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Using Google Analytics to Target Guest Posts

Carlos writes for Applied Analytics, where he tries to convince people that web analytics is cool by showing bloggers and small-business owners how to use it for their own nefarious purposes.

By now you should already know: writing guest posts is a key way of exposing you and your site to new readers and of getting some link love back to your site. And while there is tons of great information out there on how to land a guest post—most bloggers still miss a crucial first step simply because they don’t know that bloggers need web analytics to be successful.

How do you pick a good site to submit to? I’m going to show you how using some simple metrics from Google Analytics can give you a solid answer.

Here’s How it Works

First you have to read that blog/site over a certain period of time. Know the voice of the author, see what topics he/she is interested in, and read the comments to get a feel for the readership. But then you also have to comment on the site yourself. Liberally.

Don’t just do it for the sake of doing it—make sure you have something to say. As time goes on and your comments impress the other readers, some will start to click over to your site to see what you’re all about (especially if you’re the first comment on a post, which means you have to learn the blogger’s posting schedule). These users will leave a trail of data on your site which will tell you if a guest post is a good match.

All you have to do is know where to find it and how to read it—that’s where Google Analytics comes in.

Pick a long period of time (at least a month) and go to your Traffic Sources section and then to All Traffic Sources. This will show you where all your traffic is coming from. Now you want to pay attention to two key engagement metrics: bounce rate and time on site. No metric is perfect, but these two give you a good idea if people coming from the site you want to guest post on are a good fit. Do they stay for more than one page and if they do, how long to they stay?

Click on the comparison button on the top right and now you’ll get a cool look at how each
one of those sites compares to your site average.What do you see? Is Awesomeblog.com sending you people stay longer than your average traffic? Do they spend more time on the site? Less?

Here’s what the comparison chart looks like for one of my sites:

What it tells me is pretty obvious: BripBlap.com and FrugalDad.com are sites that send me “good traffic” in that they don’t bounce as much as an average visitor does. They actually send really good traffic—this is where I should submit a guest post.

Summing it Up

If the numbers are average and you really want to submit a guest post, go ahead. If they’re really good, then you’d be stupid not to. But if the numbers are terrible and you still want to send a guest post, don’t be surprised when you do and it does very little for you (except for the backlink).

You’ve just wasted a fair bit of time and you won’t benefit from half the reason guest posts are so great in the first place.

Image by Anonymous

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Optimizing Titles For Search Engines

I admit to being far from an expert when it comes to search engine optimization.  It’s one of those things I always promise myself to learn more about, but never seem to get around to.  However, over the last couple years I have managed to pick up a few nuggets from other people a lot smarter than me on the subject of optimizing blog titles for improved search engine ranking.
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How Much To Charge For Banner Advertising?

A reader recently wrote in with the following question about advertising.

I just had someone contact me inquiring as to the price of a box ad in my right-hand sidebar.  I have no idea what is a reasonable price.  What would be a reasonable amount?

Most advertisers interested in banner advertising are want to get eyeballs on their banner to improve brand recognition, and potentially increase conversions.  For this reason, they are primarily interested in traffic.  You may want to consider providing statistics from a stat tracking service such as Google Analytics.
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How Much Money Do Bloggers Make?

I recently ran across a link to this post from a couple months ago at Saving To Invest (I missed it the first time around). The post discusses how much bloggers make, and attempts to put some numbers to it by applying a few assumed formulas to known traffic numbers.  My guess is that a few are pretty close (Frugal Dad numbers aren’t too far off for November 2008), but others may be grossly over-inflated.
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