Results of the cross-blog series - it was a success!

It’s already a month ago since I organized the cross-blog series on Mastering Productivity. And since this was a new concept (as far as I can tell), I’m going into detail when looking back at the results.

The concept
A cross-blog series is a combination of two concepts:

• Guest posts
  These are articles written by someone else than the blog owner. The benefit for the blog owner is that he gets an article to publish for free (with no or low effort). The benefit for the author is exposure and traffic from to his own site or blog.
• Series of posts
  These are articles that are sequels to each other and posted on different dates. The benefit for the author is that people who like the series will come back to read the sequels.

The concept of the cross-blog series combines these two concepts. Basically a cross-blog series is a series of posts, but published on the same day and time, but each article on a different blog. The benefits are (based on a four-article series):

• A lot of exposure for the author
  This is like having three guest posts on the same day.
• Organic flow of traffic between blogs
  Regular guest posts drive traffic to your site from people that take initiative to visit the author’s blog, because they are curious to see more. CBS has organic traffic from people that want to read the rest of the series as an added benefit
• Inbound traffic for all participants
  The traffic flows between all blogs, not just to and from the author’s blog. Readers will visit each article and by doing so they will visit every blog.

So this is a win-win-win solution. A win for the author, for the blogger’s hosting the series and for the readers as they don’t have to wait for the rest.

Preparation
There are some challenges in preparing a CBS. Besides having a series of articles, you need to arrange quite a bit to get things up and running. In no particular order:

• Finding appropriate blogs to host the articles
  The articles need to be an addition to the blog hosting one of the articles in your series, so you have to find a set of blogs.

  Tip: Select one or two more than you need, just in case.

• Contacting the bloggers
  You need to contact the bloggers with the proposition of the series. Some bloggers are very responsive, but it might take up to a week to get a response.

  Tip: Set a reply before date, so you can move on in case you don’t get a response at all.

• Enriching the articles with context links
  Once you have the green light for the articles, you may want to enrich the articles with relevant links to articles to the other blogs hosting the series.

  Tip: You can also give the bloggers permission to do that themselves, they will find the relevant links a lot faster than you will.

• Setting a target date
  Set a target date and time of publication. Don’t bother with GMT or UTC timezone offsets, they are confusing when taking Daylight Saving Time into account. The best is to agree upon a date and time in a specific well-known location, so every blogger can figure out their publication time themselves. I used New York as a reference, and the time was set to 6 am New York time.

  Tip: Ask the others whether their platform supports scheduling of posts (Blogger for instance doesn’t have this functionality). You want to avoid having people wake up in the middle of the night to hit the publish-button.

• Sharing permalinks
  This is a challenge, not all blogging platforms are reliable in generating predictable permalinks. You’re only sure when the articles are online. Gather as much permalinks as possible in advance, when needed by agreeing upon post slugs (gotta love Wordpress). Check them nevertheless as soon as the articles come online.

  Tip: Arrange to meet every blogger on IM to share the permalinks as soon as everything is up. Takes only five minutes and it ensures correct links in every article.

The results
The day of the CBS, the traffic to my site was a tenfold of the usual traffic. And to be honest, this was a little less than I expected, given the nature of the other blogs that hosted the articles. I was very satisfied, but my expectations were a little higher.

But after the CBS traffic remained at double the amount I had before the CBS. So there was an enormous effect on traffic after all! The chart shows it all.

Subscriber count took a giant leap, it jumped to 373 from 265 in the day after the series. A rise of 40% in one day, and a conversion of about 10% of visitors in subscribers! Not too bad, right? As you can see in the chart the subscriber count has continued to rise after the CBS.

In conclusion
I’m very grateful that Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, Jay White of Dumb Little Man and Glen Stansberry of LifeDev participated in the series. Thanks guys!

The CBS produced very satisfying results and I would definitely do it again! I hope this concept will be used by other bloggers as well. And I’d be happy to host articles (as long as they’re relevant to the topics of How to be an Original of course).