Nowadays, almost every business has a site. Each Business is fighting head to head with its competitors for the customer’s attention and for their presence on their site.
Therefore, guest posting is becoming a more and more common method for increasing the site’s visibility by improving SEO results.
Table of Contents
What is guest posting?
Guest blogging also called “guest posting” is the act of writing content for another company’s website. Generally, guest bloggers write for similar blogs within their industry in order to:
- Attract traffic from the publishing site back to their website
- Boost their domain authority by receiving external links from high-authority domains
- Increase brand awareness.
- Build relationships with peers in their industry, and other similar/related industries.
Almost always, guest blogging offers mutual benefits for the guest blogger and the website hosting the guest content. In other words, guest blogging is a two-way street — so when you decide to hop on the guest blogging bandwagon, you should consider featuring posts by guest bloggers on your own website, too.
Why Is finding Guest Post Opportunities Important For Your Business?
Guest blogging offers a number of benefits for any type of business. By sharing your expertise on other companies’ websites, you can establish yourself as a well-known figure within your market, build relationships with other established personas in your field and expose your brand to an entirely new audience.
Additionally, featuring guest posts on your own blog will help you deliver new perspectives and fresh content to your audience. We’re all guilty of falling victim to a routine and growing tired of the same old stuff, so featuring guest posts is a great way to keep readers interested, without them reading the same type of content again and again — not to mention the promotional boost that takes place when your guest bloggers share the blog post they have written with their personal networks.
How to actually find guest post opportunities:
Using Google
Searching for “(your niche) blogs” is the quickest and most intuitive way to find relevant blogs for your industry. Once you find blogs you’d be interested in, first check to see if they have an established guest post system, or if they’ve accepted guest posts in the past. If not, don’t fret – this doesn’t instantly rule out their blog as an opportunity for a guest post, it just means you might have to sell them on the concept. If you’re approaching a blog for a guest post and they don’t have a history of accepting guest posts, write for them very respectfully. It might also help to check their comments section or interact with them via social media for a few weeks to establish a relationship with them, in order to make your guest post request seem less opportunistic.
Once you have exhausted the traditional Google search bar, check out Google Blog Search. Whereas searching on Google can be a great way to find niche blogs, Google Blog Search can help you locate blogs in closely related niches or larger blogs that have a category for your niche but are not entirely focused on it. The reason it is recommended to use this search tool is due to the fact it can help with finding blogs that you might not be aware of, even after extensively searching Google for niche blogs.
Look for Guest post communities
Indeed, there are communities built especially for the purpose of assisting bloggers to connect with guest writers. While you won’t necessarily find the biggest and best blogs in your niche on these networks, they can be a great place to get started with guest posting.
Using Social Media
Social media sites could help in finding opportunities with prolific guest bloggers.
You can also use social media searches in general. Here are a few different ways you can find opportunities through social media:
- Checking your competitor’s feeds to see if they promoted any guest posts is also important.
- Use similar search terms as Google Search operators by combining your keyword and guest blogging terms together
- Set up alerts for prolific guest bloggers in your niche so you find new opportunities as they get promoted.
- You can sort by “latest” to make sure you find more recent results. Or you can sort by “people” to see if you can find specific accounts or guest bloggers promoting their content. Check their profiles to find their websites, and add them to your list.
This can help you with finding opportunities that don’t appear in searches or competitor backlink checks. You won’t find the same volume or quality as some of the other methods on this list, but it helps you find more opportunities.
There are many online communities for digital marketers that you can join. You will find them on Reddit, Slack, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms that allow people to create their own groups.
For guest post opportunities, you will find some communities where members share guest blogs they wrote. They might also have shared lists of blogs accepting guest posts. You can use these communities to find current and future opportunities.
First, you need to find and join these communities. You also need to actively participate and contribute to the discussions and shared resources. If you earn people’s trust and build relationships, they will come to you with new opportunities.
Buying backlinks-
Buying backlinks has always been a murky grey area for acceptable link-building tactics. This presents an extra difficulty for guest blogging because many sites will only accept guest posts if you pay for them.
On the one hand, paying for links is something that goes against Google’s guidelines. It could get your website penalized, which you obviously want to avoid. However, despite that, it is still a common practice and most sites do not get penalized at all, especially if the paid contest is shown on the site as a guest post.
This is because what Google wants to penalize is an abuse of paid links that result in spamming low-quality and irrelevant links to fool the system. Make sure you are only paying for guest posts on websites that are high quality, relevant to your niche, and a trusted source you will be fine.
Summary:
It can be exhausting if you don’t know how to find good quality guest blogging opportunities. But if you know all the best strategies and methods, it will conserve you a lot of hours. This list of methods is an excellent way to get started if you’re not experienced with the process.
As time goes on and you get more practice, you will be able to learn all the extra little details to improve your success rate. Joining online communities is one of the best ways to get advice and valuable insights to refine your strategies. Just keep at it and you’ll have great success in time.