Running a home business online takes a lot of time and effort. You work so hard building up new skills and trying to make it all work. If you work hard and find the right market for what you’re offering, you can have some pretty good success.

Odds are you’ll also have some things just not work out.

It happens to everyone, even the big marketers out there. Not every idea pans out. Not every marketing plan brings in enough business to be worth the effort you’ve been putting into it. If you’re paying attention to where your results come from, you should eventually realize it’s time to cut some things out.

Most obvious is the website that isn’t working out. If you keep any track at all of your stats, you have a pretty good idea as to which sites are getting traffic and/or sales. This information should make it clear to you that some ideas just aren’t working out.

A website not working out means you have a couple of options. You can dump it, either by selling it on a site such as Flippa, or by dropping the domain registration and just let it go. If you want to keep it, on the other hand, you must figure out why it isn’t producing and make it work.

It’s not always the fault of the website itself or the concept behind it. Sometimes it’s your marketing.

What are the results you’re getting from your marketing? Which activities are bringing in the most income for your sites or otherwise making themselves worth continuing. If you don’t keep track, you may not know this.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been trying something that you’ve been told produces fantastic results for others. The question is whether it produces worthwhile results for you. You’re never going to get the exact same results as someone else, no matter how carefully you follow their plans.

Let’s take article marketing, for example. It’s a popular way to market a website on a budget because it can be done for free. You can do your own writing and article distribution. As things get better, you can outsource the tedious bits.

But is article marketing working for you? It doesn’t work for everyone.

There can be a range of reasons why any marketing tactic fails for you. Maybe you’re missing a finer point that will help it work for you. Are you doing the research and testing necessary to make it work? Do you know which sources are best for that particular type of marketing? Which customers come from that kind of marketing? Are they the ones you’re really targeting?

Using article marketing as an example, there are several things that could be going wrong. You may not have done your keyword research correctly or at all. Poor keyword choices can often lead to poor results.

Your titles could be too boring or seem unrelated to your topic, leading to few people choosing to read your articles.

Maybe you just haven’t developed your writing skills that well. Are you engaging the reader or reciting dry facts at them?

Is the failure at your resource box? Why is it failing? Is it not sufficiently related to the article? Is it not pointing out where you have more related information for the reader?

Once you’ve looked at these factors, you have a decision to make. Do you feel that you can fix the problems you’re having? Is article marketing for you or no?

Sometimes the answer is no. It’s not working out for you for one reason or another. Hopefully you have another promotion method you are having more success with, and so you can more easily give up on the stuff that isn’t working.

You should be considering similar factors for your other marketing activities. The question comes down to which activities are bringing in the best profits for the time, money and effort spent. If you’re struggling with something that is taking a lot of time but really isn’t bringing in any income, why are you working so hard for it?

It’s easy to be in love with the idea of a particular marketing tactic or website you’ve worked on for a time, and to not want to give it up when rationally you know you should. A couple times a year, at the very least, you should take a look and make sure you aren’t wasting time or money on projects that aren’t helping your make your goals. Focus instead on the things that are working. You can always come back to the other things later with a fresh perspective and more knowledge about the subject if you want to give it another try.

I’ve been doing article marketing a long time. It’s a favorite tactic, as it doesn’t have to cost money, just time. But you do have to think about how effective it is.

There are a lot of factors to consider. First is simply how well you’re writing your articles. If you’re just writing and distributing junk, of course you’re going to do poorly. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.

Second is the topic. Some topics are more competitive. Some get more searches. You really can’t say that you should expect x amount of traffic by writing an article about topic y, no matter the quality of the article.

Third is where you distribute the article. There are all kinds of sites you can send an article, and many tactics for doing so. Some people like to use article spinners so that their articles aren’t duplicated across hundreds of article sites. Some prefer to only distribute their article to the top few article sites. And others use an article distribution service to send a single version of an article to hundreds of sites with little effort. And of course you can send an article to individual ezine and website owners in the hopes of publication.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each tactic. I tend to use an article distribution service, and it’s done pretty well for me.

I’m not a fan of article spinning because I don’t trust software to do a good job of changing my content and keeping up the quality. I gather it has improved some since the early days, requiring more effort in rewriting rather than pure computer algorithm, but it’s not my style.

Sending an article to individual ezine and site owners can be quite effective, as you can pick where your article will appear. That’s handy for getting onto quality sites. It’s more effort, and you’re best off saving this tactic for your better articles.

I’ve found that results can be quite variable in article marketing, and it pays to know which ones do well so that hopefully you can figure out where some of the good response comes from.

Most articles will get maybe a few dozen hits a month, but others will go into the hundreds when listed on a quality article site such as Ezine Articles. But let’s be honest here. It’s not how many people read the articles. It’s how many go to your site and from there do what you want them to do.

I have one article on Ezine Articles that has been there a few years and has done rather well, I’d say. 4872 views, 3472 clicks on a link in the resource box. That’s a 71.3% click through rate. Too bad it doesn’t lead to a sales page or sign up page, but there’s certainly something to be learned from it.

In this case the article gets into a common work at home problem, and the resource box links to a page with the solution. It’s a great combination, and you can see that in the click through rate.

That’s the kind of combination you want. A well-written article on a good topic with an appropriate link in the resource box. Ideally one that will lead to sales or subscribers for years to come, which is the one failing of this particular example. But it has likely lead to at least some ad clicks, so I doubt it’s a total loss. Hard to say for certain.

That particular example is exceptional in its click through rate. My next highest has a 58.2% click through rate on the resource box, and plenty have yet to get a single click through. Clearly I don’t have it down to a science yet.

Any time you have access to this kind of data from an article website you should take advantage of it. See which articles are really popular. Which resource boxes get the best click through rates. And if you can, which earn you the most money. Combine this information to figure out what kinds of topics you should be writing on. It will be a big help to your business.