That information is provided for a reason--you should be able to look at your article stats and then get clues as to what has been successful for you and what hasn't, and then be able to use that information to tweak your articles in the future.

Usually you'll be able to see how many times your article has been viewed, how many times the republishing page has been looked at, and possibly how many times someone has grabbed the content feed for your article.

The most important statistic for our purposes here is the "Views" count.

Articles that have been published the longest time ago have the most time to rack up the views, while an article that you just submitted yesterday will probably only have a few views on it. As time passes, the likelihood that your article will be viewed by more and more people increases.

This is a key aspect about article marketing that many people miss:

When you submit an article, you're not just going on a one time link building spree.

Each article you submit has the potential to continue to work for you for years and years to come, being viewed again and again. Each time your article is viewed, the reader is presented with your resource box, which has some information about you and your business and a link back to your website.

All these views of your article and your resource box translate into a steady stream of targeted traffic to your website over the long term--that's why you started submitting articles in the first place!

When you're trying to submit articles that have long term potential and are not just one shot deals, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Your article will continue to bear fruit well after it's first distributed if you...

*Write on a topic that is of value to your target market.

*Write a quality article--a quality article is well written, grammatically correct, informative and easy to understand. Articles like this have timeless appeal, and they will continue to generate views long after they're first submitted.

Now, let's say that you're looking at your article statistics, and you notice that some articles have more views than others even though all the articles have had a chance to accumulate plenty of views.

Which of your articles have the most views?

Can you deduce any reason why particular articles are super performers?

For example, I can have an article that has 60,000 views, and then another article that was submitted at the same time that has just 1,500 views.

That's two articles submitted at pretty much the same time receiving view counts on the opposite ends of the spectrum--what gives?

From analyzing the articles, I've noticed that usually the super performing articles had one or more of these attributes that likely caused the massive increase in views:

*An in demand topic: The article was written around keyword terms that were in demand with search engines.

*A great title: There was something about the title that really motivated people to click through and read the entire article.

How can we use this information to increase the success rate of future articles?

1) Try focusing an article around a keyword term that you have researched and know to be a hot search term.

2) Pay very close attention to your titles, and experiment with phrasing that will (hopefully!) inspire more click-throughs on your article. Remember, your article title will show up in search engine results listings and also of course on the article directories themselves on the summary pages, so a compelling title can have a big impact on how many times your article is read.

Obviously, in order for your article stats to give you information of real value, you need to have submitted several articles already and not just one or two.

In order to see the results you're looking for with article marketing, you need to be submitting articles steadily every month. The more faithful you are with your article submissions, the better results you'll see.

Also, the more consistent you are with your article submissions, the better you'll be able to use your article stats to figure out ways to tweak your articles so that more articles become long term high performers.

By just following the one or more of the suggestions in this article, you can make a drastic impact on your article marketing success this year!