This guest post is by Joe of the New Customer Workshop.
Guest posting is a great way to market your brand. When you guest post you are able to demonstrate you expertise to a new audience. The short term benefits are a bump in traffic to your website. Longer term benefits are sees through quality backlinks which will help with search engine optimization.
One of the questions that comes up when guest posting is "Where should I post?" For me, the answer is often "Whoever will take me!"
As you begin to build a reputation you may become more selective on where you guest post. Part of your process might include research to find sites that are aligned with your brand.
Let's say you've done the research and authored some guest posts. Now what? Well, like any good marketer, you must measure the results of your campaign. If you have Google Analytics installed, this is a snap.
Google Analytics
All of you should be running some analytics software on your website. If you're not, stop reading and go install Google Analytics.
If you aren't running Google Analytics, the fundamentals of what I'm explaining are the same even if the mechanics are different.
The secret sauce: campaign variables
When you insert the link back to your website you are going to add some extra information tags on the end of the link. This data will help you classify the traffic. Google calls these tags campaign variables.
Using campaign variables you can add extra information to your posts which will help you to answer questions like:
- Which guest posts drove the most traffic to my site?
- Which websites with guest posts drove the most traffic to to my site?
- Which posts resulted in opt-ins to my email list?
- Which websites gave me more opt-ins to my email list?
- Which source of traffic is better for me? Facebook, guest posting or search engines?
This is really...
