Among several link-building strategies, only a handful actually work today when done right. One of these very few strategies is guest posting. To do it the correct way, you will need to find the right guest blog post opportunities.
Read below to find out how to make the most of this strategy and build quality and relevant backlinks that will improve your search engine rankings and overall authority in the industry.
30-Second Summary:
Finding the right guest posting opportunities can be difficult, but there are some approaches you can follow to find and assess publishers and bloggers who can contribute towards your success in the online competition. You can then craft effective guest blogging strategies to overcome the changing trends and algorithm updates regarding guest posting.
How to find Guest Blog Opportunities
To look for some of the best guest blogging opportunities, you will need to follow some effective and result-driven processes. What we learned the hard way, we are going to tell you in the below some tips. Explore the step-by-step procedure for finding the best guest posting opportunities in your niche.
This process involves a combination of strategically exploring the guest bloggers, performing competitor analysis, and utilizing the right tools to find the right opportunities that fit your needs.
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Identifying Niche-Relevant Websites
Identifying niche-specific websites is as important as the actual guest post process. To find relevant and authoritative websites in your industry, you will need to use some specific search queries, like “write for us” or “guest post guidelines,” along with your niche keywords to discover websites that provide guest posting opportunities.
There are several other search queries like these that can help you find guest blogging sites and guest bloggers in your niche. You can also use variations like “guest blogging opportunities in [your industry/niche].”
To find all such terms and search queries, you can refer to the image below having all such search queries required to find the right guest blogging opportunities.
Moreover, you can also explore social media platforms and groups to find such sites within your niche. This can include industry-related communities on platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, or other specialized platforms. On these platforms, you can find guest bloggers or site owners that are looking for guest contributors on their platforms.
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Analyzing Competitor Backlinks and Guest Posts
Finding your competitors’ backlinks and guest posts is the best way to do guest posting. Following successful businesses is what will make you successful. To find the backlinks and guest posts of your competitors, you will need to first identify which businesses fall on your competitor list.
After this, you will need to find their backlinks with tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. Now you can see which websites are accepting guest posts from competitors within your niche. Finding the backlinks of your competitors is not enough, you will also need to study their guest posts.
Content is always more important than backlinks in guest posting, so make sure to review the type of content your competitors are publishing as guest posts. While reviewing the content, you can look at their topic selection, content type, tone of voice, and quality they have shown.
After studying all of this in detail, you can write your own guest posts following your own brand tone of voice and high-quality content.
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Using Tools and Resources for Guest Post Discovery
As you can find your competitors’ backlinks using some tools, you can use the same tools to find yourself some of the best guest blog sites that accept guest posts within your niche. It is advised to use SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz to identify websites accepting guest posts.
At first, these tools will provide you with the guest posts your competitors have published their guest posts on. You can then utilize their filters to only find websites that have high domain authority, are relevant to your niche, and have your preferred guest post acceptance criteria.
There are some other resources like blogs and directors of blogs that will provide you with bloggers and sites accepting guest posts. There are some websites like “Alltop,” “GuestPostTracker,” and several others where you can find websites and bloggers providing guest blog post opportunities.
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Creating a Prospective List of Platforms
Now that you have found several guest post websites in your niche, what you need to do next is to prioritize these websites as mentioned above. Use filters like domain authority, relevance to your niche, engaged audience, and alignment with your brand values as factors to filter out websites.
After doing this, you will be left out with websites that are the most appropriate and suitable guest blog post opportunities for your business. You can document these websites by making a spreadsheet where you can include the contact details, submission guidelines, domain authority, domain rating, and additional notes for each website.
Assessing Guest Blogging Platforms
From the start of this blog, we have been talking about doing guest blogging The Right Way. To ensure this approach, you will need to assess each guest blogging site for quality, relevance, and several other factors. This is required in order to find platforms that align with your business goals, audience, and niche relevance.
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Follow the Right Criteria
There are certain factors you will need to assess the guest blogging sites to be left out with only the best ones. These factors include domain authority (DA), page authority (PA), and domain rating (DR). These factors help you assess the strength of each website by using tools like SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs.
Platforms that have high scores of DA, PA, and DR are always the best choice for guest blog post opportunities. These platforms will provide you with better link equity and search engine visibility benefits, thereby improving your website’s rankings and credibility.
