If you frequent forums and read blogs about bringing traffic to your website then you will come across this tip often: create guest posts on other blogs - they increase your exposure and drive lots of traffic to your website.
I need traffic so I created a guest post and submitted it to a popular blog. It was accepted and went live within a couple weeks.
Here are the stats of the blog that published my guest post:
# Around 2000 subscribers according to feedburner
# Around 4000 unique daily visitors according to the webmaster
With these numbers it is safe to estimate that around 2000 visitors saw the link back to my website. How many of them clicked on it? Before discovering the real number, my guess would have been around 1%. It is an arbitrary guess but one that seems possible. Around 1% of visitors click on adsense ads, so why not guess that 1% click on a link to learn more about the guest post author.
2000 visitors viewed the post. Out of them 4 visited my website - 0.2%.
For me creating a guest post did not increase traffic. I am not sure why. Why do other bloggers claim that guest post increase traffic? Are they guessing or simply chanting a mantra without data to back it? Unfortunately there is no way to tell because most of them do not reveal their traffic statistics. So your only choice is to believe them until you try for yourself.
Of course the problem may be that my guest post was poor; that people did not want to know more about the author. I need to do more guest post and collect some more data. One sample is not enough. But the first attempt was a real disappointment.
The Hidden Benefit of Guest Posts
Fortunately guest posts have two benefits. One is people clicking on the link back to your website - this one was useless for me. The other benefit is that Google notices a one way backlink from a popular blog back to your website.
In time this might bring in traffic. Because the more of these one way backlinks you receive the more Google will send traffic your way - this is also a mantra stated by many. Maybe that is what the other bloggers mean when they say it will increase traffic. In the long run it will increase traffic from Google. The effects are not immediate but they do come. It is too early for me to tell if the guest post has any benefits on my SEO. But I hope it will, otherwise the guest post was a complete waste of time.
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