Tracking the Effectiveness of Guest Blogging

When you are guest blogging, the first thing to understand is what your goals are for doing so. Some typical goals are gaining credibility, spreading awareness and building backlinks. But, in order to know whether or not you’re effective in reaching your goals, you’ll need to know how to track the effectiveness.
* Tracking Traffic – To know if the backlinks are working to gain traffic, you’ll need to get advanced about using Google Analytics. You can set up inside analytics to track traffic coming from certain domains. Set up one for each domain you’ve guest blogged at. If a particular blog isn’t working to get traffic, stop guest blogging there and move on. If one is working well, pitch more blog posts to them.
* Tracking Blogs – When you publish a guest blog post you should put the blog name into a spreadsheet, with a link to your guest post. Make a copy of the landing page link in the spreadsheet and a note of whatever freebies or discounts you offered those website visitors.
* Tracking Comments – Using the spreadsheet, you want to periodically click through to the post so you can see if there are comments on your post. That way you can respond to them. Being responsive to comments is an important component of successful guest blogging.
* Tracking Sales – If you have set up specific landing pages for each place you put a guest blog, it will be super simple to determine which guest blog posts are getting the most sales. This is another reason to set up special links and special landing pages, as well as special affiliate accounts for the bloggers who let you guest post.
* Tracking Newsletter Sign-Ups – If you’ve used some of your blog posts to get more newsletter sign-ups then you should have no trouble knowing where sign-ups came from, since they should go to a special list designed to collect these names.
* Tracking Social Media – When you guest post you should also put social media links in your bio box. But, it can be hard to know where the links came from. So, you can build something in to help you track such as asking them a question in the blog post and asking them to go answer that question at your Facebook group, or to tweet with a certain hashtag. Plus, you can use the native analytics to find out where visitors are originating from.
* Tracking Your Ranking – While Google is not focused on page rank anymore, the fact is you still want your search results to appear on the first or second page for keywords that you are trying to rank for, right? Therefore you still want to know how and where Google has ranked your site.
* Use the Tools of the Trade – There are software and tools that you can use to help you track your guest blogging, such as Link Assistant. Using this software you can find out how you rank for specific keywords, visitors and more.
Link to Link Assistant – https://www.link-assistant.com/
Some things are easier to track than others, such as traffic. Other things you may have to think about a little harder. But, you can be sure that if there is a will there is a way to track what you need to know, to ensure that your guest blogging adventures are a success.