It is important to know which article submission sites are working for you. If you are not getting any results from a particular site, stop wasting your time and submit to someone else. Maybe the clientele from that site is not interested in your particular niche. If you are diligent in tracking your results, you will know this right away and can stop wasting time with them.

It is particularly important to know which of your ads are working. This is even more critical if you are using paid ads. If the profit an ad generates is less than the cost of the ad, you need to advertise elsewhere. This type of information is readily available if you are tracking your results. Too many people write up several ads and send them out along with a check week after week. Because they are happy with the total results, they never bother to check which individual ones are working. With diligent tracking, you can see if a particular ad is profitable.

Good tracking will also allow you to test how an ad performs. Keep good records on the results from each ad. Change just one thing on your worst performing ad and watch the results. Continue doing this with each ad and you will improve your profits by significant amounts.

I get a lot of questions on how to track an ad (or article). It is actually quite simple. At the end of your URL, enter a question mark and the name of the test, ad, or Ezine that you are tracking (for example-blahblahblah.com?ad1). Each time your website gets a hit from that source, your counter will log that information. By comparing hits from competing ads, or articles, you can determine which are the most successful. Before you commit to any substantial tracking campaign using this method, do a simple test to ensure that your website works properly with the question mark test. Some servers do not recognize it and will return a “site not found" notice. If this is the case, you cannot use this simple tracking method.

Of course, you also have to have a good counter for this to work. You can find many free counters on the Internet by doing a search.

When tracking your paid ads, eliminate the less profitable ones. Then, commit more money (for bigger ads) in those publications that are profitable. If you do not want to use larger ads, seek out other publications to replace those less profitable ads.

The same is true if you are using free ads. Replace non-performing ads with free ads in other publications. By doing this, you will continually upgrade your ad performance, and ultimately, your profitability.