Guest posting will not only get you links, but, if done properly, it will get you links from relevant websites with good authority. It’s a bullet-proof strategy, but it requires some time and effort to find valuable prospects worth asking for guest post - not every website will be a good match for your website in terms of related content and quality, and you want your backlinks to keep their value whatever conditions Google decides to change.
Since a lot of people don’t quite know how to get started with guest posting, here’s a short guide on the first step: finding prospects.
#1 Google
Using Google to find websites to guest post is a bit tedious job, but can often be rewarding, and you will maximize the number of quality results if you use advanced search operators like:
intitle: finds the pages that contain your keyword in the title tags
inurl: finds the pages with your keyword in URL, etc.
You then combine them with your keyword, and if your website is about dog training, your search can look something like this: ”guest post” inurl:”dog training”.
Additional tip: besides from your main keyword, expand your search to its synonyms (or to what Google sees as synonyms of your keyword) using (~) operator.
#2 Twitter
Twitter is also a great place to search for guest blogging opportunities: tweets are searchable, and people usually tweet about the posts they made on someone else’s website (hey, check out my guest post at…), and the hosts also like to share the new content with their followers.
Twitter has its own rules for search. After you go to http://search.twitter.com , start your search using the operators OR and AND, like this: “guest author” OR “guest post” AND “dog training”. When you find the tweets that seem like something you could use, you can then contact the website owners either via a tweet or a contact form on their website.
#3 Specialized websites, tools and services
My Blog Guest is probably the best service that connects bloggers and the owners of websites that accept guest posts. It’s free, easy to use, and provides massive network opportunities. They have very strict rules for both sides, so if you’re trying to find a way to automate your linkbuilding, then think twice before you register.
Technorati is a website where you can search for blogs in your niche. They aren’t specialized in providing guest post networking, but you can manually check the blogs in their huge directory and contact the owners directly if they appear to be a good match.
Link Prospector is a paid tool, but priced highly reasonably when you consider the amount of time it will save you (actually, when you first sign in, you get a free go to test it). Once you log in and start your campaign, you can choose the type of prospecting – apart from guest posting, you can search for directories, giveaways, reviews, forums, commenting. It will then create a report with possible prospects (depending on how in depth your search was, you can get a few thousand results), which you can analyze on spot or export to CSV and work from there.
#4 Competitor analysis
Analyzing your competitor’s links will tell you a lot about the backlinking strategy you should adopt, and you can find all sorts of useful information by doing this – one of them being the blogs who accepted their guest posts. In other words, use what’s already there: someone else has already done the research.
#5 Existing relationships
Finally, the easiest way to ask for a guest post link in a natural way is to reach out to the people you already know. After some time in the industry, chances are that you’ve established relationships that you can use to ask for a guest post. These links are natural, and your competitor (he’s probably doing the same thing as you) will have hard time trying to copy them.
This was just to get you started - remember, you are looking for the best opportunities out there, so you will need to sort out the quality websites, but now you should have a really big list of websites to choose from.
You can guest post on our blog by contacting sparklexecute@gmail.com.
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