Finding opportunities where you can write posts for other blogs in your industry is a great way to build traffic and links to your site, and help you appear as an authority to your customers. Finding blogs to write for, though? Not always so easy. Below is our list of tips and tricks to find blogs that accept guest posts, and which ones you should write for.
#1. Building a Hit List Sheet
The first thing you should do is open up an excel sheet, and get a few columns together to give you an idea of where to write for. Here are the columns I normally add to my hit list:
Name | Submission URL | Domain Authority | Activity (1-10) | Estimated Site Traffic
Your name column is going to to be the name of the blog, and the submission URL will be the page on the site with information about guest posts. We’ll go over finding this page later. The domain authority is the power of the site in the eyes of Google. The higher this number is, the more authority it has. You can find an estimate of domain authority here. Activity is just how often posts are written, and how many comments they get. This is pretty subjective, but I wouldn’t be writing for blogs that haven’t posted in a year or who’ve never gotten a comment on their post. Lastly, we want an estimate of site traffic. You can normally get a good guess here. If there are no results, the site is probably too small to be worth your time.
#2. Finding Sites
Now, it’s time to find some sites to add to your list. The easiest way is just to Google for sites in your industry looking for guest bloggers. You can use the below formula to come up with quite a few:
Industry + “guest post”
Industry + “guest blogger”
Industry + “writers needed”
Industry + “blog for us”
Industry + “write for us”
Make sure to leave the quotation marks on the second part, that’ll narrow it down to exact matches.
You can also look in directories that others have made on blogs that accept guest posts, below are some popular ones.
Effective Business Ideas (My personal favorite)
Go through each of these sites and start adding the ones that interest you to the sheet. Make sure you find their domain authority and traffic as you go, and you read a few of their posts to get an idea of if your writing would be a good fit.
#3. Weeding Out The Junk
Lastly, you need to weed out the sites that aren’t going to do anything for your business. Here are some recommended ways to exclude a site from your list.
Domain Authority less than 25
Traffic less than 10,000/mo
Less than 2 posts/week
No comments on most posts
After you exclude those sites, start going through and reading the submission guidelines for each blog and finding ones you want to write for. Let me know in the comments how this is working for you!