Guest Blogging Strategies - Whiteboard Friday

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Guest Blogging Strategies - Whiteboard Friday Posted: 01 Mar 2012 01:17 PM PST Posted by randfish Guest blogging can be a great way to help build up your brand, earn recognition, and even get some great links back to your site. When guest blogging it's important to study your audience so that you can produce the best content possible. Exceptional content is often heavily shared and that has huge potential value for your site. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we'll be covering a few guest blogging strategies that you can start using today. Please leave your comments below and maybe even share some of your own guest blogging strategies with us. Video Transcription Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about guest blogging strategies. Guest blogging and guest authorship across websites other than your own is a fantastic strategy to build your brand, get in front of new people, earn some links back to your site, and earn the recognition from other communities that can lead to all sorts of good marketing opportunities in the future. But guest posting and guest blogging can also get really run down, spammy, manipulative, low quality, and junky. What I want to do today is talk about some strategies that will help you keep it high quality, help return exceptional value from those guest posts, and make sure that when you're contributing content you're not losing all of the value that you might get from putting it on your own site, or at least you're gaining enough in return to make that transaction worthwhile. So let's take a look at some of these. I want to walk through a step-by- step format here. The first step, of course, in any sort of guest authoring, guest posting situation is trying to find good targets. A few tools that I do recommend, obviously, there are some things you can do around Google searches, searching for blogs in your niche. You probably already know of some. But you can also use some more advanced searches. I like using things like "guest author in URL blog" or "guest post" or "guest contributor," variations on these phrases. "Guest posting guidelines" or "guest authoring guidelines" or "guest blog guidelines," using these types of queries inside of Google, inside of Bing can reveal a lot of different things. You probably want to add in something about your topic, some keyword that is related to you, something broad. So if you are, for example, in the world of, I don't know, contact lenses and eyeglasses, you might write about something like glasses or eyewear or ocular health or any of those types of things to try and find people in that world. I also highly recommend using a metric that's unique from the metrics that we typically talk about here at Moz. So certainly things like Domain Authority from Open Site Explorer and Page Authority, MozRank, those are all very good, very helpful. But you can go to google.com/reader and use their search function to actually search for blogs by name or by topic area, and you will find blogs with their subscriber count, the number of people who subscribe to them in Google Reader. What this number tells you is sort of how well read and how distributed is that blog. If you see something with maybe a dozen, a couple dozen readers, I'd be a little wary. I don't know how big or valuable that blog audience is going to be, and remember it's a lot of time if you are writing a high quality article, versus something that has hundreds or thousands, hopefully thousands, of subscribers. That has tremendous, tremendous value. This is also a good research tool in general. Then I also like using some of the blog directories if you are struggling to find topic areas, you're just not finding them using your keywords. Go dig in to some of these structured and organized hierarchies. BlogHer is an excellent directory list of blogs, primarily run by woman but also sort of around female-centric topic, woman-centric topics. My Blog Guest, another great community for finding things. Technorati and Alltop, two more that you could add to that list. I would also be seeking in the things that you are looking for, in the metrics and sort of things that you are looking for, try to find, if you can, blogs that get scraped. I know this is an odd one, but blogs that get scraped, it tends to be an indication that that blog is important and well-known and that other people are taking and using their content, some of them for legitimate purposes, some of them for less legitimate purposes. But the value comes particularly when you have a link from one of these sites that gets scraped and republished all over the Web, that you get links from a lot more domains than just the one domain where you're writing. Blogs that rarely have guest content. So, a lot of blogs out there are kind of in a little bit of this kind of spammy world of just, oh, yeah, yeah, I take guest posts from everywhere, we post guest posts around, and we're more like a low quality content link directory. If you find blogs that, hey, you know, four or five days out of the week the primary writers are writing there and then maybe one guest post a week. Great. Those are excellent targets typically speaking from a quality standpoint. Then finally, non-blog news and content sites that have guest authorship opportunities. I know this sounds a little odd, but the idea here is that you can contribute just like you could to newspapers or to traditional print publications, editorial content, or guest content, and those types of ways. When that gets published, it is often a very, very unique place and an audience that your competitors are going to have a very tough time reaching. Step two, let's go in to this building relationship. I despise this idea that, "Oh, you know, hey, Rand, I wrote this post about metadata for SEO. Please publish it on SEOmoz." Who are you? Do we know each other? This is a very odd transaction. Right? No one comes up to me in the street and is like, "Hey, hey Rand, wear this T-shirt. I want you to wear this T-shirt. It's got my brand on it." This is my bad Jersey. Sorry about that everyone. All right. I was born in New Jersey, so, you know, I have an excuse. But you need that