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The main reason that many authors write and publish articles is to draw attention to a product or service that they are selling. Known as article marketing, this is one of the few remaining methods of free advertising that are still highly effective.

An article is usually composed of around 500 or so words, on a single topic that will be of interest to your target market. A resource box is included at the end of the article. This contains your bio plus details of the product or service that the article is promoting.

Writing an article doesn't have to be hard work. All that is required is to carry out your research, then write the article summarizing your research in your own words.

Having completed your article, your next task is to get it publicized. Submitting your article to selected article directories normally carries this out. These serve the purpose of introducing the article gatherer to the article writer. If a publisher sees your article and wants to include it on their website or in their newsletter, this is allowed on the condition that the resource box is also included. This way, the publisher gains valuable content and the writer gains publicity. Everyone is happy!

So, is that the end of your task as an article author, or is there more that you can do to improve the results from your article writing?

If you have submitted your article to more than one article directory, how will you know which directory your website visitors have come from? How will you know if you are wasting your time submitting to hundreds of article directories, when the results may only be coming from a handful of them? You need to be able to track the results of each and every article submission that you make in order to find the answers to these questions.

Web hits and keyword ranking are useful stats to have, but you also need to track the number of pages indexed and the number of back links each article has obtained. These stats are also available to you, but only at the expense of a lot of time or five levels deep into some SE software.

With time being the valuable commodity that it is these days, we all need to spend as little of it as possible carrying out mundane tasks. I ask you, which is more likely to be the more profitable for you - time spent checking stats, or time spent writing another article? Exactly!

It is only by tracking the results of your marketing that you can determine the steps you need to take in order to see your website rise in the search engine rankings. If you are not already tracking your results, then it is high time you started. Simply submitting one article after another and hoping for the best just doesn't cut the mustard these days.