We all want to write for our industry’s authoritative websites.
Whether you’re a marketer, top executive, or founder.
Why?
Publishing guest posts on these popular websites positions you as a top expert in your field. You become the expert people respect and listen to.
And in turn, you can attract more leads to your business and achieve marketing goals.
But getting on these websites is hard.
After all, thousands of people like you are trying to publish guest posts on them.
So, the top websites can get picky about who they allow on their website.
What do you have to do?
- First, find guest posting opportunities on authoritative websites in your niche.
- Second, uncover topics they want to publish.
This guide will explore both tasks.
Let’s dive in.
Is Guest blogging dead?
In 2014 when Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, declared guest blogging dead, mouths opened wide.
SEOs literally had panic attacks.
After all, guest blogging had been the main deal.
Businesses used it to boost their search engine optimization efforts. And they gained consistent organic traffic as a result.
Businesses skyrocketed their growth through guest blogging.
But on the other hand, it became a tactic that people abused to gain backlinks and manipulate Google rankings.
And Google wanted to punish these spammy websites.
You might be thinking, “is guest blogging really dead?”
Let me clarify.
When people carry out guest posting, they often follow one of these two ways:
- They produce poor content and post it on spammy websites just for the sole aim of building backlinks. For these people, guest posting is dead, and they’ll get no result from it. In fact, they might incur a Google penalty.
- They produce valuable content and post it on authoritative websites. These people will increase their authority and gain backlinks that will help them rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Sean Si of SEO Hacker is one of many people who have gotten great results from guest blogging. In fact, he called it his most effective link building task.
Writer Claire Emerson also claimed that guest blogging landed her more website visitors, backlinks, and leads.
And Buffer co-founder, Leo Widrich, posted 150 guest posts in 9 months. Through this strategy, Buffer increased its customer base from 0 to 100,000.
While guest blogging sounds all glorious, executing it on top websites is difficult.
But it’s doable.
First, you have to find guest blogging opportunities in your niche.
Find guest posting opportunities on authoritative websites
Having talked about the importance of creating great content and submitting it to authoritative websites, how do you find these websites?
Let’s go into 4 simple tasks that can help you achieve that.
1. Use Google search operators
Basically, Google search operators let you instruct Google about how it should deliver search results to you. You can liken it to a filter for your search results.
For example, you can tell Google to strip your results to a single website, file type, or even a keyword in the URL. And there are more.
How does this help you find guest posting opportunities?
First, you can uncover authoritative websites in your niche.
Second, you can find those that accept guest posts.
For instance, you can combine your niche with the possible word that websites will use for their guest post guidelines page.
Some examples are:
[niche] + “write for us”
[niche] + “guest post guidelines”
[niche] + “contribute to our site”
For example, if you’re in the digital marketing niche and are looking for guest post opportunities, you can use these search strings:
Digital marketing + “write for us”
Digital marketing + “guest post guidelines”
Digital marketing + “contribute to our site”
See an example of such a search below:
The limitation here is that you’ll only find a limited number of websites you can send your guest posts to.
Let’s look into search operators that will help you dig deeper to find more opportunities.
Site search
If you’ve been in a niche for a while, you already know some popular websites in that niche. You can use Google to search this particular website to find out if they accept guest posts.
Below is an example of such a search for Search Engine Journal:
How do you carry out the site search? Use the following search string:
site:website.com search term
This way, you can easily find out if a website accepts guest posts or not. Although some websites still accept guest posts even though they have no guidelines page, you’ll want to target these websites later.
Intitle search
This operator helps you to find keywords that are present in a page title. When websites create guest posting page guidelines, they use common terms in the page title.
You can use a search term like intitle: “write for us” to find pages with those words in their title.
You can also combine this with your niche keywords to find pages in your niche.
Inurl search
You can use this search operator to search for keywords that appear in a post URL. Most websites will include words like “write for us” or “guest post” in their URL.
To use this search operator, use the search string: inurl: keyword. You can also combine two search operators as shown below.
Exact match search
This is easy.
When you put a quotation mark around your search term, Google will look for these keywords in the exact order you’ve placed them in the search box.
2. Perform competitive analysis
One shortcut to finding authoritative websites is to study your competitors.
In most cases, they’ll be fellow professionals.
