Guest blogging

Guest blogging is the process of writing articles for another company that aims at sharing expertise and popularizing a certain brand’s website. It helps content creators increase their traffic, attain new customers, improve domain authority, establish their position as industry leaders and experts, improve brand recognition, and maintain relationships with companies in the same industry.

In this video, you’ll get guest blogging tips, learn how to search for guest blogging sites, and discover how to find keywords for topics that have high traffic.

In this article, we’ll unpack the reasons to leverage guest blogging, its benefits, and opportunities. Next, we’ll proceed to the steps you need to take to start guest blogging, find appropriate websites, and monetize your efforts.

Why should you start guest blogging?

Writing evergreen articles or creating other forms of content that are relevant and fit for a partnering company is a challenging task. However, it offers several benefits for guest bloggers. By sharing their expertise, companies obtain high traffic, new leads and customers, domain authority, brand awareness, and good relationships with businesses within the market. Besides, it enables brands to obtain constant growth and win customer trust.

Guest blogging is beneficial for both the author and the website hosting their content. Becoming a guest blogger improves a brand’s exposure to different target audiences and attracts people interested in a particular topic.

Now that you have the reasons to hire professionals to create quality blog posts, let’s proceed to the next section to discuss the advantages of this effective technique.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

Creating original and quality content for companies in the same industry isn’t an easy task, but it’s worth the effort because of the various benefits it brings:

• high website traffic;
• wide reach;
• good relationships with influencers and well-established companies in the industry;
• extra social media shares;
• big social media following;
• established position of an industry leader and expert;
• additional backlinks to your website;
• high brand awareness;
• qualified leads;
• fast sales cycle;
• big sales volume;
• profound content marketing knowledge and new skills;
• different points of view and information for readers.

The pros are clear now, so it’s time to review how bloggers can find an opportunity to write a guest post.

As a guest blogger, you will definitely look for opportunities to place your articles on relevant sites with high authority. When doing this, remember to review blogs that relate to your industry and have an audience that will be interested in your company. For example, if your brand sells and specializes in beauty products, it’s better to look for a website that contains information about cosmetics, skincare essentials, fragrances, etc.

Use Google search

The majority of blogs that need guest bloggers inform about this on their websites. You can easily find them by leveraging Google search operators.

Say, your brand provides customers with marketing automation software solutions. To find a place to post something related to your industry, you need to create a query in Google that contains your main keyword plus “submit guest post” (use quotation marks) to obtain all marketing automation websites open to guest posting. Your query should look like this:

marketing automation platform + “submit guest post”

Look, you instantly receive around 15,800 results for your query. The only thing you need to do now is to find the most relevant websites for your business.

Consider prolific guest bloggers

One more opportunity is to find some great authors in your industry who always come up with relevant and quality content. Look through their accounts on social media to see their articles and the companies they promote. These brands can be perfect for your articles as well. Find them on Google, and check out whether it’s possible to publish your guest post. Explore their guidelines.

To search for an influential guest blogger, you should create the following query in Google:

name + “guest post by” (use quotation marks)

For example, let’s look for guest posts written by Kay Dexter, a marketing strategist. You can see the necessary query below:

Kay Dexter + “guest post by”

By writing this way, you’ll obtain the websites that contain Kay Dexter’s guest posts.

Look through backlinks of your rival companies

To get great websites for your guest posts, you can always leverage Ahrefs or SEMRush. Select your key competitors, and check their recent backlink profiles. If your competitors succeed in publishing their guest posts on some good websites, there’s a chance that they will publish your articles as well.

For example, let’s check Runner’s World’s website and its backlinks in Ahrefs.

Become a part of relevant communities

Depending on the type of your business, you can join an appropriate community for new opportunities. For example, if you work in digital marketing, it’s worth creating a group on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Slack. This way, you can find websites that welcome articles from other companies. Besides joining such a community, you should also show your active participation in it.

Now that you know where to find some opportunities for your guest blogging, follow our guide to start creating guest posts and publishing them on reliable and relevant websites.

To kickstart your guest blogging, you should be aware of several steps. We’ll discuss them in more detail below.

