Around 1.5 months ago I guest-blogged on Darren’s blog at problogger.net. Today I would like to share with you the results of this exercise.
I think the success of the guest-blogging depends on many things, on things like;
- Authority, traffic, user-base… of the blog that you are guest-blogging.
- Topic of your guest-post; how interesting it is, how beneficial it is, how well it is written etc.
- What you have done to capture the new visitors to your blog?
So, as you can see the variables are many. For this reason, it’s very difficult to analyze one guest-post at one particular blog and apply the results on other bogs. However, for simplicity reasons, let’s say what economists like to say “ceteris paribus (all other things being equal)” and proceed with the results. I am sure the results will be beneficial to many bloggers, despite the fact that it’s based on one guest-post on Problogger. Just remember to keep those variables in mind if you decide to guest blog on other blogs. Do some basic research on the blog and its followers, niche, traffic etc. before deciding to give away one of your best articles.
Should you give away your best articles as guest-posts?
When I was done with my blog post titled “5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours“, I was about to push that “publish” button in my WordPress and then I remembered “How about I give away this blog post as guest-post to some high-traffic blog?”. I was satisfied with the quality of the post so I decided to test if it is worth to give away your best articles as guest-posts.
I quickly made a list of potential blogs that I could send my guest-post to. From a handful of blogs that I have selected, Problogger definitely stood out, so I sent a quick email to Darren.
Few things to remember when sending an email:
- Write a brief intro about yourself (name), your blog (give URL) and the topic of your guest-post. Don’t make it more than 5 sentences. No one wants to read long emails.
- Attach the article that you wrote to the email. Top-bloggers are usually busy and do not have time to reply (especially when they do not know you). So make it easy to get published, attach your guest-post to the email.
- Give a time-frame to review and get back to you. 2-3 days should be fine. Let him/her know that if you do not hear back from him/her during this time-frame you will be posting it on your own blog or send to another blogger. This will make things clear for both of you.
The Results
The post itself on Problogger got over 900 tweets. So that’s a lot of traffic, even according to Problogger standards. It also received more than 150 comments.
On my side, Google Analytics is showing that Problogger sent me 384 visitors during the 20 days period after the guest-post was published. Which is not much but then again I am guessing that my WP-Cache plugin might have affected the real stats.
I use caching for my blog and it refreshes every 60 minutes. During the first week MyBlogLog statistics was showing over 100 visitors per day from Problogger. Anyway, my guesstimation is that the traffic was between 300 to 800 visitors for the whole 20 day period. (anyone have details whether wp-cache plugin affects traffic stats?)
RSS Subcribers: +50 (give or take)
Twitter Followers: +100 (give or take)
Conclusion
As a conclusion, for my case I would say the guest-blogging was definitely worth it. Increases in the RSS and Twitter followers and the flow of traffic for the first week was very significant. I certainly noticed the spike in all three.
As for you guys, you should definitely try guest-blogging as one of your marketing strategies. Only thing, like I said in the beginning of this post, choose the target blog and the topic of your guest-post very carefully and wisely. Also, titles play important role too, so make your titles catchy (but not misleading).
I hope you found this post interesting and beneficial. If you did, please tweet, stumble, digg… thanks!
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You can put your url on your profile page for others to see . your right dont put it in your answer as it can be considered spam and you could get reported.
Nice idea, but is it possible to post them on 2 or more blogs at same time? to get more traffic? Or its not good to have a dublicate post?
Nice. I’m going to enquire on some guest posts on some similar sites to mine. My personal blog has some good content – just could do with some more traffic. Thanks for the advice. :)
Guest blogging can be worth its weight in gold,as you just illustrated to us, Ades. You have to have serious value to offer in order to get space on an a-list blog, but it is worth the extra effort. Just don’t ever repeat that same content verbatim on your own blog too, as there will be duplicate content issues with the search engine bots, and unhappiness from the other blogmeister…..
I like Problogger better, just personal preference, I guess.
This technique seems to be creating a content in other site and divert the traffic to your site. Look from your statistic and I guess it real worth to do so.
Does this help in the SEO point of view since you are creating linking?
Yes I also experience with it.Before I underestimate on guest blogging, as I did not get much time to write article. But after making some post as guest blogger, my traffic gone increase. It also help us for getting nice backlink.
I pay a monthly membership fee to post on a blog network. I submit a post, change it a little for each blog and get backlinks & traffic from PR2 – PR4 sites in my niche. So, I could see how posting on a high traffic blog like problogger.net would help.
Pretty awesome results you got from guest blogging on problogger’s blog, I am sure that the long run will pay off even more =D
Till then,
Jean
Excellent results in so short period. Its worth to try it, thanks a lot anyway about idea :)
Hello nice to know about this.I have a question.How did you contacted Darren.If I use the contact form on Problogger there is no option to attach a file for guest post.
seems like you know how to get traffic using guest blogger. I like it. But not really have much time to do that.
@valencia, normally it’s a consensus between bloggers that when you guest-post on another blog you will not post the same post on your or other blogs. Because duplicate posts will only harm your blogs.
@Blogging Tips, you have to find a way to get his email address. You can always use the contact form and upload your post on your blog and give the URL.
Your right about making your blog reach success it does take work in many different ways.
Guest post really makes sense. But we dont have much PR juice from that dedicated page.In SEO point of view,this will be a great benefit.
Recently i have purchased links from 1 year old article.That page is having PR5 and it is getting almost 600 daily visitors from google.This method is really helpful but we need lots of time to search such inner pages.. What do you ades??
