Guest posting is new to me. I have always simply created the content on my own site or blog and promoted it myself. However, after doing some reading about the potential benefits and upsides – I decided to give it a shot. The results so far are extremely promising and as a result – I am sure that I will do guest posts in the future.
I wanted to share my results so far from my guest post on Dumb Little Man with the article I wrote: 7 Free or Cheap Ways to Effectively Promote Your Business Online
What is guest posting?
Guest posting is when you write an article or post for another site or blog. It not only gives the blog owner content for their site, but allows you to fuel the growth for your own site by driving traffic and creating awareness about who you are by exposing your content to their readers.
Choosing a site or blog
While there are many sites that accept guest posts, I wanted to choose one that had a large audience to help bring exposure as much as possible to my site. Since BigManta.com is only a little over a month old, any exposure or awareness I can create at this stage can be extremely beneficial and helpful to gaining readers, subscribers, and visitors. After looking at various sites I decided to choose one that I felt could reach a large number of people and one that related to my topic of becoming successful online. My researching led me to Dumb Little Man (because of the reasons I just mentioned).
Writing your post or article
The next step was to determine what type of article to write and submit to the site. Dumb Little Man writes about a variety of different topics and is a site that provides useful tips on how to improve your life. Since the readers are so diverse in their interests I needed to write something that had wide appeal but was still relevant to my site’s topic.
This led me to the idea of writing an article about cheap or free ways businesses can promote themselves online. There is a wide audience for this topic because whether you own a business or you work at one (a huge audience) the tips can be helpful. Everyone always wants to save money advertising – so the appeal of “Free or Cheap” helped to gain a wider audience. Had it been “7 Ways to Advertise your Business Online for Under $1,000″ – the audience and appeal would have been much smaller.
My next step was to write the article -which took about two hours from start to finish. I then emailed my article along with a quick little introduction of who I was and asked if there was anything I need to do from there. After receiving a response back with a few revisions to the article – I was told it was going to be posted!
Now it was a matter of simply waiting for it to be posted.
Roughly a week later – I saw that my guest post was published 
The results of my guest post: Facts, figures & numbers
I want to share the immediate results that were due to the guest post:
- RSS Subscribers – I picked up a few RSS subscribers (5-10) during the first day. This is not something that is too surprising because I believe subscribers sign up on sites where connections have been made or established (and this site is still very much in its infancy)
- Newsletter Subscribers – This one was actually surprising, I saw about 10-20 additional newsletter subscribers and several more have signed up as I write this.
- Visits - In the article, there was only one link back to my site in the author box at the end of the article. Although it was not displayed prominently, it drove about 20 visitors to the site and has already sent another 15 today.
- Twitter - For me, this is one of the most uplifting and encouraging signs that my content does interest other people. As of this writing, my guest post has already been ReTweeted almost 200 times! This lets me know that my content is interesting and helpful – and the perseverance will be worth it.
Would I do it again?
After seeing these results, I would definitely do more guest posts. What is surprising is that the second day seemed to have more interaction and will drive more visits and subscribers than the first. There will also be the residual effects of the guest post for many months and years to come.
If you’re beginning to blog or even have an established site, I think that guest posting can help you really distribute your content and exposure your name to people who may not have heard of you before.
Useful resources and links
If you’re interested in learning more about guest posting, you may want to check these resources out:
- 5 Tips for Effective Guest Posting
- 10 Tips for Effective Guest Posting
- Write a guest post for I Will Teach You To Be Rich
- Guest Posting Secrets – How to Get Published on an A-List Blog
- How to Guest Post to Promote Your Blog
- What Makes a Great Copyblogger Guest Post?
What are your thoughts or experiences, or do you have any questions?
If you have guest posted it would be great to share with others your experience so they can learn further as well, simply leave a comment below. Or if you have any questions, please feel free to ask
You’ll also find that time zone differences can cause a secondary surge.
Never even considered that, I’m sure that was why I saw the jump in visitors over the course of the day
Great Post.
Thanks for writing this post i’m sure it will help many bloggers out there who are still not sure to whether guest post or not. It’s definatly a good way to get more exposure and building a name for yourself.
Glad it helped you
Since it was my first shot I was skeptical about the results, but happy to see that it ended up with a very positive outcome.
My goal is to help others and share experiences with becoming successful with other like-minded people. Making money takes time and hard work – and we often don’t hear hard facts or results. Hope it helps a few people trying to decide whether to guest post or not.