You want to post reg­u­larly to your blog. You have done everything right: you’ve planned and strategised, but some­how you are still strug­gling to come up with yet another post. One way around this is to bring in a guest blog­ger. But there are more bene­fits to hav­ing a guest post on your blog. Here are some tips to get you mov­ing in the right direction.

What is guest blogging?

The pro­cess is fairly explan­at­ory: that of bring­ing in some­body else to write an art­icle for your blog. Many online mar­ket­ing experts recom­mend guest blog­ging as a way of broad­en­ing your audi­ence, of increas­ing your net­work, because it’s like grass­roots mar­ket­ing. If your guests offer you a guest blog spot in return, then it is also great for being seen as an author­ity in your field.

Why are guest blog­gers a good idea?

Apart from the fact that a guest blog­ger saves you the angst of con­stantly think­ing up new mater­ial, bring­ing in another guest blog­ger has other benefits.

Some of these bene­fits include:

• a fresh voice. Every­body writes in a dif­fer­ent way, with a dif­fer­ent voice and a dif­fer­ent style. But bring­ing in a guest also brings in a fresh per­spect­ive to your over­all topic. It can be like bring­ing in a breath of fresh air, rein­vig­or­at­ing your audi­ence and spark­ing off new ideas.
• a day off! Hav­ing someone else post on your blog, espe­cially if you are able to host a guest fairly reg­u­larly, gives you a break from the pres­sure of churn­ing out art­icles. You might occa­sion­ally need to col­lab­or­ate on ideas, but it still leaves the angst of writ­ing to someone else. 
• new ideas. Your guests’ blogs, in approach­ing a topic slightly dif­fer­ently, are likely to help spark off new ideas. This can be great for your own creativity.
• a new audi­ence, and new net­work­ing oppor­tun­it­ies. If you draw a guest who hosts another blog, and if your guests pro­mote their guest blog­ging spots (which is great for them too!), it’s likely that their audi­ence will come to your blog to read their work. And, if they’re inter­ested, chances are they’ll read through your blog as well. Need­less to say, this is great for expand­ing your net­work, because guest blog­gers will often offer you a spot as a guest on their blogs.
• the oppor­tun­ity for your writers to get involved. If you choose to put out a call for guest blog­gers, then some of your read­ers may well get excited about the pos­sib­il­ity of par­ti­cip­at­ing. This alone is great for rein­for­cing your rela­tion­ship with your readers.

How do you find guests for your blog?

The best guest blog­gers are those who can bring in some­thing new or fresh for your audi­ence. They can be col­leagues in your industry, people who write sim­ilar blogs, or even those who most fre­quently leave com­ments on your blog.

If your busi­ness is like ours, and has vari­ous con­tract­ors who provide par­tic­u­lar skills for your cli­ents, then you have yet another source of guest blog­gers. By sit­ting down and brain­storm­ing poten­tial guests for your blog, you will likely be astoun­ded by just how many people you could poten­tially draw on.

But you can also turn your guest blog spot into an oppor­tun­ity to con­nect with your read­ers. Here are some sug­ges­tions for find­ing guest bloggers:

• put out a call to your read­ers, and ask them to participate
• ask people in your net­work: from organ­isa­tions of which you are a mem­ber, from your social net­works, from col­leagues and contractors
• ask those who com­ment most often on your posts whether they would be inter­ested in writ­ing a full article
• make it an event! Cre­ate a new cat­egory for guest blog­gers, offer pro­mo­tion oppor­tun­it­ies, ‘link juice’, and pro­mote the hell out of it. Every­body likes their time in the spotlight.

About pages on web­sites are like your call­ing card. It’s quite often one of the first places pro­spect­ive cus­tom­ers will click on your web site if they are curi­ous about your busi­ness, and want to see if they are going to think fur­ther about work­ing with you.

But ‘about’ pages can be dif­fi­cult to write because, let’s face it, few people like to talk about them­selves. Even fewer know how to start!

Our copy­writer Leti­cia recently pos­ted an art­icle on this very topic. She talks about why they are often dif­fi­cult to write, and gives you some great tips on how to get started.

Click here to read The Hard­est Text to Write.

It might be tempt­ing to pro­mote your busi­ness on Face­book from your per­sonal account. Before you do, stop and think care­fully because it can be a bad idea. Here are 4 good reas­ons why you should avoid it.

1. Per­sonal is per­sonal, busi­ness is business

If you are con­sid­er­ing pro­mot­ing your busi­ness from your per­sonal account, let me ask you some­thing. How much do you want your cli­ents to see what you post as your status? Chances are, not much.

We all have times where we like to whinge about things, swear, get excited, share con­tent that shocks, or whatever. If your cli­ents are con­nec­ted to your per­sonal Face­book account, it is likely that you will even­tu­ally regret it. And then you can’t delete them, because they would get offended.

2. You don’t want to bore your friends

Sure, your mates all know you run a busi­ness, but how many of them want to hear you go on about it? Not many, I bet. Bore them enough, and they will simply ignore you, or — worst case — hide you from their news feeds.

More to the point, your friends are unlikely to be your business’s tar­get audi­ence. You are far bet­ter off focus­ing your busi­ness on where it will have the most impact.

3. Ded­ic­ated pages = ded­ic­ated fans

One of the most import­ant things about a ded­ic­ated busi­ness page on Face­book is that it is spe­cific. Focus­ing spe­cific­ally on what you do, how you do it, and inter­est­ing things about your busi­ness is easier to pro­mote. It also means that when you start get­ting act­ive about grow­ing your net­work, it keeps you per­son­ally out of it. You will have a ‘product’ (your business’s page) that you can pro­mote, rather than try­ing to pro­mote yourself.

It’s a pretty tight Catch-22. And this alone is a great reason to keep your per­sonal account per­sonal, and to set your busi­ness up as itself.

