Guest posting is talked about as a way of generating potentially huge amounts of genuine visitors to your website. Can it be true? Does it really work?

I have just been reading a claim from a blogger that he attributes 80% of his $50,000 annual blog income last year to the effects of guest blogging. This is an amazing claim and yet, he had nothing to gain from this claim. He was not directly selling a product, just the source of an interview. So should we believe him?

Backing Up The Claim

I don’t see why not. A few years ago one of my financial websites was making $3,000 – $4,000 per month on Google Adsense alone, without any paid marketing. This income, which lasted about 4 – 5 months, was through just search engine visitors. I was devastated when the site dropped 5 pages through the Google listings.

And this was just mainly fresh visitors. OK, they were arriving on a high income site. A site about mortgages is worth a lot more in Google Adsense revenue than potentially one about blogging.

But on the downside, one about blogging would have repeat visitors. It would have visitors subscribing to RSS feeds and newsletters. These visitors would return and be prone to buying into recommended products.

So yes, I believe his claims could be true. But why then guest blogging? Why not just article writing?

What’s Wrong With Articles?

Well with article writing you might get a good following of readers through the directory, but the main aim is to produce work that is listed for reprints. It is great for building inbound links and depending on the article directory’s traffic, you should receive some visitors.

But guest blogging is different. Here you are posting directly to the blogs, hopefully blogs which have good readerships. By writing quality material you are enticing the readers of that blog to wander over to yours and become readers on your blog also.

The Experiment

That’s the theory. Whether it is actually that much better is open to question and that is why I have to find out! So keep watching this post and I’ll mention which blogs I have guest posted to and which have resulted in traffic.