Link love

We all know that guest posting brings in real traffic if done correctly. As a member of my community, you’re probably also aware on how I’ve been guest posting on a lot of blogs for the past few months for now. I have done a lot of guest post but I realized I haven’t really done any analysis on the effects of this guest posts for my blog. And while it’s impossible to do one posts for all guest posts I’ve done, I think it would make more sense to at least try to pick one and feature it every week. What do you think?

Anyways, I’ve been trying to do 5 guest posts per month and its a level I’m trying to maintain for now. If you can remember I made a commitment to take this blog to the next level but increasing my efforts. However, that took a hit after my current employment. Nevertheless here’s an interesting analysis of my guest post in FamousBloggers.com

What is FamousBloggers?

FamousBloggers is multi-author blog which is blogging in topics related to online business. It’s a relatively *new blog. I said new because it has just been in the blogosphere for less than one year yet it has already made so much strides and it has a good overall community behind it. Hesham and his community is one of the very few teams in the blogosphere who are serious in taking their whole thing to new heights.

If you know me I love testing out different traffic sources and experimenting. You may probably have seen me do couple of guest posts for high traffic blogs like John Chow and also you’ve seen me in smaller blogs as well. Guest posting for FamousBloggers is really intriguing to me for a couple of reasons. First is that its a new source of traffic as I’m sure most of the readers their haven’t heard my blog and second, I want to build  a good relationship not just with the blog but with their community.

Guest Post Analysis

I’ve done about three guest posts on FamousBloggers.com for the past few months and there’s really some interesting number I am seeing. Before that, let’s just first analyze how’s the return on a normal John Chow guest post considering that Chow’s blog is one of the most high traffic blogs around in this niche.

The reason I showed you the statistics from Chow’s guest post is because we are going to use his blog as the barometer. John’s blog is always an interesting cover for me in the subject of guest posting first is because he gets so many traffic yet these traffic are mostly trigger-lucky readers who read myriads of content everyday. Usually they end up bouncing up too quickly on most blogs just because of where they’re coming from.

Another thing is that John’s posting frequency is always weird. Sometimes you can get your post in there for more than 24 hours but most of the times, it can be there for less than 6 hours. That’s why stats always fluctuate and with that, you always need to have some sort of perfect timing to maximize your traffic with his blog.

Now as for FamousBloggers, I did start guest posting for that site last May and initially I don’t think there’s that many people in that community that were aware of my blog. Here are the initial stats:

As you can see with the numbers, back then nearly all of his readers don’t know my blog so its a whopping 94% new visits. I got a fairly good amount of traffic with 50 unique hits for that one guest posts and some followup comments throughout the entire month. Another nice return here is the page/visit stat. This is one of my determiner on whether the guest post is worth it or not. As you can see, each user nearly has visited 4 pages of my blog so it’s nearly 200 pageviews for that guest post and for me it’s an always nice indication.

After that one guest post I tried doing some other more to have a bigger picture on what I can really get on that blog in terms of exposure.

Now there’s a weird stuff here as far as this specific stat is concern. I was getting over 5 views per visit yet my bounce rate is 51.61%. Again the discussion between the difference between bounce rate and exit rate has been there for years. Anyways I’m still happy with the turnout of it thus far since I’m not getting a massive traffic yet, it’s targeted. Another thing that you can notice is that the % of new visits has gone down which means the goal of my guest posting campaigns there is already met.

But of course, it still doesn’t stop there. Just late last month up to this month, Hesham launched a $3500 cash contest and obviously I joined that considering the fact I’m obsessed with contest.

However, I was quite curious since if it’s a contest then maybe it could prove my theory that guest blogging contests really differs from normal guest posting campaigns in which not a lot of people really convert mainly because all they care about is the contest and not the intrinsic reasoning behind a guest post. Either way, I booked my spot and wrote a definitive guest post on blog commenting. Here’s how it turned out:

And it turns out I was right. 🙂 I got the most comment and retweet in that post but that’s simply because it’s a community contest and so the whole community was trying to help me out as well. But as far as converting them to click my author bio and go to my blog, not that much.

However, one thing I was happy about is that most of the readers of that blog are not anymore new to MelvinBlog. I started out with a new visits percentage of 94% and now its amazingly down to 13% which is really nice thing to have. Again the traffic wasn’t ever massive but conversion is everything and I can get 10 people to subscribe to my blog then its certainly better than 1000 bouncing readers.

How I do and prepare for that

Well most bloggers just do their guest post and leave it up in the air but I always prefer to welcome those new audience in the most polite way I can.

As I have been preaching for a long time, a landing page is a must. It’s because new visitors may not always like your current posts and if you direct them to your best posts instead, then you’re giving them an option to explore more which should be your goal anyways. Here’s a nice screenshot (again) of the my traffic when I direct people to my landing page:

So there ya go. You can see that by getting them to that page, they get to explore more and there’s a high chance that they will subscribe to your blog or follow you for quite a while. Heck even those who came from Google didn’t bounce that quick.

FamousBloggers Guest Post Conclusion

Actually there’s no conclusion yet, since I’m still going to do occassional guest posts on that blog. But for the moment it’s all good. One thing that blog has is an interactive community wherein you’ll expect almost 30+ comments on each and every of your guest posts. So with that, I know that I’m posting articles to real people, not just bots.

Drawbacks is that Hesham and his folks publish articles on an everyday basis so like John Chow’s blog, you get to have a small time in the featured area which is at the top. But even though, you can still get your guest post in their front page for almost a week so that’s still maximum exposure there.

Lesson learned here is to always look for new traffic sources. I mean last year this blog is unknown, and this year it’s one of the most popular blogs in this niche. You’ll never know so you just gotta keep finding that new traffic source and see how you can cater to it.

Now the mic up to you? Have yout tried guest posting on FamousBloggers? or maybe you can share some of your experience with guest posts?