Ezine Promotion: Tracking the Results of Your Efforts
By Brian Alt

Ezine promotion is a long and arduous process. Take a look through all the articles in the Ezine-Tips.com promotion archives and you'll quickly realize that the sheer number of techniques available for promoting your ezine can be quite overwhelming. The quest you may find yourself asking is this: which techniques are going to work the best for me?

Unfortunately, there's no easy answer to this question. While some techniques should definitely be used by everyone (announcement lists, search engine submissions, etc.), others may only work well for certain ezine topics.

By tracking the results of your promotional efforts, you will effectively identify which techniques work the best for you, and which ones don't work. You can then eliminate those that don't work and focus on those that do to maximize your time spent promoting your ezine.

These are a few specific techniques that will help you measure the effectiveness of your ezine promotional efforts:

* Tracking Referrers - Live statistics tracking services such as HitBox and WebTrendsLive will tell you where your Web site traffic is coming from. This "referrer" information will be useful for gauging which search engines, directories, and other Web sites are sending you the most traffic. For more on live statistics tracking, go here.

* Tracking Click-Throughs - For tracking visits from other sources (such as ezine advertising), you could set up unique Web page URLs for each promotional effort. Measuring the number of times that those pages are accessed will tell you the number of click-throughs that those efforts create.

You basically have two options here. Either set up "refresh" pages using the appropriate HTML meta tags...

Or utilize link-tracking software of some kind, which will make the job of tracking click-through much easier. Two such solutions recently reviewed in Ezine-Tips include ProLinkz and the Lyris click-through tracking module.

* Tracking Email Requests
- Email subscription requests can be tracked by setting up unique email aliases for individual promotional efforts. This technique is covered in detail here.