Once you’ve published a few guest posts and see the results in increased subscriptions, you’ll likely be charged up to do a lot more guest posting.
In fact, one tried and true guest posting strategy is to aim to have several guest posts published on different blogs during the same week or two. Readers and potential customers in your niche will see your name on these different blogs and think – wow, this person is everywhere! They must be pretty good.
It’s an additional incentive to click on to your blog to see what you’re all about.
When you’re sending out more than one pitch in the same week, it becomes especially important to maintain an accurate tracking system. Otherwise, it’s easy to get confused and forget which post you sent where. Or worse, which blogs are netting you the most visitors and subscribers.
Hopefully you’ve already created your basic tracking spreadsheet which helped you to keep track of the blogs you want to be featured on, their contact information and post ideas for each one. Now you’re ready to take your tracking to the big time.
Ideally you want to have two separate spreadsheets. One will keep tabs on your blog research, networking with bloggers, and help you to brainstorm topics. The other will track your posts themselves and their outcomes.
It may seem like a lot of unnecessary work to create and keep up two separate spreadsheets. But if you have no system for tracking your pitches, knowing when posts are due, and identifying which posts were most effective toward reaching your goal, you will easily get discouraged.
It takes only a few minutes a day to keep these spreadsheets up to date and you’ll be rewarded a hundred fold because if you have no system, you’re likely to begin mixing up all these blogs and what post you’ve sent to which.
Your first spreadsheet is where you keep track of your research: potential blogs to guest post on, post topics and contact with the blogger.
You can start with the basic spreadsheet described in Module 2, but you’ll be adding several more columns. Here’s a suggested format, that will be quite handy if you are following the strategies in this course.You can make adjustments based on your own preferences and the information you want to track.
Let’s take a quick look at what all these columns are about (at least the ones that aren’t obvious).
The Social Media column will quickly remind you of where you can go to ‘talk’ to the blogger, and to see what sorts of topics and questions he or she is interested in.
The three columns about topics are the results of your topic brainstorming session for that particular blog. You’ll want to home in on a topic that is popular on that blog and gets a lot of shares, but also find a new spin or a ‘missing’ element for such a topic.
The Contacts Made column is a place to keep track of how many times you’ve reached out to the blogger through commenting on their blog, interacting on social media, offering an interview, or even a personal meeting at an event. You might think you’ll remember all of this, but once you begin networking with several bloggers it all can become a blur in your head! Make notes here so when you go to pitch your post you can refer to previous contacts.
It’s true that all these columns get a bit unwieldy, but this spreadsheet will be invaluable to you as you brainstorm and write your eventual post.
Your second spreadsheet will be your Post Tracker. Create the following columns (some of these are repeats from #1, but it will save you time clicking back and forth.) You will only be using this second spreadsheet for the blogs you are actually pitching to and writing for.
This Post Tracking spreadsheet picks up where the last one left off. It’s where you check to be sure you are following up on your pitches, and that you turn in promised posts in a timely manner.
An important (and often overlooked) component of this document is the Outcomes column. When you keep track of outcomes (even if you must use a bit of guesswork), you can determine which blogs are bringing in the traffic you want.
Here is where you’ll record information such as traffic spikes on the day your post is published (and the next few days), how many new subscriptions came in, and any increases in product sales. Even though you won’t know for sure if your new subscribers, for example, were precipitated by your guest post or not, you will eventually begin to see some patterns.
This information can bring some surprises. Sometimes you might find your guest post on smaller blogs brings in more traffic – because that blog’s readership is composed of more of your ideal readers and clients. So be sure to take the time to record the outcomes of your published guest posts.
Author: A-List Team