Investing in marketing can be difficult for growing businesses, especially given how challenging it can be on your limited budget. That is why it is so important for business owners to discover optimal ways to not only advertise but also optimize their business online. And one of the finer ways for you to promote your business for free lies in the appeal of contributing to other blogs. Guest posting has become a great way to build your authority as an expert in your industry. Not only that but it has also proven to be ideal for gaining backlinks for your website, thus strengthening your online presence and brand. But that beckons the question – how does one find good guest posting sites?
The importance of guest posting and how it helps you
As far as moving company SEO efforts are concerned, there are many directions in which a business can go. Guest blogging is one of the more efficient link building strategies that all SEO experts recommend. Why? Because to this day, it is a tactic that works quite well and is just as effective as it was ten years ago. The biggest challenge is for one to find the right websites to pitch their content and knowledge to. And that is where this article and the following four ideas come into play:
#1: Mine a list of sites that accept guest posts
A majority of websites today have a blog to further build their online authority. To find good guest posting sites, you should start from there. Take a closer look at the websites that are directly or partially related to your particular niche. The good news is that you won’t need to spend too much time on this at the start, as there are plenty of site lists available online. You just need to find the time or the right help to find them. Our recommendation would be to start from your industry and all the news sites linked to it. Then move on to your local community and dig up lists of sites that cover your service area. That should offer you a good foundation to build on.
Another option you have here would be to use search engines to find a “list of [industry] blogs that accept guest posts“. However, once you do come across the search results and find lists, make sure to vex them. Check the following criteria:
- Does the website work and is the business still operational?
- Whether they still accept guest posts.
- Is the blog in question still active (when did they publish their most recent post?)
#2: Use Google to find good guest posting sites through keywords
If you’re a moving company, what do you do when you need to find movers’ articles or movers’ news? You type in the keyword in the search engine bar and go through the results. Simple, straightforward, and practical. So, there is no reason why this same principle can’t work on finding guest blogs. All you need is the right combination of search terms to use. You might want to start from the following list:
- “guest blog”/”guest post”
- “write for us”
- “submit an article”/”submit a guest post”
- “contribute guest post”
- “contribute to our blog”
- “become a guest blogger”
- “guest blogging guidelines”
- “contributor guidelines”
- “send a tip”
- “guest post by”
- “guest author”
And if you’re in doubt, just explore the results that come up. Go to those blogs and check the authors. One thing is sure – you can definitely come up with a nice list of sites from the first 10 pages of search results.
#3: Shift your focus to your competitors
When it comes to guest posting activities, another thing you can always count on is the fact that your competitors are doing it as well. Perhaps not all of them but definitely the more accomplished ones. So, all you need to do is explore their backlink profiles and go through the websites listed there. There are plenty of backlink checkers online that you can use to find this out with ease. Majestic is one of the tools that our team recommends using. Just type in the domain name of their site and request a check-up of the backlinks and anchors associated with their site. You can then use the list that the tool provides to find good guest posting sites for your niche.
#4: Use tools to find good guest posting sites for your company
Similar to the above-mentioned backlink checker, there are other SEO tools that experts use to find websites that accept guest blogs. And a lot of them are free to use or have trial versions that you can easily sign up for. These examples include:
- Content research tools (to explore guest blogs by using your topic keywords in combination with “guest post/blog“)
- Audience overlap tools (to find websites similar to yours and ones that share your audiences)
- Social listening tools (to screen through social media platforms or the entire web to find blogs related to your niche)
Maintain good relations with the sites that accept guest posts
Chances are good that you will want to contribute more than a single article to a website that accepts guest blogs. After all, why burn a potentially high-quality site after a single post and backlink. Therefore, make sure that once you do find good guest posting sites and manage to get published on them, that you use that to build a long-term relationship with those sites. And to do that, you just need to go through the following steps:
- Make sure to do the writing yourself. Don’t hire a freelancer to handle it for you. You are the expert, therefore, it is your opinion that people will seek out. Write content in your niche and under your own name, and make sure to link to other influential sites and articles.
- Work on your social media presence. If people recognize your insight as worth their time, they will want to learn more about you and what you do. This can bring in more traffic and raise interest from other guest posting sites as well. So, work on your social media profiles.
- Maintain a list of sites and authors that you cooperate with. The wider your web of contacts is, the better equipped you will be to find the sites you need, and to even trade with others.
- Always make sure to do a background check on a website before you write for them. Having guest posts on certain websites can bring more bad than good. So make sure to vet the guest blogs you communicate with.