4. Per­sonal accounts don’t go viral; pages do

The viral nature of social net­works is what makes them so valu­able to busi­nesses and products. With this in mind, it’s worth­while not­ing that per­sonal accounts don’t go viral. Pages do.

And if you have a ded­ic­ated page, you can make sure it starts to do the rounds by cre­at­ing a growth strategy for it.

Very few net­work growth strategies would work effect­ively from a per­sonal account. But there are some excel­lent ways of doing it for pages.

Keep your eyes peeled, because in our next art­icle we bring you key strategies and tips for grow­ing your business’s Face­book network.

It sounds fun, but your site’s bounce rate has noth­ing to do with tram­po­lines, bal­loons or pil­low fights. ‘Bounce rate’ is a term used to describe the per­cent­age of new vis­it­ors to a site, then leave without vis­it­ing any other pages. Essen­tially, they’re ‘boun­cing’ off.

What your bounce rate means

Your site’s bounce rate could be telling you a num­ber of things about your web site content.

If your bounce rate is low — under 40% — then it’s telling you that your site is enga­ging and invites users to explore fur­ther. That is, you’re doing a good job — keep it up!

If your bounce rate is high (over 50%, for example) it could mean that:

• vis­it­ors are not being engaged by your site’s content
• they’re encoun­ter­ing some­thing that drives them away — like an error, a broken link, or con­fus­ing text
• your site is not what the user was expect­ing. This can be the case if you have an advert or link on another site that is mis­lead­ing. If a user clicks on a link expect­ing to see dog groom­ing inform­a­tion, they’re going to be very sur­prised if they arrive on a site selling ham­mers. Chances are they’re going to hit the back but­ton — and quickly!

But wait — it could be a good thing

While a high bounce rate often means that your site’s con­tent needs atten­tion, it may not be a bad thing.

If your site is simple and con­tains all the inform­a­tion that your vis­itor needs on one page, then might not need to click any­where else. In this case a high bounce rate isn’t negative.

Your page’s page’s primary goal might be really spe­cific. You might want users to:

• call a phone number
• send an email enquiry
• down­load a file
• watch a video
• click a link to another site.

Users who do this will still con­trib­ute to your bounce rate, even though the page has suc­cess­fully ‘con­ver­ted’ them.

Blogs and news-oriented sites often show high bounce rates. Vis­it­ors will fol­low a link to a par­tic­u­lar post, read it, then move on.

There’s always room for improvement

A high bounce rate may not harm your busi­ness. But lower­ing it will almost cer­tainly yield bene­fits for your online mar­ket­ing efforts.

If you have a high bounce rate — even if your site is in one of the typ­ical high bounce rate cat­egor­ies — there may be ways to improve it. You might want to think about:

• look­ing for pos­sible errors
• chan­ging the site’s structure
• rework­ing the copy
• look­ing at your ‘call to action’ statements
• ask­ing some rep­res­ent­at­ive mem­bers of your tar­get audi­ence to give you unbiased feedback.

It used to be com­mon to track web site ‘hits’. But this is not a valu­able met­ric, and rely­ing on it could lead you astray. In this art­icle we’ll explain the dif­fer­ence between hits, pageviews and visits.

Hits explained

A web page is made up of lots of dif­fer­ent pieces. When you watch a page load — espe­cially on a slow con­nec­tion — you’ll often be able to see this quite clearly. The page builds bit by bit: first the struc­ture, then text, then other ele­ments. Large images often take longer to load than the rest.

Each piece of the site is a sep­ar­ate file, and every request to each file gen­er­ates a new ‘hit’ on the web server. Load­ing a single page could gen­er­ate any­where from 1 to 50 (or more) hits.

Pageviews

A pageview is a much more use­ful met­ric. As the name sug­gests, it tracks the num­ber of times a page is viewed.

If your site works well, you will find users vis­it­ing mul­tiple pages. This is why, although valu­able, a pageview met­ric is not a true indic­a­tion of your web site’s traffic. A high pageview count is great, but a high vis­itor count is even better.

Vis­its

A visit is the most use­ful met­ric of all. Each num­ber of vis­its tells you the num­ber of single people spend­ing time on your site in one sitting.

For example, let’s say I visit your web site in the morn­ing, and look at 5 dif­fer­ent pages. This rep­res­ents one visit, five pageviews and a large num­ber of hits. But, unless I count how many images and other assets are on the page, I’m not going to be able to eas­ily estim­ate the num­ber of hits.

Later that day, I fire up my browser and return to your site, look­ing at 3 dif­fer­ent pages. This rep­res­ents a second visit, three more pageviews and again, a large num­ber of hits. My activ­ity on your site has gen­er­ated two vis­its, eight pageviews and a lot of hits.

Unique and return­ing visits

Vis­itor stat­ist­ics are split between unique vis­it­ors and return­ing visitors.

What is the dif­fer­ence? A unique vis­itor is one that has never been to your web site before. A return­ing vis­itor is someone who has come back to your site.

A high num­ber of unique vis­it­ors and a low num­ber of return­ing vis­it­ors may indic­ate that your web site’s con­tent is not enga­ging enough to keep bring­ing people back.

Con­versely, if your unique vis­it­ors’ rate is low, you might want to think about ways of bring­ing more people to your site.

The best vis­itor met­rics have high num­ber of both unique and return­ing vis­it­ors. That would tell you that you are not only draw­ing people in, but you are good at keep­ing them com­ing back.

Meas­ure it, improve it

It is good to keep an eye on each part of your web site stat­ist­ics. Whatever you can meas­ure, you can improve! Know­ing the dif­fer­ence between hits, pageviews and vis­its is the first step towards bet­ter under­stand­ing your web site visitors.