relationship before you're going to do this kind of outreach and ask these questions So what I recommend is using the social networks, right, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+. Do you like my Twitter bird here? He doesn't really have wings. Does he look better? Better or worse? A little worse. Eh, he's Christmassy though. What I highly recommend is four weeks, a minimum of four weeks of interaction and engagement with your target for outreach, with your target that you're trying to reach out to for your guest posting, before you send them the request. Let them know that you're a real person, that you know who they are, that you've researched them, that you've been in touch. After spending time interacting and engaging over social media, on their blog itself, I recommend at least two or more unique mediums, meaning maybe Twitter and Facebook, maybe Twitter and Google+, maybe Twitter and their blog, and do leave some comments on their blog so that they get to know you. They're approving those comments. They're seeing you in there. You have a presence in their community. Other people who are reading their site are knowing who you are. And do try to help them with something. Over these four weeks of engagement they will probably tweet something, say something, blog about something, have some kind of request, or you can figure it out yourself from looking at their About page and reading more about them that, oh you know what, this person, they are very, very curious about this particular topic or they are traveling here and they want some tips. Whatever it is, reach out and try and help in some way. If that is your first point of contact, the relationship is going to be much better than if the first thing you ask for is a favor - "Hey will you post my guest post?". Step three, you want to optimize your content, the content you're going to be writing, for their audience. So you want to be looking at their readers and asking questions like, "Well, what do the readers like?" You can see what people have guest posted previously, if there have been some. You can see what the authors are writing about. You kind of get this sense of, oh, wow, you know, this community is really focused on these topics and they seem to lean in these directions sort of emotionally and psychologically and politically and from a technical standpoint and here's what they understand and don't understand and here's how in-depth they like their material. Fantastic. Great. You know more about them. You're going to be able to write far more effective content that's (a) more likely to get published and (b) more likely to be shared by that audience. Remember, you don't just want a post to go up and provide you with a link. You're looking for that content to spread far and wide. You want lots of people sharing it, lots of people following your Twitter account after you've shared it with people. You want people visiting your site, finding more content like that, and then subscribing to your blog and RSS feed, following your brand on Facebook and all these other social networks. You want to get those people into the top of your marketing funnel so that they are comfortable and familiar with you and they trust you and like you. The way to do that is to study the audience where you're going to be participating. So, what earns comments, shares, and likes? If you use the Open Site Explorer top pages tool for this, you can actually go to a blog and then see, hey, what's been the most successful content and you can see all the social share numbers and all that kind of stuff and the links too. You can also ask yourself, "What kinds of questions does this community have?" If it is a highly participatory community, you'll often see that engagement. You can start to follow people who are deep in that community and see, oh, yeah, they're constantly asking these kinds of questions. I can answer that content. Finally, step four, I want to try to help you with some specific tactics that are going to earn outsize returns from your guest content. So, one of the first ones, one of the ones that I highly, highly recommend is you're usually getting a link, but that link is often in the form of a bio and people, if you submit a guest post and it has a lot of anchor text links pointing to your content, no one is going to approve it. People are going to think you're spammy. Even if the content is great, they're going to assume you're just there for the SEO, and they don't want any part of it. But you can get great links back to your site and a lot of visits to your site if you have embeddable content. So things like images and graphics or videos or interactive tools, interactive content that you're referencing back on your site that for obvious reasons can't live in the post itself. Right. Now, you might have a small version of an infographic or a small version of a photo, but then you would link off to the larger version of that photo or the larger version of that graphic, which would live on your site. That's a great thing to do too because it means that the hosting is offloaded from the guest blog publisher who might not have the world's most robust hosting, and if they are getting tons and tons of bandwidth requests, it's not exactly ideal. I also recommend a few other ones. If you can, if you have a few blogs that you know, hey, this audience is phenomenal, ask if you can do a series. Say, "Hey, I have a three or four part series on this specific topic." It's very, very wide, it's broad. Great. Write three or four guest posts and that will get you more and more familiarity with that audience, earn you better branding, earn you more links, all those good things. When you are guest posting, you often have a target list of many, many folks. You're going, "Oh well, I'm going after this guy. Then I want to go after these three guys over here, these three other blogs." Oh yeah? Well, when you write for this guy, freaking link to these guys. What does that do? That says to these people, "Oh, wow, this is cool. I got a link from this other post. Oh, interesting, it's a guest author. He must follow me, he must like me." Fantastic. Now you're relationship building in the future. They're going to get the trackback and the ping for this. You'll have done them a