Guest Blogging: Illustrated Link Building Tutorial #3

So, you write very well. And you write a lot. On your site. Or your blog.

The problem is that no one ever sees your amazing articles because your site has very few links to it, and so it never shows up in Google searches for the topics you write about. A waste of talent.

Let’s take a look at the following idea, which will enable many more people to read your articles, and also get you links so that eventually people will actually be reading your articles on YOUR site.

Guest blogging = writing a post for someone else’s blog, usually with the understanding that you will include a few links (not a lot – bear that in mind) to your site in your bio and maybe even in the actual content if it’s relevant.

Where do you find the right place to blog?

One helpful tool is MyBlogGuest. This service allows owners of blogs who are looking for guest posts, and writers who are looking to submit guest posts to find each other. I actually just signed up for this, so I can’t speak yet about how helpful it’s been, but it was started by Ann Smarty, a big name in the SEO industry, and has been recommended by some big SEO blogs as a good resource. If you’ve used it successfully, you can share with us all in the comments below.

After that, try doing Google searches, using your keyword followed by phrases like: “guest post” “guest article” “write for us” (a full list of ideas is at the end of this post).  Not all of them are going to be relevant, and even those that are relevant may not be great quality blogs, but after going through a few search results pages you should have some ideas of where to try. Definitely use some tool (SEOQuake toolbar, SEOMoz toolbar) to get an idea of the relative strength of the pages for the sake of linkbuilding, and visit the blog to get an idea of the quality of the blog and the user engagement, if you’re not just writing purely for a link.

Let’s see some examples:

To find a spot for a guest post on SEO, try looking for the keyphrase: seo “write for us”.  Here are some of the results:

All of the first three appear to be decent, relevant sources. Let’s take a look at the first one:

Jackpot. Their submission guidelines fill an entire page, but if you want a serious forum on a strong site, this seems like a great option.

What if you’re a life coach and you want to share your wisdom in an article (and get back a link to your life coaching site)?

With this search query, we got one site which is actively looking for guest articles:

And the titles of the rest of the sites show that they do, at least on occasion, publish guest posts. Do they always? Will they publish yours? There’s no guarantee, and you’re going to have to do the work of looking through the results and filtering, but at least you have a pool of potential blogs.

Let’s try one last query – for those of you baking experts:

So these first results are entirely guest posts.  Let’s take the third as an example:

Again, while not as direct as a page of actual submission guidelines for a guest post, these blogs do have potential for contacting them and suggesting a guest post. While doing queries for this blog post, I even got a result that was a comment on a blog saying that the commenter would love the blog author to do a guest post on the commenter’s blog. So that commenter might be good to write to and say: I also write about cake decorating, and here’s my blog: www.cakedecoratingsecrets.com. Would it be helpful if I gave you a guest post on how to use different colors of buttercream icing to make a cake that looks like waves crashing onto a beach?

And with that we close with a word to the wise: your main goal may be link building, true. But you also want to give a good impression of your writing to a new audience and to the blog owner. Do your research on the potential blog target before you aim and fire out an offer. Make sure your offers of guest blog posts fit right in with the topic and style of the blog.

Happy writing!

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Here’s your promised full list of search queries, taken from our Link Building Guide:

• keyword “guest blogger” OR “guest post” OR “guest article” OR “guest column”
• keyword “become a contributor” OR “contribute to this site”
• keyword “write for us” OR “write for me”
• keyword inurl:category/guest
• Have any others? Share them with us in the comments?