If you frequent forums and read blogs about driving traffic to your website, you’ll come across this tip often: Create guest posts on other blogs – they increase your exposure and drive a lot of traffic to your website.

I need traffic, so I created a guest post and submitted it to a popular blog. It was accepted and went live in a couple of weeks.

Here are the stats from the blog that published my guest post:

• Around 2000 subscribers according to feedburner
• Around 4000 unique daily visitors according to the webmaster

With these numbers, it is safe to estimate that around 2000 visitors saw the link to my website. How many of them clicked on it? Before discovering the actual number, my guess would have been around 1%. It’s an arbitrary guess but it seems possible. About 1% of visitors click on AdSense ads, so why not guess that 1% click on a link to learn more about the author of the guest post?

2000 visitors saw the post. Of them, 4 visited my website – 0.2%.

For me, creating a guest post did not increase traffic. I’m not sure why. Why do other bloggers claim that guest posts increase traffic? Are they guessing or just chanting a mantra with no data to back it up? Unfortunately, there is no way to know because most of them do not reveal their traffic statistics. So your only option is to believe them until you try it yourself.

Of course, the problem may be that my guest post was poor; that people did not want to know more about the author. I need to do more guest posts and collect more data. A sample is not enough. But the first attempt was a real disappointment.

The hidden benefit of guest posts

Fortunately, guest posts have two benefits. One is that people click the link back to your website; this was useless for me. The other benefit is that Google notices a one-way backlink from a popular blog to your website.

Over time, this could lead to traffic. Because the more one-way backlinks you receive, the more traffic Google will send to your address; this is also a mantra said by many. Maybe that’s what the other bloggers mean when they say it will increase traffic. In the long run, it will increase Google traffic. The effects are not immediate but they arrive. It’s too early to know if guest posting has any benefit on my SEO. But I hope so, otherwise the guest post was a complete waste of time.