In my opinion, guest blogging is one of the best ways to build relevant backlinks to your web pages. Not only does this method of link building help build out and diversify a website’s backlink portfolio, but when done correctly, it can also bring targeted visitors to your site. If you are anything like me, you have probably thought that there are only so many blogs out there that write about a particular topic. How do I take my guest blogging to the next level? How do I find even more opportunities to spread my content and links across more root domains? In this post I’d like to cover a few ways to generate ideas for guest blog posts, how to find blogs to post your content on, and how to do effective blogger outreach, to give you the best possible chance of getting your content published. Let’s get started.
Idea Generation
The first and most common way to start guest blogging is by finding blogs that write about topics directly related to yours. For example, if I run a website that sells a weight loss supplement, I should look for blogs that write about weight loss or the actual supplement that I am selling on my website. To the engines, most of these links are highly credible because of how relevant the websites are to my site. I want to get as many of these as I possibly can.
The second way, which takes a little more creativity, is by finding blogs that write about topics that relate to your products or services indirectly. Using the same example above, I might look for a blog that discusses everything you need to know about being a new mom and offer to write them a post about how to lose the baby weight. I might also look for a celebrity blog that discusses the latest celebrity fads and offer to write them a post about the latest weight loss fads that celebrities are into.
If you really put some time and effort into it, posting your content on sites that relate indirectly can help you reach viewers that you might not have reached otherwise.
Research
There’s probably a dozen ways to get started researching blogs to publish your content on, but in this post, I am going to stick to the two ways that I use most often.
Typically when I begin a guest blogging campaign, I start by searching the keyword or topic in Google and selecting blogs. As you can see in my example below, www.weightlosswithsandra.com/blog/ might be a legit site to get a guest blog post published on. When I visit the site, it looks like she accepts content from many different individuals or websites, so I would add this to my list.
When I exhaust my Google Blog search, I turn to more advanced search queries. These queries will drum up more results than a typical Google Blog search and can bring additional opportunities to get your content published. Some of the more popular search queries that I use are as follows:
[keyword] blog
“[keyword] blog”
intitle:[keyword] blog
inurl:[keyword] blog
“add comment” [keyword]
“post comment” [keyword]
intitle:tag [keyword]
intitle:post [keyword]
[keyword] guest writer
[keyword] guest blog post writer
[keyword] submit content
[keyword] submit post
[keyword] submit blog post
[keyword] guest blogger wanted
Blogger Outreach
Reaching out to blogs, asking them to post your content, and actually getting it published can sometimes be tricky. That’s why building a relationship with the site owner or blogger before asking them to guest blog is often the best route to go.
To start building the relationship, I start off by commenting on and sharing some of their content through social channels. After doing this a for a few weeks, I will reach out to them via email or a contact form. I let them know how much I appreciate the information I read on their blog and that I have been sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. I find that if I tie in the sharing of their content in the initial email, I get a much higher response rate. When I get a response, I begin the discussion about writing a unique piece of content that can be published on their website. The rest is pretty much history.
I would like to wrap up the post by mentioning that guest blogging shouldn’t be a one and done strategy. You should work to keep the relationship with these bloggers alive for as long as you can. Just because you post a piece of content on their site once, doesn’t mean you can’t get another piece published in the future. Reach out to them often, ask them to share your content through social channels and continue to share theirs. You can also ask them to post your other types of content like infographics and videos. With just a little effort on your part, you can have a “link building partner” for life.
I like to offer guest blogs on my site and I like to go find them as well. I find that doing so let’s me build a network of people that want to post to my blog for links to their site and let’s me build unique content on my site at the same time. When I go out and build guest blogs on other sites I like to find sites that are talking about my topic.
I like the idea of building a network of people who want to post on your site and also who want you to post on their site.
very nice article, it was really useful, personally i prefer guest blogging networks for better guest blogging opportunists such as http://www.guest-blogging.org
Networks are a great resource as well. I love Ann Smarty’s network http://myblogguest.com. There are lots of great bloggers who want to post content and also who will accept content.
Thanks for the kind words, Greg.
Everyone who is interested in guest blogging, welcome to MyBlogGuest.com!
mybloguest.com is amazing too, but if you have took a look at guest-blogging.org you’ll find that it’s a totally different concept, 1st it’s totally free so you don’t have to pay to post your posts like myblogguest.com, 2nd it’s connecting you to the blogger himself not to his posts, also it’s simple and easy to navigate
I just found out about myblogguest and am highly impressed. Just wish I would be approved more foe publishing posts.
As SEOs, we’ve gotten pretty good at generating content ideas and researching data but we still need to improve our blogger outreach efforts. This is more time consuming, and selfish by its very nature, but we naturally think [link] to our friends and those that have supporting information to share. Like any branding campaign, we associate brands with our needs as a solution. The same is true with people so growing & strengthening your network is a huge part of blogger outreach.
Keeping a record of the contact info for everyone that has posted your content is a very good idea.
In addition to that, you should keep a list of all the people who have responded to your emails even if they said no to the guest post. It’s a real person who responded. Continue to share their info via twitter or facebook to build the relationship. They might be interested in posting another topic at another time.
You also could invite them to post something on your blog first.
i also want to create guest post section on my blog.but tell me how can user automatically post on and then after admin approval publish it on web.
Great information here. Will surely implement these tactics to enhance my Guest Blogging Efforts.
Do you accept Guest Bloggers to your Blog ? If so how does it work ?
Thanks
Your methods such as intitle and the keyword guest blogger, etc. were pretty cool, I am going to use them to find some more SEO blogs, great tip.
Greg, your advice to build a relationship with the blog owner is key. Follow them on Twitter, retweet their stuff and show them that you’re genuinely interested in their blog and what they have to say.
Even though these relationships are difficult to get, they could turn out to be long-term resources for you.
Great post about Plugin for blogs!thank you for sharing this post with us, very informative.
I also think that blogging is one of the best ways to build relevant backlinks.
What other guest blogging networks are out there?