Even if you write on behalf of a brand, your competitors are the people (founder, chief marketing officer, or head of content) who write for competing brands.
If these people have been featured on a website, you have a good chance to do so too.
Here are two ways to find guest posting opportunities:
Visit their websites
Writing for top websites is an achievement for any professional. Most people go through a lot of stress to secure those guest posts.
Apart from that, writing for top websites positions them as an industry expert.
So, expect them to flaunt it.
Here’s an example:
This is especially applicable to freelancers or marketing agencies.
In some cases, brand executives may have no guest blog list on their websites.
But if you find one of their guest posts on top websites, you can uncover more.
Reverse image search
At the end of these posts, websites use the guest author’s image in their bio.
And to maintain consistency, most people use a specific headshot for their guest posts.
With reverse image search, all you need is an influencer’s headshot. Then you can find website pages that feature those images.
Some of those pages will be guest posts on authoritative sites.
To do this, go to a bio of this influencer and right-click on their picture. Select “Save Image As…”
Upload this image into the Google image search box.
The results will show you websites this image also appears on. This would give you a list of websites to target.
This tip works well if you don’t see an expert’s guest post list.
3. Reverse engineer backlinks pointing to competitor sites
When people write guest posts, there’s usually a backlink (in the author bio) to the writer’s website.
This means if you analyze a competitors’ backlink profiles, you’ll find websites they’ve written guest posts for. And naturally, these are guest blogging opportunities for you too.
So how will you analyze their backlinks?
You’ll need tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz.
Let’s see how you can use Semrush.
First of all, you have to analyze the competitors you know. If you don’t know them, you can use this tool to find websites with similar content to yours.
Visit the Semrush dashboard and enter your site URL. Then click “Search.”
Here are five competitors for this blog:
You’ll find details such as the number of competing keywords, overall search engine keywords of competitors, and organic traffic.
Click “View details” to get more details about your competitors.
After doing that, you can now find the sites linking to competitors. To find them, navigate to “Backlink Analytics” at the left sidebar of Semrush.
Then, enter your competitor’s domain URL and click “Analyze.”
Doing this will take you to the backlink analytics overview page. On this page, you’ll find information like backlinks, referring domains, and authority scores of referring domains.
Click the number below “Referring Domains” to see referring sites. Here, I’ve selected “Active” to see only links that are still active.
You can explore this list to come up with some opportunities. Then, visit promising websites to see their guest blogging guidelines.
Through backlinks, you can find guest posts your competitors have written for authoritative sites.
Then you can leverage this information to find high-probability guest blogging opportunities.
4. Use Ahrefs content explorer
With over a billion pages in its database, the Ahrefs content explorer is a place to find articles on various topics. If you’re looking for websites in a niche, you can simply put the topic in the search bar.
For example, the keyword “parenting” will return over 800,000 pages. You can get fewer results when you apply filters. Searching in page titles alone will give you 90,000 results.
You can further strip this down to about 26,000 pages when you apply the filter for one article per domain.
You can export the list of websites here. This is a huge list, and many of the domains will be useless. But you’ll still have a much bigger list than searching on Google alone.
You can also check these website’s domain ratings (DR) to know which ones will provide backlinks with high authority. The DR you target will depend on your current stage of guest blogging.
You should aim for websites with lower DR if you’re just starting out with guest blogging. Because websites with high DR usually have requirements that may be too high for a beginner.
When you filter these sites according to their DR, you see realistic sites to target for your guest blogging campaign.
After making a list of the websites you want to target, you now need to find guest post ideas. And you can find these from websites with DR of 71 and above.
In most cases, these websites post quality content with great headlines to maintain their authority. When you input this high DR website address into Ahrefs, you can see their most popular content.
You can then use these ideas to pitch lower DR websites for guest posts. There’s a higher chance of getting accepted as you’re using proven ideas.
5. Use Twitter search box
Most websites share posts on their website to Twitter. And when sharing a guest post, they usually indicate it’s a guest post.
With a single search, you can uncover many websites in your niche that share guest posts on Twitter. This means you can send a guest post proposal to these websites too.
In the Twitter search bar, you can enter the search string: [topic] guest post. See an example below.
When the results come up, you can see many websites that accept guest posts for this topic.
The advantage of Twitter is that you’ll find many websites to make a big list.
Find topics authoritative sites want to publish
Finding big sites that accept guest posts is one step.