favor by giving them a nice link to some of their content you recognized. You're building that relationship. Fantastic. Do that. When you are writing for one, link to the others. Bio links. Bio links are tough, but you can actually, if you are clever and smart about how you interact with these, you can get the anchor text to overlap well with your branding. So, for example, I use this example a lot. Whenever I have my bio go on other people's sites, I like to link to my wife's travel blog. Now, obviously people would get very suspicious if I said travel blog, and Geraldine, my wife, of course, refuses to do any SEO herself. So, yeah, anyway, whole other story, we could do a Whiteboard Friday about that. So what I like to do, is I like to say, "Rand's wife, Geraldine, chronicles their adventures in her Serendipitous travel blog," and that is the link that I use. So it is sort of a, "Oh, you know, this is a clever combination." It does get the words travel blog in there, which I hope some day she might rank for. I think she has a great travel blog, so I hope that she does. The idea here is that you take your brand, right, so if you have your eyeglasses site, you might say, "Well, Kenny's nascent eyewear site is doing quite well in this particular vertical." Whatever it is, you want to try and craft that in a clever way so that you include some anchor text, include some branding. Finally, last thing here. When a lot of people write guest posts, they do one of two things, and I think both are kind of dumb. Number one is they don't do any SEO. They're not actually targeting keywords. They think to themselves, "Well, I want to target keyword phrases and rank for stuff on my site, not on someone else's." That's weird. The second thing they do is they try and target their primary keyword phrases on somebody else's site, which, of course, is also a little bit strange. I understand these are two dichotomous opinions here. But what I highly recommend is target those secondary or tertiary keyword phrases, the ones that you wouldn't go after because they're not super high volume. Maybe they're secondary or tertiary in your list of important keywords to go after. But you do want to try and own those search results, and one of the ways to do it is with a guest blog post. So doing a little bit of that keyword research upfront, figuring out the terms and phrases that you really want to rank for, targeting those on your site, the ones that are of secondary importance and maybe thinking about those as great guest posting opportunities, because, remember, guest posts, especially on powerful blogs, they're going to earn lots of links, they have high potential to rank, and of course, if they do that and they earn lots of nice link juice, the links pointing back to you are going to be authoritative and helpful for your own SEO. All right everyone. I hope to see lots of phenomenal guest posts from you all over the Web. Great content only. I don't want to see any more of this mishmash SEO spammy crap. I hope you'll join us again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

11 Google Analytics Tricks to Use for Your Website Posted: 01 Mar 2012 04:29 AM PST Posted by Eugen Oprea This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Do you know what is the most common question that I get every day on social media, forums or email? "How to get insights about my Google Analytics data?" People approach me saying that they have a Google Analytics account for years, but they look only at page views or the number of visitors they get. And this is wrong, this is so wrong when they have powerful free Web Analytics tools that they can leverage to learn more about their visitors and use those insights to better serve their visitors. That is why in this article I am going to tell you some Google Analytics tricks that you should use for your website. You can get the basics from my Google Analytics course, but right now I am going to take this one step further to help you get even more insights from Google Analytics. Now, if you don't use the latest version of Google Analytics, login into your account and click the [New Version] link from the top right corner of your screen before we get started. This way I can be sure that you use the latest Google Analytics interface and you can follow this article along. 1. Setup Goals Something that it's quite a straight forward process, it's actually neglected by the majority of people and this is the fact that after you install the tracking code on your website you need to setup goals. The goals you setup for your website are the foundation of your website analysis because everything gravitates around your goals and conversion rates, the goals that are ultimately your business goals. If you are wondering what goals you need to setup, start by asking yourself what is the purpose of your website. Is it an eCommerce site and you want to sells tangible goods, is it a blog where you want to make revenue from ads, do you sell eBooks or services? What is the main purpose of your site? Then, once you figure this out you can go and start setting up goals base on your business objectives. If this is still unclear for you, here are some examples that will give you traction: eCommerce site - enable eCommerce tracking and start checking the conversion rates for your products Engaged Visitors - people who spend more than one minute on your site Readers - people who visit at least two pages on your site Calls to action - use event tracking (see below in the article) to measure calls to action Best performing ads - again, use event tracking to measure your best performing ads Subscriptions - check how the visitors who subscribe to your list behave Purchases - if you sell eBooks or courses you can get insights about your buyers Later, these goals will help you track conversion rates and get insights about what are the main traffic sources that send you visitors which convert, what are the keywords who send you customers, which page your visitor use most to signup for your newsletter, where are your customers from and examples can continue. Use these examples to get started, but please note that every website is unique and it will have unique goals. 