Image by nep via Flickr

To sum up the entirety of this post concisely: if someone’s laughing, scared, or almost in tears, you’re doing your job. Of course, if you’re a kindergarten teacher, not all of these ring true. What I mean is: if you have become the butt of your competition’s jokes and your clients can’t sleep at night, then you’re a great creative. Why? Because you’re one step away from making your clients laugh and your competition cry.

Let me share a story: I have been posting ads on Craigslist (in addition to trolling writing job posts) every few days for the last few weeks in an effort to gain more visibility in Denver.

Recently, I crafted this little masterpiece:

I’m Michael. I’m no longer a business student, and have now turned belly dancer. I’m also a writer.

I don’t really come with a lot of perks, because I’m not a car or an executive position. But I like to write. I like to write almost as much as I like to think I’m good at it.

This advertisement should catch your eye because it’s short, sweet, and sounds fantastic when you translate it to Russian (I’m serious. Give it a try).

As for me… I’m a web developer, choreographer, teacher, muse, purveyor of shiny things, and possibly a Roman czar (though I can’t confirm that). You can get all the gory details on my sparsely-padded resume, when you email me. Now. Before the competition gets me.

It was a success for a couple days and got me a few emails (Though not nearly enough). And then, the unexpected. It was flagged for removal.

Someone out there thought my charm was obscene, irrelevant, or otherwise improper. I was hurt. Then I realized the truth.

My competition is scared.

Some writer out there decided I was intimidating enough to flag my advertisement for removal. I would be stealing business from them otherwise.

You can rest on the assumption that I am over the Moon happy about this. It means I’m not talking out of my ass and I can indeed be a writer, professionally.

If you’re a creative, or if you want to be successful, continue to push the boundaries on your business and your thinking. Challenge yourself daily. Evolve constantly. Defeat stagnation. Maybe soon your competition will be scared, too.

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It’s not quite that amazing, but it is fairly effective as a method of driving traffic. At least, until recently.

Not too long ago, Google changed its algorithm yet again. So-called Google Panda means, in theory, that low-quality content will be ranked lower in the search engine results than the high-quality, original content.

Of course, debate rages as to whether that has actually happened or not, but that’s not what you’re here to read about.

Article directories like eZine Articles and Suite 101 have a love-hate reputation within the online community. Marketers love them because people actually, for whatever reason, read them and they rank highly in search engines – and they pass link love to their newest endeavors, helping the marketers to rank higher. People searching for “real” answers hate them, because they’re often incredibly useless, watered-down, or even downright spamtastic.

Some people question the efficacy of an article marketing campaign, but many agree that it is the way to go when you’re trying to build your site’s reputation and you have very little content to anchor your site in social media front pages.

The question today, though, is whether article marketing is still useful and relevant to your business and search engine endeavors.

As noted, Panda aims to eliminate low-quality content from search engine results (at least, the top spots). Article directories are notorious for having incredibly low-quality content. That should mean that article directories should rank lower, right?

Well, if you are keeping track of results pages, you might have noticed that some of the pages moved down in the rankings. However, they are still very much visible and accessible – including to search engines.

Search engines will still pick up on the link back to your site. They will still consider it in their calculations for where your site will appear. Perhaps human eyes will not find their way to your article marketing efforts as easily, but if you’re doing article marketing for direct human traffic, you’re probably a little misguided.

So is it still relevant? Is it still useful? Absolutely!

I recommend you continue your article regimen for promoting your best articles. Combine it with the right mix of social media, other link-building, relationship building and networking, and you’ve got a recipe for a win – unless you’re trying to rank highly for a competitive keyword, in which case you’ll need to get a little more creative.

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Rate is simple enough. It is merely the calculated number in a specific form.

Conversion, however, is a slightly more complicated term.

A conversion rate is the number (generally a percentage) of people who do what you want them to do compared with the number of people who you bait and hook but do not reel in.

To know your conversion rate, you need to know what your goal is: what is the call to action (you do have a call to action, right?).

Because of this broad nature, a conversion rate is often used to measure any number of things. If you’re performing a snail mail campaign, your call to action (the ultimate goal – the ideal way your customer will respond to your efforts) might be calling you on the phone and scheduling a free consultation. In that case, your conversion rate would be the number of calls as a percentage of the number of letters you sent out.

If you’re trying to get visitors to your website to sign up for an email newsletter, you might track the number of clicks to your website and the number of newsletter sign-ups. Additionally, most anybody would want to track the number of people who made it to the sign-up page and then left (a very handy number for analyzing if your sales pitch needs work – more on that in another post).

Now that you know what a conversion rate is, it’s time to try a little exercise: I want you to find the conversion rate for whatever method of advertising you most rely on (or whichever you find simplest, or most challenging… whatever gets your boat a-floatin’).

Identify your call-to-action. Buying a product or service from you is probably the simplest for now.

Identify your medium, like your website, your business card, or a direct mailing.

Track how many people access the medium. For a direct mailing, it’s the number of letters you sent out. For your business card, it’s how many you hand out (No, do not overdo it and try to track how many people the cards are passed on to). For your website, install some form of visitor tracking software (I like Google Analytics) and see how many people click to your website.

Track how many people contact you. It gets more complicated than this, of course, if you have advertised via multiple methods. A great way to find out how someone heard about you? Just ask them. More often than not people are more than happy to answer. Of course, there is an exception:

Please do not include a request for “How did you hear about us?” on your website or newsletter sign-up. It is quite clear that they are signing up for your newsletter through your site, so the online pitch probably had a lot to do with it. If you have a few people who sign up randomly after meeting you in person, that is fine. Statistics always accounts for outliers – so can you.

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