Guest posting or Guest blogging is one of the top SEO strategies to earn high-quality and relevant backlinks. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, and others consider backlinks as votes. The more votes a domain has, its chances of ranking higher in the organic search results.

Website owners and marketers are always looking for ways to build website links. However, unnatural links are a violation of Google guidelines. Google devalues links created to pass Pagerank. Only the links earned naturally are counted as votes.

Guest posting helps to earn white-hat and natural links when done in moderation. This is why SEOs and digital marketers use Guest Blogging as a prime strategy to earn genuine and reputed links for their domain.

What is guest posting?

Guest posting is a technique for earning links where a webmaster or a marketer publishes their content on niche sites that accept content contributions. Some sites openly accept guest content.

The method involves finding websites of similar niches and approaching the webmasters with a formal email sharing your background information, mentioning why you wish to guest post, and attaching a draft for review.

Most of the sites have guest contributor guidelines. You only need to follow the guidelines and take the next step accordingly.

Guest blogging is difficult because manually finding sites, reviewing the guidelines, suggesting topics of interest, and following up with webmasters requires patience and intelligent work.

What are the advantages of guest posting? 

The top advantages of guest blogging are:

• Traffic to your site is increased because high-quality guest posts often pass relevant referral traffic.
• Your backlink profile becomes more robust and trustworthy since links acquired via Guest Blogging are editorial in nature.
• When you publish several guest posts in relevant blogs, you establish a reputation for your brand and authority in your niche.
• Smartly written guest posts have higher chances of conversions because prospects can read your guest blogs on other sites and approach you for work.
• You can showcase your guest post links on the homepage of your website to increase brand trust.
• Guest blogs are a great way to get more social followers for your business.

How to find sites for guest posting?

Here are the beginner steps for finding sites for guest posting:

Step 1: Conduct research on Google to find sites of similar niches where you can become a contributor. Here are some of the search queries you can use to find out sites looking for guest bloggers:

• “Keyword” + “write for us”
• “Keyword” + “this is a guest post”
• “Keyword” + “become a contributor”
• “Keyword” + “guest posting sites”
• “Keyword” + “guest blogging guidelines”
• “Keyword” + “guest blogging”
• “Keyword” + “submit a guest post”

Install the MozBar when you are finding sites because this will help you pick sites above a particular DA range. MozBar will display metrics such as DA and PA on the search engine result pages so that you can select high-quality sites.

Step 2: Once you find a site, check its guest blogging guidelines. Generally, every website has its own set of guidelines that has instructions to submit a guest post. Invest time to read the complete guidelines and prepare your content accordingly. Some sites might ask for a draft along with an email while others might ask you to send some topics for approval first. Make sure to read the guidelines thoroughly before you proceed to the next step.

Step 3: You are all set to send emails to the webmasters. Depending on the guidelines, you can start sending emails to webmasters with content topics and a brief background of yours. It would be great to include some of your published writing samples along with the outreach email.

Step 4: The final step is following up with the webmasters. Some might not even respond to your first email request. Hence, send them 2-3 follow-up emails to know their opinion. But, do not exceed the number of follow-ups to more than three. There will be some sites that will readily accept your contributions and send you the published article link. Continue steps 1-4 to regularly find new sites to acquire more backlinks to your site.

Top tools for guest posting

When you start the guest posting work, you will soon find it redundant and boring. Hence, some guest posting tools are essential to make your job of finding sites and sending emails to webmasters easier.

Here are the tools that you should use for guest posting:

Pitchbox

Pitchbox is an influencer outreach and link building tool to help bloggers and marketers find relevant guest posting opportunities. You can find blogs and articles related to any industry you want. It allows you to perform real-time and SERP-based prospecting.

Pitchbox uses top SEO tools to fetch data, including Ahrefs, SEMRush, Majestic, and Moz. Go to the campaigns section in the Pitchbox dashboard and click on “Create” in the “Blogger Outreach” box as seen in the image below.

Now, create your campaign by filling in essential details like campaign name, country, and the most important keywords.

Add filters such as DA, PA, DR, PR, backlinks, referring domains, keywords, and traffic. These filters are fetched by tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush and others.

After creating a campaign, click on inspect.

The tool will automatically find hundreds of guest posting sites with details like DA, PA, TF, Keywords, and others.

You can easily export this list to use in your digital PR or guest post outreach campaign.

Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach is a powerful outreaching tool for bloggers and marketers.

It lets you find relevant guest posting sites and also offers outreach templates to send emails to webmasters. You can also track the campaign results with in-built CRM.

To get started, click on “Content Prospecting” from your Ninja Outreach dashboard.

Now, enter the keyword or phrase related to your industry like tech, marketing, social, etc. You can set the number of results to 5000. After entering, you will find tons of websites related to the searched term.

To get more targeted results, Ninja Outreach offers various filters such as Alexa rank, DA, PA, PR, post shares and comments. Also, you can change the type of page you want.

For example, to find product review sites, you can select them from the options.

You can also save these link prospects in your Ninja Outreach account with a custom name.

Summing up

A strong guest blogging strategy is useful to help your business website acquire tons of relevant and high-authority links. If you still haven’t thought of running a guest post campaign, then you should seriously start thinking so. Guest blogging, when done in the right proportion increases brand awareness, acquires natural links, increases search rankings, and improves the flow of organic traffic to your website.