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Since posting a lot of the article marketing experiments last month, I've gotten a whole lot of questions about the intelligence you can glean from utilizing articles in your overall site building mindset...simply as a baseline metric to figure out what works well, and what does not. 
Interestingly while conventional direct response wisdom will tell you that what works in one market will work well in another, my own experience as has been quite the opposite. Human nature may certainly never change from market to market, but the message you use to seal the deal oftentimes very much does.
John emailed me last week and asked ( and paraphrasing a bit for brevity..:-)
" How Can I tell if my articles are good?"
I can empathize with this question because, like me, I believe all of my articles dress well, and have a good sense of humor. But that still hasn't stopped Megan Fox from threatening a restraining order if I keep sending flowers on special occasions. The truth of the matter is this - the marketplace will TELL you whether your articles are good, or need to be improved in fairly short order. How? Are you they being opened - yes or no? Are you getting traffic once they are (is the resource box converting) Are your landing pages converting the traffic that they send…yes or no? It's all reasonably simple stuff, and if you set baseline points for each campaign - i.e -these 10 articles should get 10,000 views in aggregate - I would like 2000 new eyeballs in front of my offer, and - considering this affilate program converts at X, or the adsense/YPN ads on my page are worthY - the totality of this campaign, if it performs AT expectations - should be Z, and that is worth the expenditure of time and effort to knock them out. Of course if you are list building, or simply using all of the individual parts of the campaign to measure the individual anatomical "correctness" of a larger body of work, the monetary gains most likely are far less important at this stage and you are most likely more concerned with simple intelligence….in which case, often times getting shitty results is preferable as you'll learn a lot more, and have greater incentive to refine, rework and rejuvenate your efforts when the curtains open for real.
As I've recently posted ( and shared more with others privately) some of the facts, figures and screenshots of article marketing campaigns that have been highly effective, let's take a few minutes and look at some more recent ones that have been atrociously bad…and then see what we can learn.
What is interesting to note about this particular campaign is the results totally contravene previous tests I have done in other markets using long paragraphs of resource boxes that appear to be woven into the body of the article - versus your more standard fare "click here to learn more about x" sort of approach. Not only did this totally surprise me, but the huge SPREAD between views on the headlines did as well, with the lower figure being represented by my typical long flowery sorts of headlines - " six sensational, sexy secrets to do x" sort of approach - vs - a more stormin' Normin - " do X in six easy steps".
Had I not tested this out first, I would have gone with the more overstated, sensational title with each one - as I have a terrible habit of saying in 14 words what most likely could have been said equally as effectively in 5. ( Which my shrink attributes to a slightly meglomaniacal personality problem, a deluded sense of self importance and the remnants of some bad Peyote in Costa Rica back in 1998.)
And these results below, from the same general campaign, are more in line with the general sort of range or margin you expect to be working with - generally consistent on the views, which reinforces the use of more subdued headlines as these all did - and while there is a gap in some of the resource box CTR, even a 10% spread on numbers this low (still less than a month old I believe) aren't goign to be alarming or cause for a major re-working of the resource box, although I'll obviously tweak them to run closest to the top performing one. (although in this case I do believe all three were the same)
There are some MUCH more interesting things you can do in this venue, and some darker shades of grey ways you can up the ante a bit in terms of testing, tweaking and tickling out the profit margins you NEED to make on each one of these campaigns…but I'm not going to post it here, as my good friends at ezinearticles.com do stop by on occasion..:-) I will however, be putting it up in a pdf in the FREE STUFF section within the next week or so, so that if you haven't yet tested the warm and welcoming waters of the playing on the ecological edges of right and wrong in the HUGELY self grandiose world of internet marketing ethics, you can start on your next article marketing with my blessing..:-)
Tags: article marketing, copywriting, Q & A
