Have you ever heard of guest blogging? Guest blogging is basically about writing great articles for a blog related to your website. At the end of the article, you have a paragraph or profile section which includes information about you as the writer, with a link or two back to your websites. In short, it’s a technique of getting your name known as well as promoting your website.
If you want to read about guest blogging in more detail, Glen of ViperChill recently wrote a great article covering most aspects of guest blogging. In this article, I’ll be giving you some tried and tested techniques for finding guest blogging opportunities.
1. Websites in your Blog’s Comments
If you have a blog yourself, you’ve probably got the ability for visitors to comment on your articles. Many of these visitors have their own websites, and they are very likely to be related in subject to your blog. Therefore search through the comments on your blog, and contact each commenter who has a website you want to write for.
Since the commenters are already interested in what you have to say, they are very likely to be interested in you writing for them.
2. BlogCatalog
BlogCatalog is my favourite source for finding other blogs in my niche. As the name suggests, it’s a directory of blogs, all arranged by category. Therefore you just need to find the category relating to yours, and then start contacting blogs that you want to write for.
3. Niche Web Directories
A web directory is basically a website containing links to lots of other websites. Links on the directory are categorised into different topics, and pretty much anyone can submit their website to them. There are also niche directories, which focus on a specific topic or niche of website.
For example, you can find directories that focus on just health websites, or perhaps shopping, etc. All you need to do is find some directories related to the niche of your blog, and then go through the directory contacting the blogs that you find. Offer to write an article related to both your website and theirs, and more often than not, you’ll get an acceptance!
As a starting point, you can find a whole collection of niche directories at VileSilencer (I don’t understand the name either, but hey!).
4. Google Searches
Sometimes blog owners create a page advertising that they’re looking for guest writers. We can actually use Google to find these pages by searching for phrases (including the quotes) such as:
- “Write for Us”
- “Guest blog for us”
- “Call out for guest bloggers”
- “Calling all guest bloggers”
You just then need to narrow down your search to include blogs from your niche. So you might do a search such as below. Notice that “Write For Us” is in quotes, but food isn’t. Basically that means we’re looking for the exact phrase “Write For Us” on a page, but including “food” somewhere else on the page. This helps us to find food-centric blogs. Even in the food niche, you might need to use alternative words for food, such as recipes, deserts, cakes, etc.
“Write for Us” food
5. BlogSynergy
Finally, there’s BlogSynergy, which is a platform to make it really easy to find guest blogging opportunities. BlogSynergy is a new project that brings together blog owners who are very enthusiastic about finding writers for their blogs. Blog owners add their blog to the relevant category, and then specify their writing requirements.
As a writer, you can then request to write for their blog, giving them some ideas on what you can write about. If the blog owner accepts (they usually do), then you go ahead and write the article for them! Blog owners can also find you on BlogSynergy if you fill out your profile, and they can send you a request to write for them!
BlogSynergy is currently free during it’s beta test phase. Even when it does start charging a fee, there will be a basic free account too.
Conclusion
Finding blogs to write for does take a little effort, but guest blogging does result in some great results in terms of growing your website and the number of visitors you receive. If you’ve never tried it, why not give it a go?
This is a guest article by Dan Harrison, who’s one of the founders of Blog Synergy and who is also a champion of guest blogging as a way of building communities around blogs.
