Many people use article marketing to publicize their websites. Using articles for this purpose can afford proof of your credentials to share information to the broader internet community.

If you are involved in this promotion method have you ever stopped to consider to what extent this activity of article marketing is bringing in income for your online efforts. If not, you are highly recommended to spend some time correlating revenue to article marketing.

While article marketing incorporates many factors such that an exact calculation of advantages in revenue terms is difficult, we cannot ignore the fact that when it comes to profitability of any online business, we must think in terms of hard cash.

Here statistics play a big part in correlating revenue to articles and I am about to propose a way that you can check your article marketing statistics.

Simple calculations can help to project revenue to the number of articles we write, even though there are factors peculiar only to a specific author that are not common to any other individual.

Over a certain time of, say, 6 months, an author of several articles can graph receipts derived from article writing with the "y" axis as Revenue and the "x" axis of the graph as the quantity of articles prepared, each time maintaining the number of article directories to which the article was submitted at the same figure.

For example if you are marketing these articles to sites such as ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com, your revenue that goes to the "y" axis is the payout derived for the month from using only article marketing, and the "x" axis will be the number of articles submitted.

Over the period of 6 months, you will have enough data on the graph to form a straight line that goes through most of these points on the graph where the line is represented by the equation y=mx+c

The function of the regressed straight line will show that the return derived is a function of "m" which is the gradient of the line, and a constant "c".

The constant "c" is the value at which the straight line cuts the "y" axis and this is the particular part which stems from the individual and is an indication of his talents in article writing, his craft of writing, his command of the language and factors that only the individual possesses.

By studying revenue obtained against number of articles submitted, keeping other factors unchanged, it will be possible to get an indication of the quality of the author's writing and form a rough basis to forecast further profitability to the number of articles planned for submission, ignoring other factors such as keyword selection, onsite and offsite search engine optimisation which are excluded from the study, and only on the basis of the individual's writing "flair" and talent as measured by the constant "c".

This is by no means exact; but recording statistics and charts like these is useful in helping the marketer notice sudden trend changes, particularly where performance falls.

He can then consider what has caused this change and highlight details that may be otherwise missed.

Many use software to track earnings, but most scripts do not incorporate graphical analysis. When the charting is done by hand the internet marketer notices sudden fluctuations or is able to think about what to change to bring in more revenue.

He can go deeper to ask this question: " Since the revenue is directly proportional to the slope of the revenue line, what factors will change the slope?".

Knowing these factors, he can vary them and test the changes.

By correlating revenue with articles written, the internet marketer can forecast profitability, no matter how rough the estimate. He has on his hands a set of statistics to use for further analysis, or in marketing terms "testing".