If you’re landed on this page, then you definitely want to know how to find guest blogging opportunities in your niche.
As you probably know, guest posting is one of the most efficient ways to build relevant links to your website from authoritative websites within your niche.
Guest blogging works.
There are numerous success stories of how bloggers and online marketers leveraged guest blogging to link building, generating consistent site traffic to their blogs, and increasing revenue.
Guest blogging is not all about building links. Even though this is probably the main reason why people guest blog today.
With a killer guest blogging strategy, you’ll be able to expand your network and audience. And what’s more, you’ll get a chance to showcase your knowledge and expertise.
Is guest blogging effective for SEO?
Guest blogging is a great off-site SEO technique.
By simply getting your message across to bigger audiences on other websites, you can build high-quality backlinks.
Getting as many high quality and relevant sites as possible to point back to your domain is extremely important for your SEO.
Generating high-quality backlinks from top domains can significantly increase your organic rankings, brand awareness, and overall domain authority.
Google sees your backlinks as a decisive factor while calculating a certain site’s worth.
Adam Enfroy has proved that guest posting is here to stay. He published over 60 guest posts and in this way, he managed to increase the organic traffic from 0 to 125k+ in just 11 months.
Thus, optimizing your blog for search is probably the smartest thing you can do for your brand online.
How to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities
The very first and probably most difficult part of using guest blogging strategy is identifying guest post opportunities.
The good news is that there is a wide range of sites you could potentially contribute to. Bad news is that not all of them accept guest posts.
So, here are the proven ways to find guest posting opportunities.
Using Google search operators
Searching for "your niche + blogs" is the quickest and most intuitive way to find relevant blogs for your industry. Google is one of the best search engines to find tons of hidden opportunities, as well as many relevant and good-fit websites.
You can use Google search operators to find websites you never knew existed.
List of queries
Use the following guest posting search queries to dig up guest blogging opportunities.
"[keyword]" + "write for us""[keyword]" + "guest post""[keyword]" + "blogging guidelines""[keyword]" + "guest article""[keyword]" + "guest article opportunities""[keyword]" + "guest post opportunities""[keyword]" + "guest blog opportunity""[keyword]" + "guest post by""[keyword]" + "contributing writer""[keyword]" + "guest writer""[keyword]" + "guest blog submission""[keyword]" + "submit guest blog ""[keyword]" + "guest column""[keyword]" + "contribute to our site""[keyword]" + "guest post written by""[keyword]" + "suggest a blog post""[keyword]" + "guest post written by""[keyword]" + "submit an article""[keyword]" + "contributor guidelines""[keyword]" + "guest blog post wanted""[keyword]" + "blogger wanted""[keyword]" + "writer wanted""[keyword]" + "article wanted""[keyword]" + "blog post needed""[keyword]" + "article needed""[keyword]" + "writer needed""[keyword]" + "accepting guest posts""[keyword]" + "post written by" + "[familiar writer/link builder]""[keyword]" + "become a guest blogger/guest writer""[keyword]" + "guest author""[keyword]" + "submit article"
b. Site search
If you have already a list of the authoritative websites you’d like to contribute to, then you can use the site search to know whether they accept guest posts or not.
You can use this search operator site:example.com search term to learn whether they accept guest posts on their sites and if they do, you can easily visit their guest post page to find out their requirements.
Let’s say, you want to contribute to Fitness of body site. To use the site search operator, enter the following search string:
In this case, you can see that this site is open for guest bloggers. But you should also remember that some blogs don’t have a page with guest post guidelines even though they accept guest contributions.
Another important thing to remember is that your pitch could be easily rejected by blog owners if you send a topic suggestion that has been covered multiple times on the targeted website.
To avoid this, you can use the ‘site search’ method to research the topic you want to write about. For example, you want to write about KETO diet for Fitness of body blog, you can use the site search to find their posts about link building.
In this way, you’ll be able to avoid pitching a title that has already been covered before. Plus, you’ll get more details about a website you want to pitch your guest post ideas to.
c. Intitle & inurl search
These two are pretty self-explanatory. These search operators help to find the targeted text within page titles and/or URLs.
The thing is that, in most cases, websites include important keywords in their URL as well as in titles. What’s more, you can combine the intitle and inurl operators to get more accurate results.
