How to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities the Right Way

Last Updated on 2 months by Christopher Jan Benitez

One of the most difficult tasks when forming your strategy for guest blogging is how to find guest blogging opportunities.

Some opportunities are offered when site owners, impressed with your writing skills, offer you a chance to write a guest post on their blog.

Aside from this, however, you are left to your own devices when looking for other sites to send your guest posts.

In my previous post, we discussed the entire process of developing a sustainable guest blogging plan so you can continuously reach out to your target audience from other sites by writing a post on these sites.

However, we could not delve into the mechanics of looking for guest blogging opportunities.

Three tips were mentioned in the previous post: visiting AllTop.com, using the right Google search queries, and going to Twitter and Google+ for fresh sites to submit your guest post.

While these should be enough to help you find sites for guest blogging opportunities, there are more tactics that you can employ to find more sites.

By stumbling upon more sites, you can stock them up in your file and reach out to them as soon as you finish the first batch.

Doing this consistently will give you more sites to write on and allow you to extend your guest blogging strategy and build your blog visibility for greater traffic.!

In this post about guest blogging opportunities, you will learn the following:

  • The reason why you need to do guest blogging
  • How to find guest blogging opportunities using Google Search
  • Why Google+ Communities is a good place to find sites where you can guest post
  • How to conduct competitive research on fellow bloggers
  • What guest blogging communities should you mine for information
  • Why building relationships with influencers is a critical step in forming a guest blogging strategy

Why find guest blogging opportunities and write for other sites?

Building your blog through guest blogging may seem counter-intuitive.

Instead of writing for other sites, why can’t you just write your post on your blog?

While the argument makes a lot of sense, it unfairly disregards the benefits that guest blogging brings to your site, namely:

  • Reach out to an untapped audience – By writing a post on another site, you open yourself up to a brand new audience
  • Funnel down audience from their site to yours – Related to the first point, if the readers loved your guest post and found it useful, there’s a chance that they will follow you back on your site. If you have written the same quality of content on your blog, you’re looking at a potential reader and advocate of your content!
  • Bring relationships with site owners – This point will be discussed in depth later. But basically, guest blogging allows you to maintain a working relationship with site owners that you can later leverage for future use

Now that you have a good idea of how helpful guest posting is in building your blog, below are the ways how you can find guest blogging opportunities:

Most of the time, a quick search on Google solves all problems.

The same thing applies to guest blogging.

Simply typing “guest post” after your niche should provide you with relevant results at the get-go.

However, if you want more specific results from your search query, then I suggest you enter this phrase on Google Search:

“niche” inurl:write-for-us

Replace “niche” with your industry, i.e. marketing, lifestyle, etc.

The more specific your niche is, the more specific the results will be.

The search phrase will filter results that have the “write-for-us” string on its URL page.

  On the page, you will find the editorial guidelines on how to write a post that the blog will accept for publishing.

Join guest posting Communities in Google+

Editor’s Note

Since Google+ no longer exist, you can’t use this method. However, I’m leaving it up here for now until I have time to rewrite this section. In the meantime, skip this tip and move on to the next step.

screenshot-plus.google.com 2015-07-21 20-45-35

While Google+ may be a ghost town as a social media, its Communities feature is still one of the best ways to reach out to like-minded people.

Enter “guest post” or “guest blog” on the search bar and click on the Communities link to show you the different groups that you could join.

From here, you can see different users looking for guest blogging opportunities, offering sites for bloggers to send their guest posts, and looking to collaborate with other writers.

Quick tip: If you want to write about digital marketing for a high-quality site, then I suggest you pitch to Web Hosting Secret Revealed. Click here and read the editorial guidelines before pitching your guest post idea.

Find guest bloggers and “steal” their sites

screenshot-followerwonk.com 2015-07-21 20-15-24
screenshot-plus.google.com 2015-07-21 20-21-08

Arguably the most effective way to find the best guest bloggers in your niche is using Followerwonk.

By entering “keyword “guest post”” in the search bar, you will see Twitter users that best match your search query.

The order of the results is the highest follower to the lowest.

Visit their Twitter account to see their tweets. Most likely, they will be tweeting their latest guest posts published on different sites.

Check the site to see if you can submit a post.

To make it much easier for you to find the sites where they have written, find their Google+ profile check out their About page, and look for the Contributions section.

You can expect to see most of the sites listed here. Visit each of them to see if you can submit a guest post.

screenshot-myblogguest.com 2015-07-21 20-46-29

As mentioned in another post, guest blogging as an SEO strategy was killed off by Matt Cutts.

As proof that Google is not taking the proliferation of low-quality content through guest blogging lightly, it cut off the guest blogging industry’s head when it penalized MyBlogGuest and members of the site.

While its reputation has far from recovered after its penalization, it still provides a platform to find sites where you can send your posts to be published.

Keep in mind that if you wish to pursue these sites as part of your guest blogging strategy, you should prefer the possible consequences that may come with being part of these sites.

However, trying them out and experiencing them for yourself is never bad.

Build connections with influencers

It has become more difficult nowadays to write for other blogs.

Marketers who use guest blogging to get backlinks have damaged the trust between the publisher and writer as a whole.

However, their strained relationship bears some good news: it discourages spammy marketers from guest blogging.

Therefore, the floor is now open for earnest bloggers who want to guest blog for the purpose of providing value to readers and getting them to visit your site.

But before bloggers can get their guest posts published, they need to jump through a couple of hoops.

Emailing them about your intentions of guest blogging on their site won’t cut it anymore.

Also, some sites that publish guest posts don’t just accept offers from strangers.

This time, you need to develop authentic relationships with people whose sites you want to guest blog on.

That said, you must reach out to people who matter in your niche.

Guest blogging on sites with a low barrier of entry but having few followers and traffic is not worth your time.

You need to guest blog on authoritative influencers sites to maximize your impact.

I could grab a regular guest blogging gig at Blogging Tips because one of my clients was kind enough to introduce me to owner Zac Johnson.

The method of seeking out friends and contacts may be a long shot but there are other ways to proceed with this.

Influencer outreach

One of the best ways is to follow them on social media, share their posts, comment on their blog, and, most importantly, send them an outreach email.

To determine if the influencer is worth reaching out to, find out if the site meets the necessary metrics for a high-quality guest blogging site.

Once the blog owners start replying to your comments and tweets, you can engage with them more personally.

The purpose of doing these is for site owners to become familiar with you and see how active you are as their followers.

Once you feel your relationship has deepened, you can finally ask them if a guest blogging spot is available for you to fill.

When proposing a guest post, check out the blog and determine content gaps or topics that haven’t been discussed yet that you can fill in with your article.

Sometimes, they agree, but there are times that they don’t for different reasons.

At this point, you just need to keep trying until you succeed.

Final words

Using the guidelines above, finding guest blogging opportunities should be much easier now.

And despite what has been said in the past about guest posting, it’s clear as day that it works!

You can expect to find lots of sites where you can send your guest posts after conducting these tactics.

Now that you have a list of sites for guest blogging opportunities, the question now is: how can I rank each site so I can focus on sending my guest posts to the best sites first?

To answer this question, check out this post Factors to Determine Site Quality for Guest Blogging.