1. Look for guest blogging opportunities. As we’ve already mentioned in the previous section, when searching for some chances to guest post, pay attention to the websites that operate in your industry. The blogs you search for should be in the same niche, have an audience that will be interested in your company, and have a high level of engagement. Look for potential clients through Google search, prolific guest bloggers, social media, competitor backlinks, or communities of guest bloggers. MyBlogGuest is one of the examples of such communities.
2. Get to know your target websites’ content. Before writing any guest posts, you need to understand the content of your target blog. Explore the audience they write for and the type of content they publish. You should be aware of all these facts before writing for them.
3. Explore the guest posts on these blogs. Look through and analyze the guest posts from other writers and compare them with articles published by the owner. Find out whether they succeeded to perform like the owner’s blog posts. For this purpose, see the number of comments and shares. If the audience doesn’t demonstrate a high level of engagement, it’s better to avoid such blogs. They won’t let you establish authority or bring traffic to your website.
4. Find out what types of authors these sites need. Take a look at several bios of experts invited to write posts. It will enable you to figure out what kinds of people they work with: freelancers, bloggers, or business owners.
5. Study their guidelines. Before contacting a blog owner, you should see their guest posting guidelines first and try to follow them when creating a guest post. Be aware of the posts they would like to see, the format, and other essential details. It’s necessary to avoid any complications during your partnership and make a great article.
6. Pitch a great idea for your post and write an article. Once you read the guidelines, you will know for sure what things this or that blog requires. If it mentions submitting a topic idea, you can prepare several of the most appropriate ones. Depending on the quality of this website’s content, you should prepare a related post. Look through the previous guest posts to create something similar so that your content is relevant.
7. Create a guest bio. This part is the most important for you because it contains self-promotion links. Try to do your best to describe yourself as an expert to gain trust. You can include a link to your site, social profile, or information about your background and experience.
8. Monitor and evaluate your post’s performance. Finally, you need to track the progress of your guest post. If you strive to boost traffic to your site, then measure the results by using Google Analytics. This way, you’ll define the success of your article.

It’s time to jump into the next section and walk you through the ways to search for sites that welcome guest posts.

How to Find Guest Blogging Sites

Sometimes writers have problems with finding the right sites to guest blog. In this section, we’ll unveil several ways to do it.

• Look for special blogs on Google. You can easily find the necessary lists of sites that allow guest bloggers to write articles for them. Many people have studied this question before and shared their knowledge on Google. This way, you’ll have a quick look at the websites related to your niche and their domain authority. The only thing left is to choose the most appropriate ones for your company.
• Use special tools. You can research the necessary websites with different tools. For example, platforms like BuzzSumo enables users to search for guest blogs by writing topic keywords + “guest post” or “guest post by.” As a result, you’ll have a list of blogs that allow guest posts.
• Analyze the activity of your competitors. By using different tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, you have an opportunity to take a look at your competitors’ actions and strategies: their backlinks, websites where they guest posted, and see the authority of websites they write for. This analytics is one of the primary sources of guest blogging sites. You can choose the companies that suit you the most and contact their teams.

Now let’s figure out how to earn money using guest blogging.

How to Make Money Guest Blogging

Savvy marketers know the numerous advantages of guest blogging and ways to earn money by implementing this strategy. There are several things you should consider to receive money for your articles.

• Sell your product. The easiest way to monetize your guest posts is to promote your product and ultimately sell it to a new audience. You can choose an appropriate moment to educate readers about your company and explain what problems it can help solve. For example, if your article is about platforms that help build websites for free, don’t forget to mention that you have such a service with a free plan or trial period and place a link if possible.
• Offer to create posts for compensation. If you are a freelancer and you are good at writing informative and relevant articles, guest blogging might be your additional source of income. Consider writing posts for influencers, teaching others how to write such blog posts, partnering up with companies and creating content for them, or creating an online course on guest posting.
• Sell affiliate products. One more great idea to earn money with guest blogging is to sell other companies’ products. You need to masterfully describe them and educate your readers about their benefits. The two main advantages are that the product isn’t yours, so you don’t need to spend extra time on its development, and you get money for its promotion and selling. Put links that lead to these products, promote courses, webinars, and training, or invite them to join online communities.
• Write sponsored reviews. Companies often need feedback and reviews from experts in the same industry. You can become one and earn some money. However, stick only to honest reviews to avoid harming your reputation.

In a nutshell, guest blogging should be a crucial part of a successful company’s strategy. It brings brand recognition and a wide target audience and positively affects SEO. If you aim to become a guest blogger or considering hosting guest articles on your site, just give it a try.