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There are several venues where you can sell your writing, some more profitable than others. The first one that you should always consider is your existing clients. If you're just starting out, this one may not work immediately, but once you've got a few jobs under your belt you should have a list of clients that you can go back to whenever you have time available to write.

Along those lines, always make sure you capture your customers' information - at least their name and email address - so you can contact them in the future. The fact is, they'll thank you for it - it's a win/win situation for both of you.

You'll have a list of people with whom you've already worked, and understand what they're looking for, and your customers will have a writer who they know they can trust to deliver high-quality content on time.

Before you go looking for new clients, always get in touch with your existing clients to see if they have any work for you.

Another way your existing clients can help you generate more business is through referrals. You should always ask your clients for referrals, even if it's just a matter of letting them know that you're available if they know anyone who is looking for writing.

Marketers who need writing and don't have a writer they can trust will often turn to their friends and acquaintances in the internet marketing world for recommendations. If your clients are happy with your work, they will usually be willing to recommend you to those people.

In fact, you can even offer referral bonuses to really snowball your referrals. If you pay a "finder's fee" or offer a certain amount of free writing for every referral an existing customer sends you, this can really help to push the process along.

If you are looking for new customers, whether because you're just starting out or because your existing clients aren't looking for any new content at the moment, there are several effective places to turn.

One of the best places to find new clients is through forums. There are many different internet marketing forums, and many of them have sections where you can offer your services.

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Just what you need to track will depend partly on just what it is you're testing.

For example, if you're testing different headlines on a sales page, you're going to want to track the test factor itself and the conversion rate it results in. Provided nothing else changes, that's really all you need to know - which headline resulted in what conversion rate. The traffic costs, the selling price and everything else is the same, so you don't need to worry about tracking the visitor value or anything else.

On an Adsense site, on the other hand, you'll need to track different things. If you're testing different ad sizes, for example, you'll need to track the ad size and the CPC (how much you earn per click).

The CTR (click through rate) isn't really that important here because the CPC can vary from one click to another. You could get a 5% CTR and still earn more than a 20% CTR if the ads being displayed are paying more.

Part of the reason this is a factor on Adsense sites is that different ad block sizes display a different number of ads. The ads are typically displayed in decreasing order of CPC so if one size shows two ads and another shows four, the one that shows four has two opportunities for people to click on a lower-paying ad.

You can always track the CTR if you really want to know that information, but just keep in mind that it's not as critical as the CPC.

Part of a successful tracking system is to make it as simple as possible. The more complicated it is, and the more information you have to track, the more likely it is that you won’t keep it up to date.

When you're first getting started with this stuff, it's easy to fall into the trap of trying to track every little bit of data you can find. It can seem like magic, plugging all these numbers into a painstakingly designed spreadsheet and watching it spit out all kinds of interesting calculations.

But as you get more and more websites to track the process will start to take up more of your time. Too many people just get sick of having to do all the work and wind up setting it aside completely.

Keep in mind that you’re not stuck with the system you start with, however. If you find that you're not really using some of the data that you're tracking, that's probably a good sign that it isn't really that critical to your business.

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But keep in mind that you can redirect people to any page on your website. So you could have a sign by your cash register inviting people to sign up for your email list, for example. Offer them special discounts and other benefits when they subscribe to your list.

Then put a QR code on the sign that takes them to the sign up form on your website. All they need to do is enter their name and email address to subscribe to your emails. This is much more effective than having a book where they write down their name and email address to get added to your email list, which is how a lot of small businesses still approach building a customer email list.

Another example of a business where QR codes could be used very effectively is real estate. Realtors could put a QR code on their for sale sign that directs people to a web page with all the detail about the house they’re selling, including a video tour of the inside.

People just driving by could easily scan that code and check out all the details themselves, with no need for printed flyers or anything else they have to physically pick up.

This example brings up one of the drawbacks of QR codes - once they’re generated, they can’t be changed. They will always point to the same website when someone scans them.

The simple solution to this problem is to use some kind of redirect service that will let you change the ultimate destination of the code. The QR code would point to the redirect link, and that link can be updated any time. So in this example, when a house sells, the realtor would simply change the redirect to point to another listing when they move the sign.