Almost 50% of bloggers spend somewhere between one and three hours writing their posts, and nearly 25% of bloggers spend up to four hours writing a typical post. For this time investment in itself, we continue to see more content creation and marketing platforms focus on freelance writing and outsourcing, versus taking the time to write content on their own.
That’s a significant amount of time, which is one of the reasons many blogs accept guest posts. Done right, guest posting can be a great way to promote yourself and your business.
For content creators and freelancers, it’s not just about writing content for their own sites and properties, it’s also about the time and effort spent on content used for promotional purposes as well. Instead of writing content for your own sites and clients, freelancers might want to expand their horizons and start writing for other sites as well.
This can instantly help with brand recognition, improved SEO rankings for your site, and also to use as a reference in your portfolio when clients are asking to look at your best work. In short, the pros heavily outweigh the cons when it comes to the many opportunities in guest blogging for freelancers.
Let’s look at how to find blogs you can write guest posts for.
What Are Your Goals?
Before you start looking for blog opportunities, you should think about what you want to do with your guest posts. There are three primary goals you can work toward:
- Building authority in your niche
- Generating traffic back to your own site
- Creating backlinks to your site for SEO purposes
These don’t have to be independent of each other. A single guest post can serve all three purposes, but some blogs may be better suited for some of these than others.
Even though you’re writing for someone else’s site, put as much effort into those posts as you do your own. You’ll build a good reputation and authority with other blogs in your market as well as your audience with these tips on blogging.
For freelancers looking to increase their brand, reach, and how much they can demand for their writing services, guest blogging is a win-win opportunity.
What Types of Blogs to Look For
The first thing you should do is look for blogs that focus on your niche. A guest post on an unrelated blog still has some value, but it’s not going to serve any of the three goals we mentioned above very well.
You won’t build authority in your particular market, there won’t be much traffic back to your site since it’s not related to what people are reading, and the backlinks won’t be as valuable because they’re not related to your site.
You should also look for blogs that have an audience interested in the products or services you offer. A blog might be related to yours, but if the audience doesn’t align well you likely won’t generate a lot of new leads. This is also why many content writers will focus on niche/task specific blog content, so they can hit their exact target audience needs, and hopefully see higher conversions in the process. When relying on SEO, this can also prove easier and more effective in ranking content as well.
The blog you write for should also have readers that are highly engaged. Look for blogs that have an active comment section, where people are interacting regularly. You can also spend some time looking at social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to see how many people share and talk about posts on the blog.
How to Find Blogs that Accept Guest Posts
The easiest way to find blogs that accept guest posts is through Google. The following searches are all effective ways to track down sites. Replace “keyword” with a keyword or phrase that’s related to your niche.
- keyword “submit a guest post”
- keyword “guest post”
- keyword “guest post by”
- keyword “accepting guest posts”
- keyword “guest post guidelines”
Make sure you include the quotes around each phrase to find that exact combination of words.
However, don’t jump into thinking it’s going to be easy. This method and space is extremely saturated and if you are going to find success with guest blogging, you will need to provide real value and put in the time and effort to reach out to only the best sites.
Using Expert Round Ups as Leverage
Depending on your expertise and the industry you are working in, expert round ups might be another great option to leverage your position and expertise.
The concept of an expert round up is quite simple. A website or blog will ask a specific question to a bunch of industry experts, and the compile them all within one big article or blog post. The experts all get featured with a quote/answer, a profile picture, and a link back to their site.
The site hosting the expert round up gets some really nice content with authoritative figures, and hopefully some nice traffic, links and social shares from each of them as well.
As a guest blogger or freelancer, the option for you to take advantage of such roundups can be from both sides:
- Host your own expert round up on your own site
- Take part in future and existing round ups
If you aren’t getting invites to take part in other round ups, simply reach out to sites that already have ones in place and see if they would like to update them with your own feedback. To incentivize the process, tell them you will also run a small social media campaign to help send them more traffic and promotion as a quick thank you.
Follow the Leaders
If there are prolific guest bloggers in your market – and there are in most markets – look for the sites they’re writing for. You know those sites are willing to work with guest posters and if the big names are writing there, it’s a sign that it’s a strong blog.
Our final tip on how to find blogs to guest post on is to “spy” on your competition. Check the backlinks pointing to their website and look for guest posts that they’ve written. Again, you’ll know those sites accept guest articles and they are likely a good candidate for your guest posts.
Check back often for more helpful articles like this one.
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