This is how I often use and combine them:
inurl:[guest] + [topic]intitle:[topic] + inurl:"write for us"intitle:[topic] + inurl:"guest blog"[topic] + inurl:"submit" + intitle:blog"
d. Author search & reverse image search
Another way you can find sites to send your pitch to is by finding people from your niche or market who often create high-quality backlinks for their sites through guest blogging. You could also find a lot of interesting data by spying on your competitors.
The process goes like this: Find your target, extract a link of their headshot and paste it into Google’ reverse image search:
In this way, you’ll be able to see websites where these images appear.
You’ll find that these are guest posts the influencer has published.
Reverse image search is an efficient method that can instantly help you find all the places where influencers in your industry have published their guest posts.
Using Ahrefs Content Explorer
Ahrefs comes up with some of the best SEO tools in the industry. The Content Explorer is one tool within Ahrefs’ SEO toolset. It’s basically a mini search engine that’s extremely helpful for SEOs, marketers, and bloggers.
Here’s how you can use Ahrefs to excel in guest posing.
- Select the “Content Explorer” Tab on Ahrefs.com
- Type in your keyword in the search box and hit the orange search button
- You will get a huge list of results.
- Reduce this number of pages by applying other filters. For instance, apply the “one article per domain” filter so that only a single domain page for that topic will show up.
- Ahrefs also allows you to sort your results based on the domain ratings.
Using social media platforms
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be very helpful when it comes to guest posting opportunities.
Social media is a go-to-place when people want to interact with each other. But what’s even more important is that most websites use these platforms as their primary source of content promotion.
So, how this can help you with finding new opportunities for guest contribution?
Well, you can reach out to your friends (and friend of friends) with blogs or websites. Connection is the key!
Search for guest blogging opportunities. Twitter is probably the most efficient social network for this purpose.
The thing is that many websites share their content on Twitter and they always indicate when it’s a guest post.
Use the search string: [topic] guest post to find guest blogging opportunities in your niche.
Using social media in searching for guest post contributions will enable you to connect with the website owner before you send your guest post request. This fact can drastically increase your chances of getting your pitch accepted.
Facebook groups are perhaps the best community development options for bloggers today. And they could be a perfect place for prospecting new guest blogging opportunities.
Even though LinkedIn is a professional network, it’s highly underestimated when it comes to searching for guest post opportunities. It’s a perfect place to connect with people in your industry. On LinkedIn, you can also see their updates when they need posts on their blogs.
Blogger Directories
With blog directories, you’ll be able to find the best and most trafficked blogs in your niche. These can really give you a sense of who the A-listers are for your industry.
Alltop is one of the blogger directories that helps you to effortlessly find new places to guest blog. All you need to do is type your keywords into the site’s search, and Alltop.com will provide you with a guest blogging site list that matches your topic or interest.
There are many sites like Alltop, like http://technorati.com, theweblist.net, popurls.com, and others.
How to Identify High-Quality Guest Blogging Opportunities
Now you’ll need to learn how to identify high-quality guest posting opportunities.
So, here it goes, look specifically for:
- Websites of similar or same niche.
- An audience that matches your ideal customer.
- Signs of high engagement (e.g., multiple comments, high social share).
Metrics to Identify a High-Quality Guest Blogging Opportunity
There are a few relevant metrics to consider when it comes to identifying a high-quality guest blogging opportunity:
- Ranking for relevant industry keywords. You can use the SEMRush tool to determine the SERP positions for keywords across competitive websites.
- Organic Traffic. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush come in handy here.
- Domain Authority (DA). It’s a metric established by Moz and it’s ranked on a scale that ranges from 0 to 100. You can use this metric to assess the value of a potential website – the higher the score, the better.
- Alexa Score. Alexa.com helps you estimate traffic to any given domain. Note that the lower the number, the better.
- Social Factors. Facebook likes & shares, tweets, LinkedIn shares, comments can give your content additional reach.
Quick tip: Don’t forget to use a domain authority checker to quickly evaluate the strength of websites you plan to outreach.
Summing up
Guest blogging is a complicated process that requires a lot of effort and dedication. But with the right strategies in place, you can dominate your niche via guest blogging in no time.
What’s your favorite strategy to find guest post opportunities? Let us know in the comments section below!