Guest blogging – A real life case study

Guest blogging rules. No shit Sherlock… I hear you saying. There are literally tonnes of articles out there already promoting the benefits of guest blogging. Glen Allsopp and Skellie are just a few of the many to openly write about their guest blog love. Wayne Smallman is another interesting contributor to the topic, due to his coverage of both the positives and negatives of guest blogging (yes… there are negatives). Yet despite all the guest blogging banter, I am yet to come across a case that provides tangible results. So on that note… welcome to my personal guest blogging story (particularly useful for blogging newbie’s).

To set the scene, I’ll provide a background on the origins of my humble little blog. I started Online Marketing Banter in January 2008. So I am most definitely still a newbie. In January I kept myself busy simply attempting to lay the technical foundations. Yes… I am a technical noob! Content was relatively light and no real effort was made to promote it. Thus, it goes without saying that I had very few readers (apart from my mum and the evil Dr Jekyll). However, by February, I was confident I had my house in order and could begin laying the promotional seeds.

Guest blogging was something I’d read a little about, and seemed an obvious way to attract new readers. In late February I was lucky enough to land a guest post gig on SEO Scoop. The Scoop is a well respected SEO blog with over 2,400 subscribers and Dazzlin’ Donna was kind enough to accept my submission – SEO isn’t just for the big boys.

The results of that guest post are discussed below. In particular, I investigate the results in context to the benefits most guest blogging articles spruik.

Benefit 1 – Traffic

While a StumbleUpon like traffic explosion didn’t eventuate following the post, SEO Scoop has been the second highest referrer of external visits following the guest post. A slow but steady stream of traffic has seen over 100 visitors come directly from SEO Scoop. In fact, in the first half of April (more than a month after it was published) the article has continued to drive over 20 visitors to the blog. Nice! I certainly wasn’t expecting a continuous trickle 45+ days after the event.

More importantly however, the engagement of the SEO Scoop readers has surpassed traffic from all other channels:

Here’s the important points:

• SEO Scoop visitors read almost twice as many pages
• They spent up to 4 times as much time on the site.
• The bounce rate is almost half most other sources.

Wow! SEO Scoop readers proved to be even more engaged than Sphinn users, long considered my own personal target market/holy grail. Without being too sensationalistic, I think there’s justification in saying that my 100+ SEO Scoop readers were more valuable than the 2,000+ StumbleUpon visitors. Interestingly, Sphinn and StumbleUpon both also outperform search engine optimisation in terms of reader engagement, which brings into question the assumption that organic traffic is better than social media traffic. Needless to say, I’m already planning my next guest post on The Scoop…

Benefit 2 – Subscribers

Unfortunately, subscriber growth is a difficult metric to track. Given the slow and steady nature of the guest blogging traffic, it’s impossible to attribute any subscriber growth directly to the guest post. What I do know is that on the day the article was published, the subscriber count increased by two. However, given the high levels of engagement displayed from SEO Scoop readers, it is reasonable to assume that a proportion of the 100+ readers converted into subscribers.

Benefit 3 – New Readers

The lure of new readers is perhaps the most obvious benefit guest bloggers chase. New readers potentially mean new subscribers. Yet I was staggered to see the proportion of Scoop visitors that were new to my blog.

Holy crap! Just 8% were new visitors. Hmmm… does that mean the guest post was a failure? If I failed to attract new users, was it all a big waste of time? Hell no! Just look at the engagement stats for the Scoop visitors again. They visited more pages and spent more time on the site than any other visitors. If they hadn’t already subscribed (which was likely given my low subscriber count at the time), it’s likely they were at least considering it afterwards.

And here’s another way to look at it… It gave me verification that the promotional techniques I was using were hitting my target market. I would never have guessed so many Scoop readers had visited my blog. Woo ha!

Benefit 4 – Inbound Links

One of the key detriments of guest blogging is that inbound links point towards your hosts domain. Subsequently, link love boosts traffic and organic ranking for your host, not you. But, in my short stint of blogging I’ve learned that new bloggers don’t generate bucket loads of inbound links. Even my most popular articles have failed to generate more than a handful of inbound links (despite going hot in social media). If I had hosted the article on my own domain, I probably would have failed to attract more than a handful of links. And most of them would have probably been from unknown sources.

Instead, I achieved a single link from an authoritative site within my niche. Which would you prefer?

Benefit 5 – Exposure

I subscribe to Search Engine Watch’s email newsletter. It’s one of the few email newsletters I still maintain a subscription for. In particular, I find the daily search marketing news helpful to stay in touch with industry news (especially when I haven’t had time to check my RSS reader). So can you imagine my reaction when I saw my article listed in their news of the day…

Whoa momma! I liken it to the first time an artist hears their own song on the radio. It almost brought a tear to my eye. There is no way the article would have been picked up by SEW if I had published it on my blog. Quite simply, no one would ever had found it. And along with the SEW mention, the story also made the front page of Sphinn.

Talk about gold medal exposure for a new blogger…

Conclusion

It doesn’t take a genius to determine that I’m a guest blogging advocate after the SEO Scoop experience. But before you start creating your own master plans, take note of the following points:

• I succeeded because I gained a position on a high traffic, high authority blog. This isn’t necessarily easy to do. I was lucky that Dazzlin’ Donna opened SEO Scoop with a guest blog invitation. I was in the right place at the right time.
• I attracted high quality traffic and high levels of user engagement because my content was closely aligned to that of SEO Scoop.
• The selection of blogs to target is of critical importance. Selecting a blog outside of your niche, or with a small readership isn’t likely to help you in any way. Be selective of those blogs you target.

Keep these points at the top of your agenda and you’ll be on track for your own guest blogging success. Now… I’m off to write my next guest post for SEO Scoop. Stay tuned…

Tagged as: Guest blog, guest post, SEO