The Measurable Benefits Of Guest Posting

This is a guest post by Andy Walton.

Many blogs accept guest posts for one very obvious reason – free, quality content is obviously appealing to their owners. And speaking as an author, it’s healthy for the ego to see your work on a high profile and well respected blog. But what are the quantifiable benefits and how can you measure them?

I will not offer any guidelines on how to write your guest post, as David has already written a full guest post checklist. Instead I’ll focus on how to monitor the results once published.

We’ll investigate the impact of a guest post I wrote on a medium size blog (an Alexa traffic rank of 30,000). The post for this experiment was related to our newly launched website, and aimed at increasing awareness. The results were measured one week after the post was published.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll focus on 3 key areas:

Exposure Across The Web

I used Google to assess this metric. A search for an exact match of my post’s first sentence (i.e. unique to me) returned 170+ results, spread across 100+ different sites.

A random audit of 10 of these sites showed that 90% had retained my bio, and hence links back to our site.

This demonstrates the impact of new, unique content on the web – people will jump at the chance to use it. RSS feeds allow new posts to spread like wildfire, and although some of these sites were low quality they all raise awareness of your name, site or brand. Especially as their automated nature usually maintains the original post including any valuable links.

Awareness On Social Networks

As I was promoting a brand new site, up until this point there had been a deafening silence on Twitter when searching for my site name. We hadn’t yet proactively used Twitter at this point, so any new tweets would have been as a result of the guest post. This is where things got interesting.

A Twitter search returned over 20 third party tweets which directly referenced my article – this didn’t seem too positive until I looked into the senders. Between them, they had a cumulative 20,000+ followers.

That’s a decent volume of messages sent out within a week, and demonstrates the potential of guest posting to multiply via the social networks.

Direct Traffic

Finally, the old fashioned measure of success – visitors arriving direct from the blog itself. For this I used Google Analytics data to measure both basic volumes and conversion numbers using Goals. Our site has a quick registration process, and so a completed sign-up was my measure of success.

The stats showed that over the 7 days just under 400 unique visitors had been referred by the blog. Not spectacular volumes, but the key was the quality. Of these visitors, 33% completed the goal. Now that is seriously motivated traffic, compared to our overall conversion rate of between 1% and 2%.

In Conclusion

These results need to be read in context. I wrote a very targeted post, on a very targeted blog. However, this meant that the direct traffic alone justified the time spent. The other awareness and exposure factors were the cherry on the top.

So if you’ve considered guest posting but never actually submitted anything, maybe these results will give you the motivation to get writing. Alternatively, if you are a regular guest writer perhaps it’s time you monitored the results of your work, to help focus your efforts on the blogs that really deliver.

Andy Walton has over 10 years experience working for some of the UK’s biggest ecommerce businesses. He’s co-founder of Wikinut, a new publishing platform that pays lifetime royalties to authors for their writing on a massive range of topics.