If you’re working to increase your brand exposure, build your credibility as an industry expert, or improve your back links and SEO ranking, consider writing guest blog entries on other sites. Guest blogging is a great way to make a major impact on your content marketing and SEO strategy by driving qualified traffic to your own blog and website. Many social media experts say guest blogging is one of the most important ways to build authority for your own brand online.
So how do you find opportunities to guest blog? Let’s look at some ways you can uncover guest blogging opportunities and a few online outreach tools to help focus your search.
Getting Started
Before you begin your search, take a few minutes to determine your goals. By understanding the “why, “ you can more effectively target the “where.”
• Are you looking to position yourself as an expert in your industry?
• Is your goal to drive traffic to your blog or website, or increase your SEO ranking?
• Are you working to build backlinks to your website?
Answering these questions clearly, can help you to target your search for appropriate guest blogging opportunities.
The next step is one you’ve probably already done when defining your own content strategy, developing personas. By defining your audience, you can better target your opportunities. Be as specific as possible when building your personas. Having a well-defined target audience will not only help you to determine which opportunities to pursue, it can also help you to define your message.
Next Steps
You’ve defined your goals, and your target market. Now it’s time to begin to search for opportunities to reach them. Begin by looking for sites that are relevant to your industry that your target audience might frequent. As you search for, find and visit sites, check for a socially engaged readership. Have the posts been shared socially? Have they been commented on? Make sure the blog owner is active on social media sites. This makes it more likely they will share your guest posts with their community.
Another avenue to target when searching for guest blogging opportunities are the influential people in your particular industry. Using Google, search for them by name and determine if they have a blog that might be a good fit.
While these are great ways to begin your search, you can expand your efforts by using many of the free sites and tools available online.
Expanding Your Search: Using Outreach Tools
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, Google is a great place to begin your search. Try using some key word searches to find blogs that may accept guest writers. First, type in your industry, for example, “social media marketing.” Then follow this:
• submit a guest post
• guest post by
• accepts guest posts
• guest post guidelines, etc.
These queries will lead you to a blog’s guest post guidelines, submission pages, and guest posts by numerous other writers.
Using the same criteria, try searching Twitter. Often writers will tweet about guest posts that they have submitted to other blogs and you can then follow the chain to the host blog and inquire,
Here are some other online sites and tools you can use to uncover guest blogging opportunities:
• Buzzstream – www.buzzstream.com – Buzzstream is a web-based software solution to organize your blogging and create an online buzz, all while building links and improving SEO to help get you found. It also helps you to build relationships with the influencers in your industry.
• BlogDash – http://www.blogdash.com – Blogdash helps you to organize and publish content then search and find specific bloggers using keyword search. You can then engage with these influencers and build beneficial relationships.
• Technorati – http://technorati.com/ – Technorati is a directory of blogs searchable by writer or keyword. I helps you to identify potential guest blogging opportunities. By becoming a member (it’s free), you can create a profile and interact with influencers from across all industries, building contacts for you to expore.
• Open Site Explorer – http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ – Once you’ve established a potential opportunity, just type the domain name into the box on this site. It will search the web and return information on that site’s domain authority and link profile.
• Buzz Sumo – http://buzzsumo.com – Buzzsumo is a tool that lets you track trending topics across all social platforms, identify the most shared links and the influencers for an topic. Using buzz sumo allows you to tailor your content and SEO outreach towards hi-visibility topics and the influencers who write about them.
Guest blogging is a great way to grow your community, establish authority, generate backlinks and improve your SEO ranking. Try some of the tools and tips above. With a little targeted research, you’ll uncover hundreds of opportunities to spread your me