@ Ades’ Reply
Finding a contact email address for some blogs is really hard. However I obtained contact from a blog owner simply by posting in one of their comments and requesting their email address. Obviously only use this as a last resort, but it’s there if anyone needs it. :)
guest posting is a good way of increasing traffic to your blog and also building some backlinks
It’s interesting to see both the direct and indirect (incidental) results from the guest post on Problogger. Not many people track SEO results like this with such detail. Thanks for the great info.
ehm. its really a good result. Congratulation!
This is why guest posting is also a great way to earn new readers and visitors. I also tried guest blogging and it gave me maybe not that much since I am just a new blogger but it’s worth doing it.
Thanks for the information!
Posting a comment would probably do the trick to get the contact details but there is always Who.is.
The key to Guest Blogging must be (I can only guess!) having a blog yourself that is worthy enough to convince the other party to let you lose on their visitors!
thats cool… i wonder what criteria must be met to get featured on pro-blogger.
-Jack
Yeah, but I’d be willing to bet he doesn’t have time to read half of the comments he receives, where as an email might catch his attention.
-Jack
I’m quite surprised by this, as it doesn’t appear to be that much. 300 people over 20 days isn’t actually that much (I’ve had around 500 visits in 10 days from a blog I wouldn’t consider to be as big as Problogger), still, you had great supplimentary results (Twitter/RSS Feed)
Hi Ades,
You are awesome, I am dreaming to write a guest post to Darren soon. And your experience will be a good reference.
@Ades How exactly did you contact Darren from ProBlogger? Did you find his email address and email him your post? Or did you contact him through ProBlogger contact form?
I am not sure if this is relevant anymore, but he had an old post stating that you have to sign up as a user on WordPress.com and email him the email address with “Guest Post” in the subject line and he will make you a user account and you can post your article there. He may or may not choose you, but this was the most recent response I received for posting a Guest Post for ProBlogger. Is this true or did you have to go through another process?
You can contact me directly on my blog if you don’t won’t to explain everything on this post.
Thanks for sharing, good result. On the downside though, I wonder how much more effective this technique would have been in the days before Twitter?
Not all those 900 tweets would have been links of course in the pre-Twitter days, but I bet a good 20-30 would have been. Twitter referrals are here today, gone tomorrow.
@Rhys, you are right it’s not that much of a traffic, but nevertheless it had a good subscription effect. I think it’s normal, when you guest post you won’t get a huge traffic either, because mostly readers are just reading that blog and not really visiting the websites of guest bloggers.
@Dynasty Web, I can understand what is the issue here. I missed to address that issue, because I had his contacts for some time already. I think the best approach would be to be active in all the popular blogs and to build genuine relationship with the authors of the blogs. That way you will be in touch with them and can contact them anytime you want.
But for newbies, you could probably use their contact form, upload your guest-post to your blog somewhere, and provide a link in the contact form. Usually contact form messages are received by the authors themselves, only some (like Yaro) have other people managing their emails.
Its very beatiful and organic way to take visitors.
guest blogging is gud i agree, but i dont think its very good for those who want to make their own brands as posting our original content on some1 else blog is like promoting a competitors brands…
still searching for more guess blogger for my blog. Hope i can get one or two person.
Funny, but when I searched Google for articles on guest blogging (I’m going to start accepting guest bloggers for one of my blogs) the fact that Google’s snippit of your site said “Problogger” was the reason I clicked through!
Oh, regarding caching: I don’t believe that most caching systems cache javascript, which is good because you don’t want your AdSense or Analytics code (both JS) cached.
BTW, here’s something I’m struggling with. I want to allow people to create guest posts and upload images on my WordPress blog but I don’t want to create an account for all of them. Any ideas on ways to get allow guests to submit posts WITH images without having to create an account in WP for them?
@Outsourcemylife, you could use google docs to collect info from guest bloggers. Regarding letting them upload images, I guess you could use one of these.
Ades, that’s an interesting idea, thanks! I’ve been looking at different wp plugins and saw this
one that looks like it might work, but it doesn’t have a WYSIWYG editor or image support.
I’m also looking into plugins that will give “contributors” the ability to upload images… that should work because I can either:
1) Create one contributor user and allow my article writers to use that same account
2) Give in and just create contributor accounts for all my guest bloggers
Problogger etc. don’t have a lot of images, so it isn’t much of an issue… the person can just email the articles or submit the text. I wonder what other bloggers do that have image intense posts and guest bloggers?
Definitely guest blogging is one way of getting branding in the blogosphere. Fellow blogger’s traffic may essentially help a lot. Among the 384 bloggers there may be many visitors who will become regular visitors of your blog. One among is me. I came to your website through yout post of problogger and I started to interact since I like the way you compose the posts and talk with people. Great going Ades.
I guest posted once and got no traffic. Need to try it again.
This is great advice; I am new to all this and find it very interesting. How do you determine which blog sites are the best for your particular niche? Is there a way to pinpoint certain blogs more easily or to evaluate users/readers without familiarity with the site?
I am thinking for guest posting on Problogger. But I am not getting much time for writing article.
Darren’s requirement would be fairly high as he wants a professional well written article and really helpful article too. I’ve checked out the guest post you submitted, that was a great article.
Between, it looks less with 384 traffic for 20 days, perhaps not all people like to know who writes the guest post. Traffic is not important, as long as you build your brand and your blog will be well known in the blogosphere.
Cheers,
Lee
nice job but multiblogging is very difficult.You can’t use same article coz of duplicate content.So you need work double:(
I have been interested in the idea of guest blogging for a few weeks now. It seems you did something right! Congrats.
Good traffic comes from problogger guest posting. Thanks for new concept of guest posting and it’s benefit.