How to Find Guest Posting Sites: A Quick Guide

Guest posting is the link building practice where you write articles for other blogs to get backlinks to your website. This allows you to improve your SERPs rankings and gain authority in the industry while simultaneously building meaningful relations with other experts in the field.

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It’s not necessarily rocket science, but it still requires a bit of planning and preparation. In this article, we explain how to find guest post opportunities. 

Identify Publishers in Your Niche

The first step is to identify potential sites that accept guest posts that would be interesting for your target audience. Trying to get links from different industries irrelevant to yours is a surefire way to waste time and money. Search engines are quite smart today and can identify if a link is off, penalizing both you and the publisher.

Instead, you should look for websites that can be relevant to your customer base. For example, if you sell car parts, consider collaborating with car dealerships, workshops, and car reviewers.

To better understand who your target audience is, answer these questions:

• What problems does your business solve? Continuing the car parts seller example, you probably help people replace broken vehicle elements.
• Who is most likely to use your service? In this example, it’s all people with cars. Alternatively, it can be brand-specific parts or parts in a specific price segment.
• What is your unique sales proposition (USP)? This is entirely up to you. Is it cheap prices? Premium quality? Fast delivery? There are plenty of options.

Knowing these will help you understand who your customers are and what they expect of you.

Use search operators to find relevant guest posting sites faster. For example, to find car dealerships of a specific brand, put the brand in quotation marks. The search query “Toyota” car dealerships” will find only those that deal with Toyota and ignore all others.

Compile a list of those websites for guest posting in Excel, Google Sheets, or another program of your choice.

Evaluate Potential Sites

Now that you’ve discovered and organized them, it’s time to trim the excess and pick only the best guest posting blogs.

Remember, your priority is getting authoritative links, so you want to pursue reputable websites, not just some link farms. Here are the four main criteria you should evaluate:

1. Domain authority (DA). DA is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz to determine how likely a website is to rank at the top of SERPs. The score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores meaning higher likelihood. You can assess this score with most popular SEO tools. 
2. Traffic. The number of people visiting a website. The more traffic they have, the more clicks your backlink will get. Same as before, you can check this metric with most SEO tools.
3. Content quality. This is a bit more subjective, but the guest blogging sites you choose need to have high-quality content. Read a few articles and think whether you and your audience would be satisfied with them.
4. Engagement. If each article has 5–6 digit views, but there are no comments, it’s likely that the website is faking its engagement. Check the on-page comment section, as well as socials, to see if there is any real engagement with the articles.

You want to look out for a few red flags when picking a blog:

• Excessive ads or sponsored content. A hallmark of a link farm is excessive advertising and almost exclusively sponsored content. If you get bombarded with ten unskippable ads as soon as you click anywhere — run.
• Poor site design and UX. Search engines evaluate websites on how users interact with them. Poor design and UX will lead to an increased bounce rate, resulting in lower rankings.
• Irrelevant or low-quality content. You want people to read their content and eventually click your link. If the content is bad, nobody is going to read it.
• No or fake engagement from readers. Faking engagement is there to scam guest posters and readers into believing the content is good. Don’t fall for it.

Utilize Guest Posting Platforms

If you don’t want to manually research potential bloggers, there are many guest posting services that offer professional assistance. They have established platforms with vetted publishers and can connect you with reputable websites.

Most guest posting platforms show you a number of metrics about publishers, like their DA, completion rate, reviews, etc. While there are some use cases for lower-quality websites, it’s safer and more reliable for most websites to choose high-rated bloggers.

Another benefit of these platforms is they allow you to connect with publishers who would otherwise be unreachable for you. This can be either due to their size or exclusivity. But if a platform offers them as an option, it can be a great opportunity for you to reach a much wider audience.

Explore Competitor Backlinks

Don’t neglect to look at your competitors. If they’re successful, they probably did something right. This includes link building. You can check what guest posting sites your competitors collaborate with popular SEO tools like Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs, and others.

After that, find what content these websites are missing and offer to bridge the gaps. Alternatively, if the guest content of your competitors is outdated, irrelevant, or poorly written, you can offer the publisher to improve it in exchange for swapping the competitor’s link with yours.

Build Relationships

Guest posting isn’t just about writing or promoting your website; it’s also about collaboration and networking. Don’t just submit your case study or article and forget about the publisher after that. Instead, connect with them frequently and try to create great content together.

Check out their socials and engage with the community there. Comment, like, and repost to create engagement for them and draw additional attention to your website. In fact, it’s good to show your face in the community a few times before introducing yourself directly to the publisher.

Don’t stop at guest posts. Offer unique insights, join them for interviews and webinars, introduce them to other experts in your network. When your bond gets stronger, offer bigger projects, like whitepapers or ebooks.

Always remember that publishers are also people. Some might not be receptive to further connection or won’t give much feedback, and that’s totally normal. Keep it simple with them if that’s what they want. Others will love collaborating with you on bigger projects or throwing ideas and feedback all the time.

Conclusion

Finding high-quality websites that accept guest posts is vital for a successful guest posting strategy. By following the methods outlined in this short guide, you can create a clear and concise list of guest posting opportunities that will be appreciated by readers and help you climb SERP rankings.

Remember, the key to successful guest posting lies not just in finding any sites, but in finding the right ones. Prioritize quality over quantity by focusing on websites with good metrics and great content.

Keep in mind that this process is ongoing. Make it a habit to periodically reassess and expand your list of potential guest posting sites.

Now that you’re equipped with new knowledge, it’s time to put it into action.

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