DailyMorningCoffee welcomes Matthew Geer on-board as a Guest Author.
It should go without saying that guest posting is hands down the best way to attract attention to your brand or website, shy of producing epic content. And compared to other methods of building one way links, it’s the easiest (and cheapest) to accomplish.
But you already know this. What you may not know, however, are all the methods for finding guest post opportunities — the hardest part of the process.
Finding Guest Post Opportunities
My process for finding guest post opportunities revolves around basic search and reverse engineering. Take a site and figure out who’s commenting on it, linking to it and accepting guest posts from it. Not only will you find (more) sites faster, but your acceptance rate will be much higher too. Just use one of these methods and you’ll find that you have more guest post opportunities then you know what to do with.
1. Follow the PR Trail
I should start off by saying that I don’t care about page rank when it comes to my sites. There are far better metrics to track.
That said, page rank is handy when looking for guest post opportunities that are worth your time. What kinds of sites are worth guest posting for? Sites that are relevant to your niche that receive a considerable amount of traffic.
Ok, so where does page rank fit in? Well, from my experience a PR2 website will have links from websites with a higher PR. Sites with higher PR tend to have higher traffic levels, more subscribers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers. These are the sites that you want to write for.
2. Check Out the Comments of Related Sites in Your Niche
Blog comments are a gold mine of potential guest post opportunities. Sites like Copyblogger, Smart Passive Income and the Steve Scott Site all receive 50-100+ comments per post. That’s a lot of sites to contact. And you can take this strategy further by checking out the comments of those websites.
3. Use “Niche” + “Write for Us”
Most sites use the same phrase or two for their anchor text and title for their guest post page:
- Write for us
- Guest post
- Contribute
- Blog for us
- Writers needed
So take these phrases and do a Google search for:
- “your niche” + “write for us”
- “your niche” + “guest post”
- “your niche” + “contribute”
And so on. Play with different variations, both for your niche and the phrase. This will bring you pages and pages of potential sites to contact.
Instead of “your niche,” another idea is to use a blogger’s name or website. This will bring back results of sites that the blogger guest posted for.
4. Blog Directories
Blog directories are great for finding guest post opportunities. You have pages after pages of blogs in all kinds of niches to contact. Here are a couple directories to get started with:
- Blog Catalog
- Blog Engage – Not exactly a blog directory, but works just the same.
The one downside to blog directories is that you have to wade through a lot of duplicate sites (due to them posting frequently). But from my experience they’re still worth using.
5. Guest Post Pages
I’ve noticed that quite a few bloggers have “press” or “guest post” pages where they list all the sites they’ve been interviewed on or have guest posted for. Pretty self explanatory here — go through each site and contact the sites.
6. Use the Blogroll
Blogrolls are easy pickings. Snowball this method by checking the blogroll of each site in the original site’s blogroll.
7. Advertise Your Desire to Guest Post in Your Guest Posts
Don’t advertise blatantly, like in the middle of your post. If anything, that’ll make you look bad, and that’s assuming your post isn’t rejected first.
Instead, use the bio box to advertise your desire to guest post. I realize a lot of you guys want to use the bio boxes to stuff in keywords, but think of it like this. You can write 1 guest post and have a keyword rich backlink to your website or blog, or you can advertise your desire to write guest posts and possibly land multiple opportunities to promote your blog or website. Which would you rather have?
Pretty easy choice, I think.
8. Leverage Social Media
Do you have:
- Google+
Of course you do. How many contacts do you have that operate websites or know of people that operate websites? A lot, right? One tweet or post to your wall can send lots of opportunities your way.
9. Find All the Sites That Bloggers Own
Chris mentioned in a post that he knows how to find all the sites that you own using WhoRush. I use a service called SpyOnWeb, which is similar.
What’s that got to do with guest post opportunities? Well, by plugging in a niche site or Google account information, you can find all the sites that a blogger operates. This gives you the opportunity to do one of a few things:
- Offer to guest post on one, or all of their sites
- Contact them using different pen names to each one of their sites
- Check out their blogrolls, guest post pages, etc to find more sites
10. Use Guest Post Networks
Guest posting networks are sites that bring guest posters and blogs who want guest posts together. I can’t think of a better source to find guest post opportunities — especially one that offers such a high acceptance rate.
Here are a couple guest posting networks worth checking out:
Don’t Forget to Combine All of These Methods
The ultimate way to get the most out of the methods above is to use them all, and better yet, combine them altogether. In other words, if you’re checking out a website’s blogroll, why not do a quick SpyOnWeb check to see all the sites they own? Or find the sites they’ve guest posted for? The bottom line is that guest posting is a numbers games, so the more methods you utilize, and the farther out of the box you can get, the more guest posting opportunities you’ll find.
About the author: Matt is an internet marketer and freelancer. His current project is Website Mechanics, a website that will teach you how to work on your own website. Sign up to the Website Mechanics newsletter to get post updates, website tricks and tips, and other neat stuff.
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Great resources Praveen. I’ve used MyBlogGuest and in fact, today’s guest post on my site came from there.
Very well written.
Thanks,
Bryce
Bryce – Thanks for stopping by. Matt did a good job at this where he has summarized all the different ways to search and write guest posts. I am sure it will be very helpful to the readers.
Thanks Bryce, I appreciate it. And thanks to Praveen for letting me submit the post. Hopefully all the readers here find it useful 🙂
I like all these ideas. Maybe someone could write a post on how to weed out the spammy bloggers – I sometimes get requests to do guest posts from people without last names from sites that just look like scrappers.
Without opening them up and checking out their site(s) I’m not sure if there is a way….. Maybe check out their sites and see if they have any references or sites that they’ve guest posted for in the past?
Leora – Thanks for stopping by and leaving your comment. As Matt said, it might be a little difficult to identify the spammers by using any tool. The best way would be to check their blogs or websites and see to it that they have good interest at heart.
Matt – Thanks for keeping track of the comments.
Great information. Lucky me I came across your blog
by accident (stumbleupon). I have book marked it for later!
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