Guest posting is a highly effective way of gaining traffic and making a name for yourself, especially if your website is relatively recent and not many people know about it. It is however considered a harder technique than others as it requires a complete set of skills such as writing and communication. One of the things that often gets overlooked is the fact that you also need to know how to effectively maintain checklists when indulging in guest blogging.
In fact, if you do not bother to maintain a guest blogging checklist, the potential for mistakes, omissions and awkward situations is actually extremely high. Guest blogging is the one technique where you absolutely need to keep track of what you are doing at all times. When you consider that the submission of a carefully crafted article to multiple blogs can be more than enough to shoot down the reputation you took several months to build, it is even more important to have a simple checklist that you can refer to at any time.
Your guest blogging checklist
As far as software is concerned, spreadsheet software are obviously the best choice. If you are using Windows, this will likely be Microsoft Excel. Any other type of software will very likely result in issues later when you have a lot of information to deal with. The advantages of spreadsheet software such as Excel are that you can easily store tons of information and the information is already visually formatted to ensure you can find what you are looking for very quickly.
Obviously, with these software, you also get to separate your data in columns, which consequently also facilitates sorting and allows you to do tons of things other software would not let you do. When it comes to these columns, each blogger will have specific columns depending on what he wishes to record but the following columns are absolutely necessary.
Website: this is the name of the website where your guest article has been submitted
URL: this is the home page URL of the blog
Contact: the webmaster’s contact info; this can also be a username and password along with a login page (eg. WordPress)
Blog post title: this is the title of the guest article you wrote for that blog
Blog post URL: the URL of the guest article once it is live
Date submitted: the date you submitted the guest post to the webmaster
Date published: the date the guest post was published
In the last two cases, it is important to keep track of when your blog posts are submitted and when they are actually published. This allows you to have a general idea of how long certain webmasters take to publish guest posts. More crucially, it allows enables you to instantly figure out which of your guest submissions were not successfully and to strike off unresponsive webmasters to keep your list as concise as possible.
Finally, if you are guest blogging for multiple websites, it is also a good idea to keep track of which websites you have blogged for in another column. This helps you quickly identify where your different links are.
Ash writes on behalf of the Southern Marine Port Agent Mauritius which provides shipping services in Mauritius and is also a Madagascar cargo provider.
[easyazon-block asin="0312430000" align="none"]