Another thing you will have to keep in mind is the relevance of these websites with your niche and target audience. When you are filtering out the websites, look for the ones that fall within your niche and offer quality content to your target audience in specific demographics.
Last but not least, you will need to look for the editorial guidelines of the website and the quality of content they are already publishing. By reviewing their editorial guidelines, you will have an idea of their content standards. Find websites that have strict editorial standards so your content reaches the right audience.
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Create a Pre-Final List and Start Establishing Contact
When you have received all the necessary insights from SEO tools, use these insights to make a list of websites you have agreed to reach out to.
After this, reach out to the site owners, content managers, or editors through email, social media, or other platforms you find suitable. While writing your message, you will need to sound more personal and professional, showing genuine interest that you need to contribute and inquire about their guest post submission process.
If you want to increase your chances of getting a response, you can engage with their content on a regular basis, attend industry events, and offer something valuable for them when pitching guest posts. These blogger outreach strategies will help you improve the response rate and get guest blogging opportunities for your business.
Crafting Effective Guest Blogging Strategies
If you want to find the right opportunities to post guest blogs, an important element you will need to follow is the guest blogging strategy. Your strategy must be strong and effective enough to spark interest in bloggers and get them ready to collaborate with you.
Any successful guest blogging process will need effective communication and relationship-building with site owners, editors, and influencers within your industry. So, make sure you use this aspect in the right way and secure guest blog post opportunities on high-quality platforms.
Read some effective outreach and guest blogging tips mentioned below to know further.
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Create Personalized Outreach Templates
First things first. Before putting your energy into writing guest posts, you will need to reach out to bloggers and publishers to pitch them for guest posting opportunities. To do this, you need to write effective, well-structured, and personalized outreach email templates that are customized for every platform.
The best practice in this case is to address the site owner/editor by name and tell them why you are interested in collaborating with them for guest posts. To spark their interest, you will need to talk about the mutual benefits both parties will get out of it.
To make a good impact, you will also need to showcase your expertise, previous relevant work, and how your proposed content can benefit their audience.
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Establishing Relationships with Bloggers
Just reaching out to bloggers via email is not enough. If you really want to show your genuine interest in bloggers’ sites and content, you will need to engage with them on a personal level. This includes following and engaging them on social platforms.
You can share their content, comment insights, and establish your authority before doing proper professional outreach. This will help establish a rapport and your authority as a thoughtful industry leader. It is also advised to attend any events they are going to and meet them personally so it can yield you the best guest blog opportunities.
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Pitching Guest Post Ideas
When it’s time to write email pitches for bloggers and site owners, it is advised to add a personal touch and customize each pitch to your and the blogger’s specific needs. In the pitch, you must showcase your understanding of their audience and how relevant the proposed topic to their website.
One thing most people don’t know is that you will need to keep your pitches concise despite putting all the details mentioned. This will take a little of the blogger’s time, and they will be drawn towards reading it.
But hey! Don’t forget to make the headline of your email catchy and personal. This will make them open your email and then give it a read, thereby increasing your chances of getting a response.
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Following-Up Carefully
Believe this. No one gets a reply after the first email and those who do must be fortunate enough. So, if you don’t get a response after email, don’t panic or underestimate yourself. You always have the option to follow them up with another carefully written email.
When you see that you have sent a couple of initial pitches and haven’t gotten a reply back, be sure to follow up politely within a reasonable timeframe. Your follow-up email should outline how you previously tried to contact them but failed and any more valuable offering you can give them.
Still, if your pitch is declined, always seek constructive criticism and be open to feedback and suggestions from bloggers. This will help you adapt your approach for future outreach. These are some outreach and guest blogging tips you must know of.
Benefits of Guest Blogging when done the Right Way
When done the right way, guest blogging provides your business with several benefits both in terms of search engine rankings and improving authority within your industry. Below are some of the benefits guest posting offers your business.
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High-Quality Backlinks
When you reach out to authority sites and get guest posts from them, these guest posts yield quality backlinks for your business. Each link is a vote of confidence by these websites for yours, which is important to rank your website higher in search engines and increase its credibility and relevance.
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Expanded Reach and Audience
Guest posts expose your business to a whole new audience of the blogger. When you target the readership of the blogger’s site, it offers you exposure to an audience who may not have seen your business or brand otherwise. This way, you will get an expanded audience reach.
