Doing guest posting well is really hard – it’s hard to find good sites that have high editorial standards AND that will link to you. There are sites like My Blog Guest & Blogger Link Up, but honestly, I’ve found the quality here to be less than encouraging. These days, the primary way that I find guest posting opportunities is through using advanced search queries for guest posting.
Really it’s not that advanced – all that advanced search queries means is that the searches use a few advanced search operators. There is a really good list of them here on Google Guide. When I’m trying to find guest posting opportunities, I focus on the following types of advanced search queries:
- quotes – I use quotes a lot to make sure that I’m searching for exact phrases like “write for me” or “become a contributor” instead of pages that use those words
- intitle: – I like this one a lot because it searches only the <title> element for the query you enter. This is really helpful in returning dedicated pages on topics (such as guest posting guidelines) rather than pages that mention topics
- inurl: – This is another good one. Really helpful when you want to find a blog that has a guest posting category
Below are a list of guest posting advanced search queries that will help you find guest posting opportunities.
List of Advanced Search Queries For Guest Posting
These are the guest post search operators that I use:
keyword intitle:”write for us”
keyword intitle:”write for me”
Keyword intitle:”contribute to”
Keyword intitle:”submit” + inurl:blog
Keyword “submit a guest post”
Keyword inurl:/guest-post/
Keyword “guest post”
Keyword “guest post by”
Keyword “accepting guest posts”
Keyword “guest post guidelines”
Keyword “guest author”
Keyword “guest article”
Keyword “guest column”
Keyword “become a contributor”
inpostauthor:guest keyword
inpostauthor:”guest blog” keyword
inpostauthor:”guest post” keyword
Process: How to Find Guest Posting Opportunities
I have a pretty simple process for using guest posting search operators to find guest posting opportunities. The first step is to figure out what topic you want to write about. While it should go without saying, you should obviously plan to write about something you’re an expert for. You can substitute this “topic” for “keyword” in the guest posting search operators above. This will typically yield a sizable list of sites where you may find guest posting opportunities.
You can go into search settings and change your results to display 100 results instead of 10. Then you can use scrape similar to harvest all of these and then insert them into a spreadsheet where you can track your guest posting prospects.
The next step is to identify the sites that a) are relevant and b) pose a good opportunity for you. These can be evaluated at the same time and boil down to “is your expertise relevant”. This can be done by offering your expertise where it is complimentary to a community. For example, I had a friend who decided he was going to offer his SEO insights to WordPress and developer communities. He was able to build his reputation as an SEO expert within the circles he was active. The same thing goes for finding guest posting opportunities. Competitors likely won’t want you to guest post for them but sites in a complimentary field will likely benefit significantly from your expertise.
The final step in finding guest posting opportunities is to evaluate the quality of the sites. It takes a lot of work to write a great post for someone. You don’t want to spend a lot of effort writing for sites that aren’t going to pass you a lot of value. You can best measure this by looking at link metrics such linking root domains or domain authority. Sites like ahrefs, majestic, and SEMrush all have their own link indexes you can use for these purposes. You also want to do a review of the site to make sure it isn’t spammy or low quality. For me this is generally a gut check – I can’t always articulate what makes a site spammy, but I know it when I see it.
Good luck and happy guest posting.