Guest Posting Site – From Conception To Paying Members In Just 10 Days

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As many of you know I always like to have a handful of SEO clients to work on. I do this for 2 reasons. Firstly, they pay me (I’m not an idiot). Secondly, it helps me stay on top of what is working now in the SEO world.

Over the years I have found myself developing new tools that make my life easier when I do SEO for these clients.

Guest Post Tracker falls under this category.

One of the main branding and link building strategies I like to use is submitting guest posts.

Guest posts are awesome for 2 reasons.

First, if you choose the right blog who has the same audience as yours, it can drive awesome converting traffic instantly (more on that in a bit).

Second, the power you get from an SEO standpoint from links in those guest posts (or author bio) really do make a difference in your rankings.

So what is Guest Post Tracker?

As I was doing the SEO for both my websites and my clients one thing I noticed was that it was extremely time consuming to try and find blogs that would actually allow a guest post.

So then I went to some of the “ultimate” list of blogs that a few bloggers had already put together and probably half of the blogs in those lists didn’t accept guest posts anymore.

So I started putting together my own list. As my list got bigger and bigger it became very easy to find a related blog and submit a guest post.

I shared the list with some SEO friends and they loved it!

I knew I was on to something.

I was working with the list so much that I wanted more features added to it.

For example, I wanted an easy way to track which blogs I had submitted to for each SEO client. I also wanted to easily sort blogs by category.

But the list kept growing. When I got to over 500 websites I realized my Google spreadsheet wasn’t working anymore.

So I set out to build GuestPostTracker.com.

The funny thing was, I had the idea to build it, I got on the phone with my programmer and in less than 10 days it was finished.

It was easily the fastest project I had ever embarked upon.

The website turned out amazing, better than I expected.

gptforp

The site has 3 huge advantages over any other list of blogs that accept guest posts out there.

1. The site is always updated. I add (and sometimes remove) new blogs almost every single day. You don’t have to waste time looking for blogs.

2. The list is searchable by category. This makes your life really easy when you only want blogs in a certain category.

3. Submission tracking. The software allows you to mark any blog that you have submitted a guest post to. So when you look down the list you see which blogs you’ve submitted to, that date you submitted and what anchor text you were targeting.

These three features made this list of blogs extremely useful to me as an SEO guy and anyone else that wanted to promote their website through guest posting.

It was ready for the masses.

I decided to charge just $5/mo for people to use the software. This would help cover my programming costs plus the cost to keep the list updated.

How I Started Getting Sign Ups Without Spending A Dime

Like I mentioned earlier, guest posting can be an amazing advertising tool if you do it right.

I found a blog (business2community.com) that I knew was a good match with my new business. I didn’t know how much traffic a guest post there would bring me but I did want a strong link to get my new site indexed.

So I asked one of my SEO friends who is a contributor (he was using the software) to post an article about the new software. He posted the guest post entitled, “3 Must Have SEO Tools For 2016 You’ve Never Heard Of Before“.

2 days after he posted the article it was live on the site.

Now keep in mind the site was brand new and I was just trying to get it indexed from a good authority site.

But once the article went live, people started signing up.

To my surprise not only was the guest post driving traffic, people were signing up.

The conversion rate on the site was close to 3% which is phenomenal.

I knew the guest posting site was useful but I was thrilled to see people agreed with me and were signing up.

This whole process I had just gone through proved how valuable having a good updated list of blogs that accept guest posts really is.

I picked a blog from my list, submitted a guest post and saw a boost in traffic and sales instantly. Awesome.

So as I saw the amazing response to the site with such small amount of traffic I am really excited about the future of this site.

3000 Users By The End Of The Year

I’m setting some ambitious goals for this site. I want to be at 3000 users by the end of the year.

This means that I need to get about 150,000 unique visitors over the rest of the year which averages out to be almost 14,000 visitors per month. From those 14k visitors I need to average about 273 sign ups a month.

The first part of my traffic strategy is to continue to get engaging guest posts on high value blogs that match my audience.

The second part of the strategy is to approach the bloggers who already own the search rankings for all of the “list of guest posting blogs” and pay to advertise on those lists. I’ve already approached 2 of the highest ranking blogs and they have agreed to allow me to do that.

Third strategy is to target through SEO the hundreds of phrases that will drive targeted traffic. One of the cool things about this niche is people not only search for broad terms (ie “guest posting site”) but they also search by category (ie “submit health guest post”). So I will spend time targeting all of those niche phrases as well.