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Build a subscriber base
Many people are confused about how to do guest blogging. Guest posting is a great way to build a subscriber base through lead generation hooks. We will discuss this in more detail below, but for now, just know that guest posts can help you increase your email subscribers for free.
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Get Referral traffic
While guest posts help improve your domain authority and rankings in SERPs, they also provide a steady stream of referral traffic back to your blog.
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Become an Industry Leader
If you want to be an influencer in your niche, you will have to start somewhere. And, guest posts help you do that. You don’t need to be a professor or have years of experience in the field. You just need to be aware of what is going on in your field and have an opinion about it.
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Improve Brand Awareness
One reason many people submit guest posts is to improve brand awareness. For example, if the owner of Empire Flippers wrote a guest post on the Ahref website. The reason he did that was not to increase rankings in search but to build awareness about his company. By reading about what he has written, more people will know what his brand is all about.
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Get Feedback from the Community
Guest bloggers cannot write all the time, and that’s why it is important to guest post on popular websites. Other bloggers will be able to comment and share their opinion about the post. In most cases, you, as a writer, will be able to engage with them and build solid connections. You may also get great ideas about your next guest post – one never knows.
Overcoming Challenges in Guest Blogging
It is true that guest posting provides you with several benefits, but it comes with its fair share of challenges. If you need to succeed in the online landscape, you will need to overcome and address these challenges. This is only how you will get success in guest blogging strategies.
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Dealing with Rejections
One of the first things you will need to know is that rejections are a part of the guest blogging process. It’s okay if your pitches get declined. Just use these declined pitches as learning opportunities and seek feedback to improve future outreach.
Just be sure to remain persistent in your outreach and guest posting efforts, and be sure to adapt as you learn. You will need to customize each pitch for new bloggers, so keep yourself updated with the new trends and feedback to learn more and increase your chances of success.
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Adapting to Different Platforms’ Requirements
Each guest posting platform has its own requirements and submission guidelines. So, make sure to adapt your content and make efforts to follow and fit these requirements. This will increase your chances of getting accepted for guest blog post opportunities.
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Coping with Evolving Trends and Algorithms
Digital marketing is evolving day by day, and this is all because of the evolving customer preferences and algorithm updates from search engines like Google. For example, when Google rolled out its helpful content update, it led to penalties for several websites that didn’t prioritize content.
This is why it is important to learn how to cope with evolving trends so your guest posting strategies stay relevant.
Summarizing the Key Takeaways
So far, we have learned how to find the right guest posting opportunities that fit your business needs and lead to your long-term success. By following these tips and techniques mentioned above, you can approach the guest posting the right way and overcome all the challenges you may face along the way.
Frequently Asked Questions
Question 1: How Can I Find Suitable Guest Blogging Opportunities in 2024?
You can use several strategies, including using specific search queries like “write for us” or “guest post guidelines” along with niche keywords, exploring social media platforms and industry-related communities, and analyzing competitor backlinks.
Question 2: What Factors Should I Consider When Assessing Guest Blogging Platforms?
You will need to consider factors like domain authority (DA), page authority (PA), domain rating (DR), website’s relevance and alignment to your niche, quality of content published, and editorial guidelines.
Question 3: How Do I Approach Site Owners or Editors for Guest Blogging Opportunities?
You will need to create personalized outreach email templates that address the site owner/editor by name, emphasizing mutual benefits, expertise, previous work, and explaining how the proposed content can benefit their audience.
Question 4: What Are the Benefits of Guest Blogging?
Benefits of guest posting include high-quality backlinks, expanded audience reach, an established subscriber base, referral and targeted traffic, becoming an industry leader, improved brand awareness, and receiving feedback from the community.
Question 5. How Do I Overcome Challenges in Guest Blogging, such as Rejections?
Challenges like rejections can be overcome by using declined pitches as learning opportunities, seeking feedback for improvement, remaining persistent, adapting to different platform requirements, and staying updated with evolving trends and algorithms.
Question 6. What Should I Keep in Mind While Crafting Effective Guest Blogging Strategies?
Crafting effective strategies involves personalizing outreach, establishing relationships with bloggers, pitching relevant ideas concisely, following up carefully, and adapting to various platform requirements and trends.
