Keep your Guest Blogging Organized with This Spreadsheet

Guest posting has to be one of the most popular methods of content marketing right now; there has been a huge increase in the number of people utilizing this great strategy over the past year, and I’m sure that we will see similar growth.

One of the reasons guest posting has become so popular is because it helps with so many different areas of marketing. Unlike standard link building or other practices which only really affect one area (your SERPs), guest posting opens up much more opportunity.

A Good Guest Posting Opportunity Provides:

• A long-lasting credible link to your website, which will
  • Increase your websites visibility in search engines
  • Provide extra exposure for your website
  • Drive tons of direct referral traffic to your site
  • A link to your social profiles to increase your audience and social following
  • The chance to build relationships with authority figures in your industry
  • Expert status – by contributing valuable and in-depth information to highly authoritative sites, you can become a figure of authority in the eyes of your audience.

And that is just a few of the main benefits you can get from a successful guest post. As you can see, it’s a marketing strategy that you should definitely be participating in if you are not already.

Organizing your Guest Posting Campaign

Guest posting is no easy feat. It takes a lot of time, research, hard work, and patience. One thing you can do to make the whole process a little easier on yourself is to keep things organized! To help you with that I have uploaded the spreadsheet we use to track target blogs and published posts at Guest Post HQ (with a couple of small changes).

Download the Guest Post HQ Tracking Sheet Here

Using the Tracking Sheet

The tracking sheet is very easy to use. I’ve filled in the first 20 spots to give you an idea of how it works (and to give you some great guest blogging opportunities to get started with).

As you can see, the sheet stores a lot of data. Every time I see a blog which I think would be a suitable place to contribute a post for a site I’m working on, I will store its details in the “opportunities” tab on the Tracking Sheet. The details being saved include:

• Website Metrics
  • Page Rank
  • Domain Authority
  • Trust Flow
  • Alexa Rank
  • Social Activity – Number of…
    • Facebook Fans
    • Twitter Followers
    • Google Circlers
    • We also make a note of the blogs Niche, the Guidelines page (if any), and all of the available contact information (Name, E-mail Address, and other contact details)
    • Finally we store any login details (for those blogs who provide contributor accounts), and there is a space for any notes you might want to add too (submission dates, how long the editor usually takes to respond etc)

The sheet allows you to easily sort the blogs by any of their metrics, simply click the little arrow next to the field you want to sort by and choose how you want the info sorted. You will also notice that the Metrics, Subscribers, and Traffic columns have conditional formatting which applies a colour scale to make it easier for you to spot blogs with metrics you need.

That all takes place on the first sheet (titled “Opportunities”), the second sheet (titled “Published”) is where you store information about any posts you have had published. The information stored on this sheet includes:

• The title & URL to your published post
• The details of your links within the post / author bio (anchor texts and links)
• How many tweets, likes, +1’s, and comments the post has received
• Plus space for any notes you might want to add

We keep details of the published posts mainly so we can see how well those posts are performing with that particular blogs audience – which is very useful when coming up with new topic ideas. I can scroll through our list of published posts and instantly see which titles performed best at which blogs, which blogs saw the most comments on our posts, and which blogs saw the most social shares, as well as my notes (such as how quickly these blogs publish a post). This information can be extremely helpful when you’re looking for the best place to contribute a post.

I hope that this tracking sheet helps you to keep your guest blogging organized. If you have any feedback, questions, or need any help, feel free to contact me on Facebook

Author Bio: Vipin Kumar is the founder of Digital Marketing Agency, an SEO Services & high quality guest posting service which provides businesses and blogs with a cost-effective way to build their brand, increase their authority within their industry, as well as increase their traffic and target new audiences.