If you are new to setting up websites or blogs on the net, choosing hosting companies can be a real headache. You wouldn’t know which one to choose, all seem to claim offering great services, low prices and guaranteed 99% uptime (find out what does that mean here).

WebHostingGeeks is a website that offers a platform for people to review web hosting companies. Independent reviews are published in more than 10 categories, eg; overall web hosting, dedicated server, vps hosting etc.

When getting a hosting for your website/blog, third party opinions and reviews matter a lot. Don’t just go and get a hosting based on what you see on their website. Rather do some research and see what others are saying about the company. For example, on WebHostingGeeks InMotion got over 200 reviews and most of them are positive. That says a lot about the company and its services.

Tip: If possible, try to keep your domain names and hosting separate (i.e don’t get both of them from the same company). Because, when you change your hosting, and believe me you will… it can get complicated. Normally, I keep all my domain names with goDaddy and my hosting with Pair Networks.

Website: http://webhostinggeeks.com

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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