I’ve been experimenting with article submissions to increase backlinks, and I want to determine the traffic the articles generate as well, but I’ve been doin’ it wrong.

Since the articles I’m submitting (hopefully) get republished on other websites and sent out in newsletters, it’s getting hard to figure out (short of visiting every site that sends me one or two visitors a month) which traffic is coming from the articles.

So, I want to add a tracking code or special page to the links I put in the articles I submit. But as I peruse other people’s articles, there sure aren’t many people who seem to be doing this.

So, am I missing something? Is there a way to track this traffic without a link to track, or are most folks just not tracking which traffic comes from articles? Or which articles bring the most traffic, for that matter.

Ah well, as much as I hate to deviate from the norm, I’m going to add a unique code to each article anyway.

But I wonder…

-does a tracking link dilute the ‘branding’ of a stand-alone domain name?
-does it mean the main page won’t get the benefit of page rank transfer for the link?
-am I just thinking way too much?

Traffic…not the kind you’ll find on your downtown streets during rush hour, but the kind that makes your web counter spin… is something all marketers want. Badly. Very, very badly.

And there’s a million products and services out there willing to sell you traffic… and a million methods touted for getting traffic for free.

So, I decided (after trying a few of those methods with one of my product sites) to see which methods brought the most traffic, and which methods brought the best traffic.

First I bought 10,000 loosely targeted hits from a company that sells traffic from expired domains. The site you advertise is delivered as a popup or pop-under when that domain gets traffic.

Second, I set this site up as one of my InstantBuzz toolbar ads. During the test period, I ran through 159619 bar ad views (give or take the number that may have been added between the time I ran the site stats and the time I thought to check my bar views).

Third, I used the site in my signature on four related forums and posted on each periodically.

Fourth, I tried a few thousand credits at a traffic exchange site.

Finally, I put the link to the target site on most of my other sites… which aren’t necessarily in the same market, but they were incoming links nonetheless.

So, here are the results:

First, you’ll notice that only about half the traffic from the 10,000 targeted hits actually made it to the site. The rest, presumably, were killed by popup blockers. The other stats didn’t surprise me too much.

Now, lets look at which of these traffic sources actually converted to sales:

Again, not too surprising. The popups, although plentiful, didn’t produce a great conversion rate, while forum postings did. Traffic Exchange traffic was the worst, though if you’re desperate, it still does occasionally produce a result.

InstantBuzz did surprise me. I wasn’t expecting the traffic from it to convert as well as it does. Though it takes a LOT of impressions to get one click, once you’ve got a visitor from there, they’re a good prospect as long as you didn’t use a misleading headline.

Yesterday was horrible. So many of my recent promotions, and my newest product, depend on PaydotCom for processing, that when that service went down for a good part of the day, it brought my product and affiliate sales total down to a low it hasn’t seen in a long, long time.

A few days ago I spoke with an JV broker who suggested picking just one solution for my product sales, and I was leaning toward Paydotcom as the one I’d choose.

But now that I think about it, I might decide to diversify a bit. No, I don’t mean Clickbank. I can’t stand buying stuff from Clickbank, so I’m not anxious to sell using that service.

But I do have a licensed copy of Post Affiliate Pro that I’ve been using to run the affiliate program for Conversionary. I’m thinking I might just move that to a more generic domain name and run all my programs from it.

That way, I’ve got one less layer of services that can go awry. My own host can go down, but that could happen anyways. But if Paydotcom or Clickbank goes down, I won’t be affected… at least for my own product sales.

The other thing I’ll have to include in my plans in the future is to ensure that the products I promote in any given time period are not all using the same service to process credit cards or run affiliate programs. That should keep the income flowing … albeit reduced… when any one service or website is inaccessible.

I’m not saying anything bad about Paydotcom. What they do is great. And outages happen at Paypal, Clickbank, even banks. So the best thing to do if you rely on affiliate or product sales income is to mitigate the risk when (not if, when) one of the common services go down.

In a similar vein, a bug was found in Public Domain Explorer recently that crashes the program when the Library of Congress search is unavailable. We’re working on a fix now.

Well, I’ve had ContextCash links up on this blog for two days, and already I’ve got results to share.

First, let me say that this blog is not a profit-making enterprise. If it pulls in 2 bucks from Google and a hundred or so from affiliate commissions , I consider it a successful month.

So, when I looked at my Clickbank account this morning and saw some affiliate sales of products I normally don’t promote (except through ContextCash), I was pleasantly surprised. In total, $98 and change from 80 odd clicks — two or three of those are me testing the links when I first installed.

This is especially surprising since I primarily used the links to show people what ContextCASH looked like, not to sell stuff. And the links on this blog are not exactly “blended”, since they’re using a double underline to make them stand out.

Perhaps over the weekend when I add ContextCash to some of my other sites I’ll come back to this installation and make the links blend in, to see if it could possibly make this blog into a money-making one while still leaving it as the place where I can ramble about anything and everything that I feel like writing about.

Ok, I’m not all up on the SEO games and Google baiting stuff that goes on, but I stumbled across something odd today, and I wish someone could tell me what it means.

On a search for “Marketing Company” there’s an extra result on top. Yes, there are 11 rather than 10 results in total, and the first one has an ‘other sources’ link that goes to a new Google page with four “related” pages all from the same “mini net”.

Searching the Web for info on what this could be, the only suggestion I found was that it was Google finding ways to search out link scrapers and/or link farms.

I’m not sure, since I found one other result like this under “Mesothelioma Information” that referred to Wikipedia. It does seem odd to give a link with a tracking code to a company that has more to do with business card printing that marketing per se. Unless there’s cloaking goin on there’s no reason to see that site as authoratative, or even useful, for that search term.

Any ideas?