As it has been well documented in articles like this one: https://springhillmarketing.co.uk/the-ultimate-guide-to-blogging-for-seo-success/ creating smart blog posts that target specific key phrases and solve the problems of my target audience is the fourth part of my SEO strategy.

14,000 visitors in a month is a lot but with the right traffic strategies I am confident I can make it happen.

How To Get Visitors To Buy From You

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I recently received this question from a Prosperly reader:

Thanks for the article Adam. Yes I’m aware that this is a great way of earning some money but the thing is, how do you come up with something interesting enough for people to actually buy online? I mean a book or a guide. How many people would actually do that?

Believe it or not, getting people to buy is not the issue. In fact as long as you know a little about creating sales copy and internet marketing, getting people to buy is the easy part. Getting qualified people to your website is the hard part.

The reality is, if you do your sales copy and internet marketing properly you can expect to sell to 1-2% of your visitors. That is simply a fact of life. Some people will say they get more than that but for the majority of the internet world that is where they are.

If you want a quick way to increase revenue, look at your conversion rate and figure out how to get it closer to the 2%. Think about it, if your site converts at 1% and you raised the conversions to 2% you just doubled your money. Not bad considering you didn’t have to get any more visitors to your site to do it.

Website Optimizer is the best free tool to do this. You can do straight up A/B testing which means you take to versions of a page and test them against each other to see which one converts higher. Or you can do multivariate testing where you take small pieces of a page and change them and test them against the original (ie a headline, testimonial and buy button etc).

I use it all of the time and it works like a charm. ABT – Always Be Testing

As far as creating the product is concerned, back in 2003 or ’04 I created a digital product teaching how to start a lawn care business. How did I know people would buy it? Because people were searching for things like “how to start a lawn care business” and “starting a lawn care business”. They truly wanted to learn. If I could teach them I knew I could get them to pay for it.

Now remember 98 out of 100 people will not buy it, but 2 people out of those 100 will. Its a numbers game.

So I created the product and then put together some long sales copy for it and people started buying it. I already had the traffic from good organic SEO rankings. The day I launched the product and from then on visitors to my site bought my product like crazy. Give your customers what they are looking for and they will buy from you.

The Best Way To Launch A New Product Online

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A lesson I have recently learned (the hard way) is how to best launch a new product online. One of the websites we run is a reviews website in the health industry. We review products in the industry and then have affiliate links for people to buy the products we are reviewing.

Well one of the companies that we have an affiliate program through came to us and offered to allow us to create our own ideal product in this industry. We got to choose all of the ingredients so we knew the product would be top quality. He also said he would give us 50% of all sales generated of the new product since he was only going to use our reviews website to market the product. I jumped at the chance and we moved forward with the project.

I had no experience with a new product launch in this industry. The health company gave us complete control of building a website and marketing the product. All they would do was create the product and then do order fulfillment (take orders and ship out the product). So we created the website for the product itself and then added the new product as our #1 product on the reviews website.

Things started out great as our reviews website and the website for the new product were the only websites ranking for the name of the product. Quickly though, our competitors caught on and started writing reviews of their own bashing our new product. They started to show up in the rankings as well because there was no competition for the term. Even though our product was far superior to theirs, they bashed it to no end (That is typical of this industry).

I knew we were losing sales because of the unwarranted bad press the new product was getting. We were still making good money (up to $800 a day) with the new product because people trusted our reviews and recommendations since we took the time to do in depth quality reviews. But I wasn’t satisfied. After speaking at length with the creator of the product he explained to me the right way to launch a new product in this industry (which should apply to almost any industry).

Get A Jump On The Competition

Your competition is in business for one reason, to make money. If you come out with a competing product that is better than theirs they could lose money so they will do what they have to do to beat you. In many industries ethics are thrown out the window.

Because we were launching a new product with a name no one had ever heard of, here is what he said we should have done.
Create several websites that talk about the product favorably. This is very easy to do as you can go to worpress.com and get a new blog called productname.wordpress.com. You should write as much as you can about the product so the website will rank better for your product name. Then have it link to the products website.

You then go do the same thing at blogger.com and this time write completely unique content.

Then you go to sponsoredreviews.com and pay to have seasoned bloggers to write positive reviews about your new product and have them link to the products website. This can cost anywhere from $10-$50 per review. Try to get at least one really good (high PR) blog to do it. These reviews will also start to rank high for your product name.

If you do these things by the time your competition catches on you will own almost all of the top 10 spots of Google when someone searches for your product name and your new product launch will go much more smoothly.

The biggest thing to remember is to take an aggressive approach to protecting your new brand in the beginning so your competitors aren’t able to bring you down easily.