Keeping track of things falls into the often boring but still necessary category.

It’s essential if you’re directly paying for advertising – you need to know whether or not the clicks you’re buying are converting into something useful or if they’re just vanishing into thin air after they click.

The same goes for other places that are “free” but where you’re paying with your time.

Depending on the system you’re using, there may be some tracking either built in – EzineArticles tells you how many clicks have been made, that kind of thing – or it may be up to you to follow up with your own system.

As with any statistics, there’s scope for errors to creep in (human or machine) and there’s also scope for spending more time than you originally planned in what turns out to be analysis paralysis.

If you’re using paid adverts, there’s often quite a sophisticated system available. Adwords has that kind of system, at least partly because they’d like you to spend more money on ads that are working for you. If you can afford Adwords in your niche you need to drill down because all clicks are definitely not equal and even if a campaign is profitable overall there could easily be clicks that are draining cash.

If you pay for solo ads, you’ll know that there are some built in tracking options and lots of third party systems to allow you to check whether the clicks you got were from curiosity or whether they turned into a two way exchange of cash rather than one that just benefits the solo ad seller. Your call on that – the “buyer beware” nature of solo ads is one of several reasons that I’m not a fan of them.

If you’re using links at the end of articles or in the description section of videos or anywhere else, it pays to track so that, over time, you can fine tune what you’re doing.

Tracking those links can be a pain in the neck.

Especially at places like YouTube where the whole link is shown and the only way of cloaking it is to use some kind of link shortener.

For me, that makes it a problem because the plugin I use (WPShorties) doesn’t seem to track clicks from emails or links outside the website it’s on. It redirects them fine, just doesn’t bother to increment the number of clicks on the control panel.

That’s OK with me if the program I’m using has its own tracking option – Warrior Plus, ClickBank, several of the private affiliate programs I’m with all allow me to make up a tracking link on the fly. Then all I have to do is remember what the link stands for and actually check my stats.

It’s not as good if I’m sending the click to a program that doesn’t make tracking easy.

I’ve learned over time to make any links that I only have control over when I first place them go via my own site, even if I don’t have a way of tracking them. That’s because links can and do break over time and if they’re on someone else’s site and they have control over the link, it’s often next to impossible to get the link changed. That was especially so when sites took articles from places like EzineArticles and republished them – you rarely know where the articles are republished and have no direct (or often even indirect) contact with the sites. So the links can go dead if they don’t redirect via your site.

I’m fairly chilled about tracking the data from places like SlideShare and YouTube.

A couple of reasons for that:

• I’m usually promoting my own sites and products on these sites
• I’ve no idea ahead of time whether a particular video will be a success – I can only guess based on views for similar topics

Which means that replicating what happened (one of the reasons for tracking is so you can scale) isn’t really an option.

Which means that, for me, tracking isn’t a major part of what I do.

Sure, I’ll check stats every now and then.

But not much more than that.

And because it’s a fairly long term strategy to get free traffic from places like YouTube or my own blog posts, for me the gut reaction is good enough.

You’ll need to home in on your own system over time and figure out what works well enough for you.

With free traffic like videos and blog posts, I’d suggest a simple tracking system from day one (a redirect plugin for instance) so that the figures are there if you change your mind in the future.

But, whatever happens, don’t use checking your stats as an excuse not to create more content because ultimately that’s what will get you more traffic and hopefully sales.

You can tweak things later but only if you’ve got something tangible to tweak.