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

• Down and Out Weekly Round Up
• How To Get Free Traffic For Affiliate Sales ?
• Guest Post On Deciding To Stop Eating Meat.

One of the more time consuming posts for bloggers is the roundup post. A collection of link favorites seems easy enough to the untrained eye, but until you sit down to actually create a few of these posts you cannot appreciate the work involved.
First, the links must be identified and flagged in some way that you can refer back to later when creating the roundup post.  Then bloggers must create the actual post, which could simply contain all the links titles dropped into a post, or some additional editorial comments from the blogger on each article’s subject.

I usually do a little of both – some links don’t need further discussion, and other times I like to put my personal spin on the topic.  Depending on the number of links you choose to include these roundups have the potential to take a while to draft.  Here are a few tools to use to cut down on the time spent creating future roundups.

Alltop.com

AllTop.com recently made my life a little easier by creating a MyAlltop feature which allows members to select from AllTop’s list of feeds to create a personal AllTop page. I’ve been sorting through the list of feeds to select a few of my favorites, and these will serve as the foundation of most of my roundup posts.

Alltop lists the most recent five posts from each blogger, which is helpful if I am behind on my feed reader (as I usually am).  If I don’t have any links currently identified I scan the list of posts from my favorites and read those that appear interesting to me, or on theme with my current roundup.

StumbleUpon

Throughout the week as a I work through my feed reader, or follow links from those who comment at my blogs, I like to stumble those that are worthy of linking to in my next roundup post.  To go a step further, I leave a few notes on the article when submitting to StumbleUpon that will be the basis for my editorial comments on the post when I draft the roundup.

Each week, when it is time to write the roundup post, I simply go to my StumbleUpon “favorites” page, grab the link to the article and copy and paste my comments into the editor.  Most of the time I add a little to the comments to expand on my review of the post.

Notepad (Text Editor)

If all else fails I revert back to my handy text editor – in my case, usually just the simple notepad function on my computer.   At the beginning of the week I create a file called Roundup-date.txt where date is the day the roundup is scheduled to run.  When browsing articles and reading emails throughout the week I copy and paste the URL of those articles that are potential candidates for the roundup post.

You can accomplish the same thing by creating a draft post in WordPress, but this method has some drawbacks.  Obviously, if you don’t have online access you can’t modify or add to your list of links.  This may not be a big deal when adding links, but you may be offline when the time comes to set up the post, and without anything stored locally you won’t have much to work with. I prefer to use tools like Alltop and StumbleUpon throughout the week and then move favorites into text format a couple days before my roundup post is due.

Do you have any additional tips for making roundup posts easier to put together?

Photo courtesy of ianmunroe

• Must-Have Plugins For The Inspiring Blogger
• Is Wordpress or Blogger Right For Corporate Blogs
• Professional Blogging Roundup - Twitter Tools and More

If you’re a blogger—regardless of whether you’re starting out or have been doing this for a long time—do yourself a favor and bookmark Darren Rowse’s series on ProBlogger called 31 Days to Building a Better Blog.

That could be the end of this post and it would still be a fantastic tip. But since I’m here to give Jason’s readers as much value as I can (and because I love hearing myself talk), I’ll say a little bit more about this.

After you’ve bookmarked the series, try to go through every single tip and execute it. Some of you will make it and some of you won’t (I almost did), but your blog will inevitably reap the benefits.

I did this early on and it really helped get me grounded into the basics of blogging and becoming a more advanced user pretty quickly.

I tried to write a whole series on The Writer’s Coin based on each one of his tips, but eventually I got lazy and bailed out after day 13 I think.

Luckily for me, one of the best tips of the whole series was the second one: running a first-time reader audit. That may sound like some complicated accounting term, but it’s actually really simple. You ask someone who has never been on your site to sit down at a computer and explore it for the first time.

You stand/sit behind them with a pad and paper and take as many notes as you can.

What are they clicking on? What are they not clicking on? Are they attracted to pictures? Colors? Is the animated .gif of the ninja fighting the pirate getting a chuckle or not? Are they doing what you had imagined they would do when you were designing your site?

Eventually you’ll realize all your assumptions were wrong. But that’s OK because now you have a chance to fix them! You can ask a question or two, but try not to get in the way too much. Just watch and see what that person does.

I did this with my wife and I learned a ton about how people (or at least one person) reacted to my site. She liked colors and images, and if there was too much text in a row she was kind of bored and skimmed. Bold text helped break it up. And she was even tempted by some Adsense ads (which I told her NOT to click on!).

It was fascinating because I had made so many assumptions based on my own ideas about what a person “might” do on the site instead of real data.

The problem was I couldn’t find anyone else to do this with. At least anyone as convenient as my wife.

Fear not, weary blogger, I have an answer for you! You can get as many first time readers as you want through a company called User Testing.

Here’s how it works: you pay them $19 for every user you want and they’ll record that user on your site for around 15 minutes as they browse your site and talk their way through any questions or tasks you wrote for them.

I’ve seen several of their videos and it is really incredible to sit there and hear as many people as you want give you some pretty deep feedback about your site as they surf it for the first time.

Don’t take my word for it, check out the FAQ and watch one of their sample videos.

Now, if you’re really serious about blogging, you can use this site to get a TON of really helpful data on which to base decisions about how to make your site look and feel. After all, testing is the key to getting this stuff right. You don’t have to get 20 users, three is probably plenty, and the investment will be well worth it.

In case you’re curious, no, I don’t work for this site or have any affiliation with them. I’m just really excited about sharing it because the first-time reader audit I did with my wife was so insightful and so interesting, that I really believe it is a great service for bloggers. Especially since it’s so cheap!

This is a topic that I’m really into, so if anyone tries these guys out, please let me know what your experience was like and how it helped you with your own site. Who knows, maybe we can report back here and do a fun little survey of what the biggest things people noticed about their own site by doing a first-time reader audit.

Photo courtesy of Reinout van Rees

• Help a Long Time My Journey to Millions Reader and Commenter
• Making Money Blogging and Professional Writing
• Bloggers Paycheck - Making Money Blogging Guide