on autopilot. Do enough of these in enough diverse markets and after a while you are strolling down easy street wondering why all of the pernicious pot holes on the path to prosperity  went missing.

But the key is the resource box…. I don’t care how good your article is, if you muck this piece of the puzzle up, you will get far fewer clicks, which translates into far fewer eyeballs on your offer, and of course the nastiest and most nefarious side effect isn’t far behind: Far fewer sales.

Check out the preceeding example. Two articles….roughly the same EXACT amount of views in the article directory….Yet this campaign dramatically underperformed my expectations. Why? One SLIGHT change in the second article resource box yielded about 5 times FEWER clicks. Which means – scaled out at this rate, this article, with its associated resource box would need to be viewed approximately 25,000 times to equal the URL clicks the first one got at only 5,000. And of course – the cumulative net effect of this campaign was a lot less money in affiliate commissions than I budgeted for when I targeted the product, keywords and mapped out the general strategy.

Key takeaway? Keep a close eye on your CTR rate is you run a lot of article marketing campaigns no differently than you would on your Ad words efforts. You wouldn’t let your PPC campaigns bleed money for a month before you checked on their ROI – and if you look at underperforming articles as a similar slow leak in your marketing monetization model – guess what? I would have caught this a lot quicker – and considering the payout on this affiliate program is fairly high – and the better performing article of the two of these was converting exceptionally well – very simply I cost myself a nice little profit stream by being lazy.

Another good reason to use a link tracking or cloaking program on at least SOME of your article submissions as you can very simply test any number of affiliate programs either through a single link – ( i.e. –embedding different affiliate programs in the same link) or – if your Click through rate is solid but your conversions on the affiliate side sub par ( and I’ve had a lot of people indicate they were having this issue especially on Craigslist) you can VERY simply swap out affiliate offers through one single link tracking admin interface)

Interestingly – these numbers above – for this particular article campaign were even LOWER on the one article when I first made the revision (changing the second resource box to the EXACT same text as the first) and the subsequent views are getting, as you would expect, roughly the same CTR now as the first (generally 20%) which is, while not great – more than acceptable for this niche, and certainly more than ample to be very profitable.

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