‘Guest Blogging‘ is one of the most effective (and accepted) link building method practiced widely now. Guest blogging works around creating a win-win proposition both for the link acquiring website and for the link donating website/blog. The ‘link acquiring‘ website benefits from the high-value backlink it gets (also from the referral traffic received through the link), and at the same time the ‘link donating‘ website benefits from the high-quality article it receives (a new article for its regular readers, lifelong traffic from search engines etc)
In this article, let’s dig some proven and practical tips to identify potential websites/blogs accepting ‘guest blog posts’. I am choosing ‘interior design’ as a niche for ease of explanation. You can apply these ideas to the niche of your choice.
Suppose I own and manage a blog in the ‘interior design’ niche where I write about interior design trends, styles, reviews interior furniture and decoration products. I have written a 100+ article in the blog and now I am looking to build some links to the blog through guest blogging to improve my overall search engine rankings and traffic. So how do I go about it? My first task is to build a list of potential websites/blogs that accept ‘guest blogs’. Since my blog belongs to the interior design niche, naturally I would like to guest post in blogs in the same/related niche like ‘interior design’ , ‘home improvements’, ‘home designs’ etc. I have two reasons to stick with blogs/website from a relevant niche:
- Links from relevant niche has more value in the eyes of Search Engines
- Higher chances of getting accepted for a guest blog entry
So here we go, the Tips to identify potential websites that accept guest blogs.
#1 – Scan through Blog Directories based on category
Blog directories like BOTW Blogs are repositories of blogs based on different categories and niches. Identify a category that is very much related to your niche and skim through the blogs listed in that category. Not all of them will be accepting guest posts, but some of them will be more than happy to accept a guest blog. Contact the blog owner with your guest blog idea (if possible through email) and wait for his/her response. For better conversions pitch with 2 or 3 different article ideas (that are not yet published in their blog) so that the blog owner has a choice.
The screenshot below is a list of blogs under the ‘home improvement’ category. On the right sidebar (of the screenshot) you can see many subcategories as well.
There are around 20+ popular blog directories which are worth your time. I just scanned the BOTW Blogs directory (while writing this post) for a niche I am interested in and found 10 potential blogs that accept guest blogs. So get to work now. Here is a list of most popular blog directories.
#2 – Searching with keywords
Searching in Google with the related keyword phrase(s) is another practical and quick way to get a good number of blogs that accept guest posts. Most of the blogs that accept ‘guest posts’ will have pages with title(s) like ‘write for us’ , ‘contribute’ , ‘guest posts’. Google will index these pages in their database and a simple google query “write for us” will list all blogs/websites that have something related to the query. In most cases, these blogs will be accepting guest posts (while some blogs will be looking for paid writers only). The problem with a general “write for us” query is that it will return blogs/website from a wide set of categories which may not suit your niche. To solve this problem always append a keyword phrase that is relevant to your niche. If we resort to our example niche ‘interior design’, run a query like ‘interior design + write for us‘ which has higher chances of returning blogs in the interior design niche that accept guest blog posts.
Note 1:- While writing this post, I tried my hand on the above idea for a niche that I have an interest in. I got 10 high quality blogs that accept guest posts. The good side of this method is that you get access to very high-quality blogs (with good Alexa rankings, good count of backlinks, good domain authority etc) that accept guest blogs.
Note 2:- You can repeat the same tricks with Bing.
#3 – Using Tools – Similarweb, Alexa
You can find lots of websites/blogs (in a particular niche/category) with the help of research tools like Alexa and Similarweb. Let’s say for an example, Housely is a very popular website in the home decor niche. I would like to find sites similar to housely. An idea that comes handy here is to use tools like similarweb. Run a search/query on any of these tools with the URL in your mind and access the results. For example:- a query on smilarweb or alexa would fetch you lots of useful information on websites/blogs in the same niche.
#4 – Backlink Analysis of a Competing Website
Analysing backlinks of a competing website is a great idea to identify blogs that accept guest posts. There are lots of backlink research tools out there like RankSignals which provides you with backlinks to any website. For example if you want to identify the backlinks to a website like housely, just run a query in RankSignals and you are done. You will get an idea of which all sites link to housely. Analyze those links and identify which all of them offer/accept guest blog posts. Pitch them with your rocking idea and there you get your piece of cake.
So these are some practical and proven ideas to find guest blogging opportunities. If you have some other interesting ideas, feel free to comment.