2. Connect your Google Webmaster Tools account Google Webmaster Tools is another free product from Google which helps you see data about your website such as the number of impressions for your search queries and their position in Google, the number of links to your site or diagnosis information reported by Google after crawling your website. Additionally, you can check +1 metrics, your site performance or submit a sitemap for Google to index. But what the really interesting thing is the fact that you can connect your Google Webmaster Tools account with your Google Analytics account and get access to the new Search Engine Optimization reports. Once you do that, you will be able to see three new reports in your Google Analytics account: Queries, Landing Pages and Geographical Summary. They will help you learn more about your top performing search queries (keywords) and landing pages. Then, you can use that data to identify: Keywords with a low click through rate, but a good average position. Once you know them, you can change the meta title and description of your page to improve their click through rate. Landing pages with a good click through rate, but a low average position. These pages can be easily run through an on-page optimization process that will improve their rankings. What are the countries of your organic visitors and who your target market is. To connect your site from Google Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics, go to the [Traffic Sources] section, select [Search Engine Optimization] and then one of the three reports. At this stage you will see a page with the benefits of linking your accounts and a button where it says [Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing]. Click that button and then click [Edit] from the [Webmaster Tools Settings]. Then, you will be redirected to your Google Webmaster Tools where you can connect it with Google Analytics. 3. Enable Site Speed Site speed is also a neat feature of Google Analytics that lets you see the load time of your pages. This will help you check what pages need your attention and determine you to look for ways of speeding up the load time of your pages. If you wonder why this is important, I can tell you that the load speed of your pages can significantly improve your visitors experience on your site and it's also a ranking factor in Google. So a good load speed can make your visitors happy and can also increase your rankings. Along with the number of Page Views and Bounce Rate, you can see the Average Page Load Time (in seconds) and the number of visits that have been used as a sample for every page on your website. Additionally, if you click on the [Performance] tab, you can check different buckets of your page load time and see what is the average load speed of your pages. The [Map Overlay] will show you what is the load speed for different countries or territories. If before you needed to add an additional code to your Google Analytics tracking, now that is no longer required and Google Analytics will automatically add data to your reports. 4. Enable Site Search It's a fact that visitors who use the search box on your site are more likely to convert than the ones who don't. The reason why this happens is because they are more engaged with your website, with your content or your products and services. The beautiful thing about site search is that it lets you discover the exact keywords that people use to search for your products, so you can take this a step further and use them in your search engine optimization campaigns. You can actually use the most important keywords that people use to search on your site to optimize your pages and drive more targeted traffic to your website. Additionally, they might look for products or services that you do not have on your offer, but you can add them with little effort and increase your sales. Or if you have a blog, site search is a great way to see what your readers are looking for and get a ton of article ideas out of them. If you would like to enable site search on your website, first make sure that you have a search form on your site and then enable Site Search in Google Analytics. 5. Track Events Event tracking is a powerful feature in Google Analytics that can help you track among others: How many people download your eBook What ads are performing better and who clicks on your ads Which signup form converts better (sidebar, below the post, about page) Who pauses, fast forward or stops a video What errors a visitor encounters during the checkout But that is not all. Using the latest version of Google Analytics, you are also able to set these events as goals which can help you see the performance of your events based on different metrics. Enabling event tracking it's not a hard process. All you have to do is just add the code below next to your URL, before you replace the default values. onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'category', 'action', 'opt_label', 'opt_value']);" These default values will help you identify your events and here's what they represent: Category – You can use this element to identify what you want to track: eBook, video, signup form, ads. Action – This element can be used to define the interaction of your visitor and can be: click, button, play, stop. Personally, I use it to specify the place of my button/signup form/ad. Label – Use this to identify the type of event that is tracked. Value – This element helps you specify a value for you event that can be used when you setup a goal for your event. If you would like to see a working example, here's what I used to track a link to my new product, where "Ads" is the category of my link, "Sidebar" the place where I added the link and "WAB" the label. <a href="http://www.webanalyticsblueprint.com/" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Ads', 'Sidebar', 'WAB']);"> Then once you setup your links, all you have to do is just setup that event as a goal, using the Category, Action, Label, and Value conditions you have setup for your event. 