Photo Credit: Stefanie L.

We’ve talked about accepting guest blog entries on and off here on this blog. My friends and I even got together once to do recording about why you should guest blog. By the way, if you missed that, you can download the audio about joint blogging here.

These days, it is not uncommon to get invitations to guest blog no matter what your status is. But as entrepreneurs, we should examine each opportunity before accepting a guest blogger gig. Our time is limited. We really need to make sure we get the most out of our most precious investment – time.

So how do you know the blog you will be a guest at is worth your investment? Sometimes, this is pretty obvious. You would not be doing yourself any favors if you turn down a guest blogging gig for a very popular blogger in your market. Other times, not so.

One of the indicators is traffic. This is by no means the only indicator. You should also consider things like visitor demographics, the owners’ reputation and other activities they are doing that might draw in the traffic in due time, especially if the blog is new.

Here are some resources you can use to find out more about the blog in question.

Quantcast – I really love the demographics part. This really helps you figure out if the audience is really inline with your target audience or not. For example, if you target mature eco-conscious ladies, and the blog you are considering blogging for, attracts younger eco-conscious ladies, you can make a better decision whether you really want to invest time here or not.

If your product is equally appealing to both men and women and you find out the blog is frequented by more men, you can tailor your writing to appeal to men. The demographics presented are not exact of course but it’s a pretty good starting point. Also, if the blog has very little traffic, and the publisher is not using them to track their readership, you won’t find results.

Quarkbase – This is less about demographics but more about the site itself. Who really owns it, how many popular posts it has all time and last week. How many people bookmarked or voted for it on Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon. It also pulls data from FeedBurner to tell you how many people are subscribed to their RSS feed and from Alexa about traffic volume and history.

Once again, you won’t always find results. You might also want to ask the blogger him/herself. If they are professional, they will know what kind of audience they attract. It doesn’t hurt to spend a few minutes to check out a blog and have more information to make your decision. Especially when you’ll be contributing quality and unique content for them for a long time.