But proposing a topic they’ll approve?
That’s even harder.
Follow these three steps to give your best chance:
Visit your target website’s competitors
Most “new” ideas are adaptations or combinations of existing ideas.
How does this help you find suitable topics for a top site?
The topic you want to write about probably exists. While inventing a topic can make you feel like a genius, it’s often impractical.
You can waste a lot of time without coming up with bright ideas.
On the other hand, visiting your target website’s competitors will uncover ideas you can pitch.
Your target website’s competitors are top websites that publish content in a similar niche to your target website.
If you’ve been in your industry for a few years, you should know at least 4 to 5 other websites related to your target website.
Otherwise, you can use an SEO tool like Semrush to uncover competitors. Navigate to Semrush’s domain overview and enter your target website URL.
Then click the “Search” button.
Doing this will bring up details about the website’s organic traffic, organic keywords, and backlinks. Scrolling down, you’ll find a list of the main organic competitors.
See an example for Zapier:
On the table, you’ll see details like the number of keywords they compete for and the overall number of search engine keywords each domain ranks for.
You can click “View details” for more information about the competitors.
So, how do you go about finding the topics?
- Make a list of your target website’s competitors.
- Visit those competitors’ websites to see their recent posts.
- Create a list of interesting topic ideas.
For instance, say I want to find topics for a guest post on a social media blog. Two popular social media blogs I can look at are the Hootsuite and Sprout Social blog.
Here’s Sprout Social’s blog:
You can even filter blog posts by topic, industry, and experience level. After scrolling posts on a few pages, you should have 2 to 3 post ideas on your list.
You can follow the same process for Hootsuite.
Although this process isn’t thorough, you can find a few solid ideas.
And in most cases, you’re just looking for that one topic that will hit your target.
Use the keyword gap tool to find topics
Finding topics by browsing competitor websites can limit you to content published in a few months.
To go further, let an SEO tool do the heavy lifting. Semrush has the “Keyword gap” tool to find more topic ideas.
The basic idea behind the keyword gap tool is to find keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t.
To use this tool, click “Keyword Gap” at the left sidebar.
Then, enter your target site in the first box. You can then enter a competitor’s website URL in the other box.
Semrush allows you to add up to three more competitor URLs for comparison. After this, click “Compare.”
You’ll see more keywords about the two websites. First, you’ll see the shared keywords between the two domains.
You can switch to the missing, weak, and strong keywords. From this huge list, you can find at least 10 strong topic ideas to pick from.
You can also get creative with the keyword gap tool.
For instance, say you’re an executive at a SaaS content writing tool looking to publish a guest post with Zapier. You want to find a content marketing topic relevant to Zapier’s audience.
In this case, you can find keyword gaps between Zapier and a content marketing site like the content marketing institute.
Even though both websites may have slightly different audiences, you’ll find relevant content ideas.
Using the keyword gap tool will cut down the guesswork and point you to topics your target website will love.
Use Google site Search to confirm potential topics
After going through the previous two steps, you should have a list of more than five solid ideas.
Now, you have to confirm that your target website hasn’t covered these topics.
If you only found your ideas through the first step, this step is especially important.
Using the site search operator, you can search your target keyword to see if content already exists for it.
By going through this step, you can easily confirm that your proposed topic doesn’t exist on your target website.
Once you complete these steps, you’re ready to send your proposed guest post topics.
Conclusion
Finding guest post opportunities requires a diligent search. But the possibilities are endless.
By using these techniques, you’ll have a big enough list of websites to target for a whole year. Considering the importance of guest posting, finding the right websites to host your content is important.
After that, you can create the best content possible to establish authority in your niche.
Do you sweat at the thought of writing guest posts that will boost trust and authority with your ideal audience?
Do you get exhausted finding the right words or the time to write?
I can take that off your hands.
I create helpful and engaging guest posts for marketing and SaaS businesses.
My work (in my name and as a ghostwriter) has appeared on Get Response, Jeff Bullas, Social Media Today, Smart Insights, and more.
Reach out with details about your ideal audience and what type of content you want to create.
Then, I can help build your reputation on authoritative sites.
Disclaimer: This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you click a link and buy one of the products on this page, I may receive a commission (at no extra cost to you). This doesn’t affect my opinions or reviews.
