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[Note from Jeanie: I wrote this article to fill a gap at this web site about article writing. It tells a story that I think is fun and informative. Enjoy!]

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Tracking Your Articles on the Internet

By Jeanie Marshall

When you write articles for article directories, you'll find it helpful to get some direct experience with tracking the effectiveness of your article marketing campaign. It's interesting to know how and where your articles are spreading, which is a phenomenon known as "viral marketing." You'll learn a lot by tracking a few articles, or just one article that you consider to be particularly important.

Title Matters

Start by creating a strong and distinctive title. There's a lot of talk about making article titles keyword-rich (and many authors load their titles with keywords that create a meaningless or stilted title). In most of my titles, I usually use one keyword, sometimes more. More important for me, though, is to create a distinctive title that reflects the content of the article.

If you want to take a peek at my titles (and of course, read any articles that appeal to you), you can see many of them easily at EzineArticles.com or a different set (with some overlap) at the Alphabetical Listing of Articles at one of my blogs.

Search Your Chosen Title

Next, do a search for the title you want to use, putting the title in quotation marks. For example, If you Google "Those January Santa Monica Blooming Daffodils" you'll get no results (that is, until this page is indexed). With zero results, you'll know that this is really your title for your article. If someone else's article (or product or web site) pops up, you can decide to use the title or change it. This is your baseline.

Next, post your article at EzineArticles.com. Only there. Read on.

Make Some Changes on the Article and Repeat the Process

Take this same article and change your title and parts of your article. In other words, you want to create an article that the search engines read as different from the first. You can think of this as a controlled experiment. Or a test article. Or split testing.

As with the first, search for this new title in quotation marks for your baseline. Post this article at other Article Directories.

Now you have one article (technically, two articles) on two different paths, potentially circulating the Internet. If your article is unique and fills a gap, it will get published in Ezines, web sites, and other Article Directories in addition to the ones you submitted to.

A word of caution: do not submit these two articles to the same directory. At some Article Directories, this is a violation of the Terms of Service (TOS). It's a perfectly legitimate strategy to do this type of split testing, just keep track of your articles.

Track the Results

After a few days, search Google (or any other search engine you like) for each title separately, remembering to use quotation marks. This will give you a count and, of course, the places where your article is posted. It's a good idea to visit some of those places. Those visits have been very fascinating to me!

Usually, you'll find that your first article at EzineArticles.com will be indexed by Google within 24-48 hours. Others will follow. Just because your article comes up on the first page of Google with your search, don't be deceived by this. Remember, you're probably the only one who is searching by the exact title. It's nice to see it there for the small gratification, but the real reason is to know that your article is now indexed by Google. Continue to track it to see where it's published, knowing that it's all the result of the EzineArticles.com original publication.

The second article will show up on Google soon after, depending mainly on the popularity of the Article Directory itself. If you publish your second article at several Article Directories, those will show up first and then you'll notice your article has a life of its own with no more effort on your part. If it's a popular article, it will leap exponentially at some point. By then, you'll have written and posted several other articles. And on and on and on.

Of course, you won't want to spend all your time tracking the spreading of your articles. And certainly you won't want to do this with all your articles. Be selective; when it's no longer interesting, stop. In six months you can search again.

"Last Dance" Gets a New Title

In early 2000, I wrote an article which I published at my web site called, "Last Dance." In the context of my own web site, that was a helpful and meaningful title. However, it's not distinctive enough for circulating the Internet.

When I published this article at EzineArticles.com in December 2005, I knew it needed a different title, something more distinctive. So, I picked a title that no one else could come up with. It's the phrase that I use as the very last words of the article, "To Dance with Jim His Last Dance."

Immediately after I posted it at EzineArticles.com, I did a Google search for "To Dance with Jim His Last Dance" and discovered lots of information. The most significant finding: Google already had that phrase indexed, linked to my article at my web site! That was the first time I recognized that Google goes as deep as the last line of an 1800-word article.

When searching for the title a week or so later, I found a number of interesting dynamics, the most interesting of which was that one person who picked up the article from EzineArticles.com liked it enough to add a graphic. What fun.

Needless to say, I don't search for all my articles on a regular basis. I have not searched at all in many months. I did it enough to understand the rhythm of the Internet a little bit better — better than any Web guru could explain it, because I have experienced it for myself.

Author: Copyright © 2007 Marshall House, http://www.mhmail.com Jeanie Marshall, Personal Development Coach, writes extensively on subjects related to professional and personal development. She has developed a site with writing resources for coaches and consultants.

(Jeanie gives you permission to use this article at your web site, provided you publish the article as presented, with no changes, including active hyperlink. Please be certain to remove the note above the article.)

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