6. Real-Time Reporting Google has taken analytics one step further recently and introduced Real-Time Reporting, which displays information about visitors that are on your website in a specific moment. Your are able to see how many visitors are on your website in that moment, where they are on your website, from where they come (keywords and referrals) and where they live. Additionally, you have access to another 3 reports with more insights about their location, how they arrived on your website and what pages they visit. To access the real-time reports you need to go to the [Home] menu > [REAL-TIME (BETA)]. The [Locations] report will provide you information about the number of your visitors and the countries where they are located. You can also check their location on a map. [Traffic Sources] will display information about where they come from. You will see the medium and source along with the total number of your visitors. The [Content] report will show you what are the active pages that your visitors read and how many active visitors are on each of the pages displayed on your report. 7. Multi-Channel Funnels With Multi-Channel Funnels Google Analytics provides even more value for users who are passionate about conversion rates. If before you were able to track the last source that the visitor used to convert, with Multi-Channel Funnels you are able to also track other sources (ads, referrals, social media, organic) that the visitor used to reach your website from. Let's say for example that your visitor (Cindy) landed for the first time on your website from Twitter and subscribed to your RSS feed. Next time, Cindy used the feed reader to come and read your new articles. Ultimately she was looking for advice on blogging and found your eBook using a search engine. Now, because she knows your site already, she will buy it and become a customer. Using this example, in the old version of Google Analytics the search engine was used to be credited for the conversion, but now, with Multi-Channel Funnels you can see the whole path that Cindy took to convert: Social Network > Referral > Search engine. To check the Multi-Channel Funnels reports, go to the [Conversions] section. Watch this video to learn more about Multi-Channel Funnels: 8. Use Campaign Tracking Tracking online marketing campaigns will help you get past that large number of direct visits that come from URL shorteners like bit.ly or clients like tweetdeck. Additionally, it will help you track more accurately links from other websites and links that you use to promote your content or campaigns. In order to use Campaign tracking in Google Analytics, you need to tag your URLs with special parameters. Those parameters can be added to your links using the URL Builder tool from Google. Once you tag your URLs with the mandatory parameters, use them as they are or use an URL shortener when sharing them. Then, check the [Campaigns] report, under [Traffic Sources] > [Sources] to get insights about your online marketing campaigns. To see step by step instructions and how to check Google Analytics Campaign Tracking reports, read more in this article. 9. Plot Rows Plot Rows allows you to create instant segments of your data in tabular reports. If you usually look at standard reports, you can use Plot Rows to get more insights from your metrics. To use this feature, you need to select two rows from any tabular report and then click the [Plot Rows] button from the bottom of the table. Once you do that, you will see that the chart has changed and you are able to see additional information there about the items that you have selected. In other words it instantly creates a segment with two of your items compared with the total metrics. Use this feature to check how your main keywords, referrals or pages compare with each other and with the overall metrics of the site. But make sure that you select items that do not have a big difference between their metrics (i.e. compare a keyword with 2340 visits with one that has 154). 10. Custom Dashboards In the old version of Google Analytics you used to have available only one dashboard. However, right now you can create up to 20 dashboards customized to your needs. To create a custom dashboard, go to the [Home] menu > [Dashboards] and select [+New Dashboard]. Once you do that, you will need to choose whether you will want to start from scratch with a blank canvas or get some pointers with the [Starter Dashboard]. Then you can use slick widgets to create custom metrics, pie charts, timelines or tables. To get started with custom dashboards, have a look at my screenshot above and try to duplicate it or check out 5 Insightful Google Analytics Dashboards. Then, you will be able to customize it and add the metrics that are relevant to your business. 11. Flow Visualization Flow Visualization definitely deserves a separate article to present it, but in the meantime I will outline it's benefits. Google Analytics rolled out two reports, [Visitors Flow], under the Audience section and [Goal Flow], under the Conversion section. Visitors Flow The Visitors Flow will display the path that your visitors have taken to navigate through your website. You will be able to see, based on a selected dimension, such as country source or keyword, the exact path of your visitors and where they stopped to read your content. On hover, the report displays for each page additional details, like the total number of visits, how many visitors moved to a different page and how many of them dropped the funnel and left. If you click on a page, you will be able to highlight the traffic that went through that page, explore traffic through that page or display in a popup even more details. Goal Flow The Goal Flow report is essentially a better representation of the Funnel Visualization report and contains the same dimensions as the Visitors Flow report. But the main difference between this and the Visitors Flow is the fact that the Goal Flow report doesn't uses all pages, but the steps you configured in the conversion funnel. Additionally, you can also use advanced segments to filter your data and get additional insights from the Visitors Flow and Goal Flow reports. Your turn In this article I presented 11 tips that you should use for your website and ultimately some of my favorite features in Google Analytics, but now it's your turn to do the same. What do you like most in Google Analytics and what features/tricks you think that everyone should know about? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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