It’s Beer Thirty, Do You Know Where Your Articles Are?

Do you have a system for tracking your articles? You’d better because in today’s Internet marketing climate you can easily lose control. With spammers, scrapers, hackers, and other ne’er-do-wells lurking around every corner, you an easily lose track of your articles and forget where you’ve placed them. That’s why I recommend a system.

You can buy a fancy schmancy article tracking software for thousands of dollars or use the old trusty Excel spreadsheet that came with your laptop. I prefer the latter.

It’s real easy to track your articles. In the horizontal fields across the top of your spreadsheet, type in this information:

• Name of Article
• Where Published
• PageRank
• Date of Submission
• Approved Date
• Author Resource Box
• Number of Publishers

Some of these fields are self explanatory so I won’t discuss them here, but there are some that warrant an explanation. Here it is:

Where Published - This is not always an article directory, though it may be. If it is then list the directory. If you send your article through a submission service such as iSnare then list that service. Many times, however, you’ll submit an article directly to a publisher, either a blog or a website within your niche. Write the URL of that site down here in this field.

PageRank – The PageRank of the website where your article is published on the day that you publish it. PageRank is not as good a measure as it used to be, but it’s nice to know how your article progresses over time. If you submit to PR0 sites, and I recommend that you do, then knowing that one year later the site has progressed to a PR5 can be rather encouraging when your article is passing good link juice.

Author Resource Box – I recommend that you use more than one author resource box. In this field you’ll write the author resource box that you are using for this publisher on this date. Use a system that you understand and will remember for your author resource box organization. For instance, you might says version A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, or B3 where A represents the website and 1, 2, and 3 are the versions of your author resource box for that website. Use a system that works for you and that you’ll remember.

Number of Publishers – If you do submit your articles to article directories then you’ll want to check in from time to time and see how many times your article has been downloaded. This field will likely not be 100% accurate as some publishers will just copy and paste your article without using the directory’s script for the article. That’s OK; some publishers do it the right way. At least you’ll have an idea of how many publishers have used your article. I’d check on it every three months.

If you want to track the effectiveness of your articles then you need to know where they are at all times. An Excel spreadsheet can help you keep track of that.