How To Create An Article Marketing Campaign: Step 1–Your Baseline

I was telling you recently how it really helps to think of yourself as implementing an article marketing campaign rather than just writing article by article and seeing how it goes.

You need to take a long term perspective with article marketing (as with any online marketing tool) , and I know that’s the area where we struggle–most people want to see results yesterday!

I know it’s hard to plug along not knowing where you’re going or where you’ll end up, and that is why creating an article marketing campaign can make all the difference in your results.

I have been article marketing for years and years, but just last year I started a new campaign that has created tremendous results for my sites. I did something a little different and it really paid off.

I thought it might be helpful to you if I shared exactly what I did so that you can get an idea in your head as to what is possible if you implement an article marketing campaign and stick with it over the long term.

I’m going give you Step 1 today, and this is it:

Establish your website’s baseline.

In order to know how you’re doing, you need to know where you’re starting from. Each month you will measure your results in the following areas, and after several months you’ll be able to see definite progress.

This was exactly my first step with my campaign that I started a year ago, and without doing this, I don’t think I would have had the success I had over the past year.

It’s simple enough–Here is how you determine your website’s baseline:

1) What is your website’s ranking for each of your keywords?

This is the definitive way to measure success with an article marketing campaign. You can measure backlinks and PageRank and all sorts of other factors, but those things in themselves don’t have any meaning. The thing directly impacts your website traffic is where your website is ranked in Google and the other search engines for specific keyword phrases associated with your website.

Obviously the first thing you need to do is keyword research to determine a list of phrases you’ll target in your article submissions and resource boxes. (More on that below.)

After you’ve determined your list of keywords, type Keyword #1 into Google.

Where does your site appear in the search engine results listings? Is it #5, #50, or 105–whatever your ranking, make a note of it.

Now, repeat this by doing a search for each of your keywords and see where your site turns up in the rankings.

Then, after you’ve finished searching in Google, hop on over to Yahoo and do the same searches.

(It’s worth it to set up a spreadsheet to track this info.)

If you don’t know what your keywords are, you will need to find out that info. Here are some resources for determining your keywords:

What are keywords?

How do I get started doing keyword research?

2) What is your website’s traffic?

You probably have some sort of stats tracking system set up with your site that will tell you your website traffic each month–that’s what you would use to tell you what your traffic is. Just whatever your website traffic was for the month prior to the month you’re currently in, add that to your spreadsheet.

Now–please note: Remember–there is a delayed reaction in the search engines and with traffic to a site, so that the efforts you exert today in marketing your site will show their results several months from now.

Here are some FAQs you may have after gathering this information:

When I do searches for my keywords, I see radically different results in Google and Yahoo–why so different?

You may rank highly for one keyword in Google and be completely off the charts in Yahoo, or vice versa. This is not unusual–each search engine has it’s own way of measuring results so the results are different. By implementing an article marketing campaign, you can ‘even things out’. When I first started my most recent article marketing campaign, my site’s rankings in Google were much higher than in Yahoo, but now a year later my site ranks at the top in both search engines.

I can’t find my site in the search engine rankings–what does that mean?

That’s fine–this is why you’re doing article marketing, so that you can jump up the rankings! Everyone has to start somewhere, and if you’re just starting to market your site it’s not unusual to not see your site listed at all in the rankings when you do a search for your keywords. You are taking steps to change that.

Is it really possible to increase your search engine rankings with Article Marketing?

Absolutely!  Let me give you a behind the scenes look at my own article marketing campaign which I started about a year ago.

Before & After:

That’s quite a jump!

But let me tell you that it didn’t happen overnight, and it took consistent work.

The very first thing I did before starting my campaign was establish my baseline, just as I’ve told you how to do in this post.

This is Step 1–it’s not that hard, and when you get into the habit of checking your stats every month, you’ll start to look forward to ’stats checking day’.

Yes, you’ll be checking these same stats every month–just put it on your calendar at the same time each month, and take a few minutes to check your stats and log them.

True, at the beginning it may not be that exciting and you may not see much of a change, but after several months of consistently submitting articles you will start to see changes.

If you come up with any other questions after going through the process of establishing your baseline, please let me know.

Photo Credit: Bed Jump Originally uploaded by jamesjyu

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