| 🎯 What’s the goal? Find Guest-Blogging opportunities. | ⚠️ Why does it matter? To improve the authority of your domain. |
| 🏁 What’s the result? Earn high-quality backlinks to your site. | ⌚ When do you do this? Every time you want to build links to your site. |
| ✅ Any special requirements? Perform your Keyword Research and having a clear content strategy prepared is a must. | 🙋♂️Who should do it? Your SEO Team (In-House or VA) |
👉 Where this is done: In your browser, as well as in a spreadsheet to stay organized.
⏳ How long will this take? about 5-15 hours
Let’s start our research – it is time-consuming but crucial for success!
Environment setup:
- Access to MS Excel, Google Sheets or any other similar tool.
- Sign up for Contact Out Chrome extension.
Preparing to Guest-Blogging
Create a correct mindset
Guest-blogging should NOT be solely performed to earn backlinks. Instead, you should focus on building authority and earning a readership. Those two factors will guarantee you backlinks. If you approach guest blogging only with the intention of earning a link, you might end up targeting low-quality sites with low-quality content, without any authority and with bad rankings.
Work on a good visual side of your content
Your site/blog should look valuable. Focus on attention to details such as social media icons, “clean” theme, “About Us”, “Contact” pages etc. Of course, you should also keep your content at high quality so it will be recognized by audiences and potential contacts as valuable and relevant.
Keep your content relevant and create high-quality content
Your post should be high-quality. That means that they should not be spammy and focus on the matter. You should check this article from SmartBlogger.
Organize your guest-blogging opportunities
Before you start, you should prepare a worksheet that will help you organise your findings. The worksheet should be simple and clean so you will be able to easily analyze your list.
For the task, we prepared a simple worksheet template.
URL – this is where you will put URL to the blog/ influencer social media, competitors site etc.
1st Name/Last Name – here you should put the name of the person to outreach.
Contact Form – if this will be the only method you will find to contact the desired site.
E-mail address – E-mail address of the desired influencer/site admin etc.
Contacted – Just in case you can keep track of the people you will reach.
Finally, we divide our worksheet into three spreadsheets.
By doing that you can divide your findings into categories. It will help you organize your work.
The 1st and fundamental step of launching a guest-blogging campaign is of course potential guest-blogs. The amount of methods to find those blogs is huge. We will cover those that we find the most attractive.
Find guest-blogging opportunities using Google Search
For this method, you should already have a list of your Keywords.
Check out our SOP how to perform a Keyword Research.
This is the easiest way to find guest-blogging opportunities but unfortunately with a high chance of finding low-quality sites. You should analyze and check all pages you will find that way.
The procedure is very easy. Prepare a list of your Keywords and using Google Search look for:
“[your keyword]” + “write for us”
“[your keyword]” + “guest post”
“[your keyword]” + “contribute”
Other ideas include combinaison with “guest post by”, “contributing writer”, “guest author”, “guest article”, “blogging guidelines”, “this is a guest post by”, “contributing writer/author”
For example, if you are writing about healthy food and how to eat fit one of your keywords should be the phrase: “Healthy Food”, then your search should look like this:
You should also try to search using formulas with symbols like:
By doing so, you will find extra results.
As a result, we found some sites that look promising.
Visit those sites and check if they are of high quality.
Then put URLs of those sites into your Worksheet.
The search result should bring you sites that already accept guest posts / contributors.
So if you find valuable sites, add them to your Worksheet.
At the end of this SOP, we will cover some methods on how to find contact information to admins/ owners and influencers.
Find Guest-Blogging opportunities by targeting Influencers
The method is straightforward. If you are writing in any niche, you should be familiar with Influencers and content makers associated with it. When we are thinking “Healthy food,” we think about Jamie Oliver – British cook that always tries to cook healthy.
You should search with this formula: “Guest post” + “influencer name”
In our case:
As you can see we found some sites that we should target as well (add them to your worksheet).
The obvious result will be the personal page of the influencer (and probably tons of his/her posts). You can easily exclude those sites from search by adding “-site:[influencer’s website]”, so your search query should look like this:
“Guest post” + “[influencer name]” -site:[influencer’s website]
In our case:
This should deliver some non-obvious sites that are probably high-quality – since Influencers write on high-quality sites.
Finding Guest-Blogging opportunities using Buzzsumo
Creating Buzzsumo account with a 30-day free trial.
- Go to app.buzzsumo.com.
- Click on “Start Trial” at the top.
- Fill in with your “Name”, “Email Address” and “Create Password”.
Then click on “Start my Free Trial”.
- Buzzsumo will ask you some questions about you.
Simply choose the closest answer from the dropdown list.
- Fill in with your company information.
- Click on “Finish”.
Finding Guest-Blogging Opportunities with BuzzSumo
- Once you log in to your Buzzsumo account, click on “Discover” at the top of the page.
- Then select “Trending”.
- On the left side of the screen, you should find the Custom Feeds area. Click on “+”.
- You should “Give your feed a name” first. Then in the “Topics” box type in your desired keywords such as “healthy food” (in our case), and “guest post”. You can add “Content Filters” to exclude findings with particular keywords and add a “Domain Filter” to either limit to or exclude searches to particular sites. In the end, you should set “Country” and “Language” for your search.
- Once everything is set, click on “Create Feed”.
- Buzzsumo will automatically adjust the search to your preferences.
Here you can find potential guest-posting opportunities.
Analyze results and add related URLs to your Worksheet.
Reviewing / Analyzing your findings
Now it is time for you to make a cup of coffee or tea and patiently read and judge all pages you found. You should reject any sites that have poor-quality content. Take some time to sort your findings from the most valuable pages to less valuable. Remember that this evaluation should be objective. Analyze with caution and attention to details.
While you are analyzing focus on:
- Domain-level metrics: Domain Rating, referring domains, backlinks.
You can check that using Ahrefs Authority Checker.
- Content quality: Go through a few blog posts to see what kind of content they normally post. Look for any sign of spammy, long articles. If you find that domain has a lot of that kind of posts you should consider to mark that domain as low-quality or even delete it from your list.
- Profile info location and visibility.
Check if information about authors of the posts is visible.
- Engagement: A highly engaged audience is a good sign.
Check if there are a lot of comments and shares.
- Content relevance: Check if the site contains many posts reassembling your niche.
- Authors: Check what kind of guest authors are featured on the site. Check for potential spammers. You don’t want your backlinks to be from a site with bad fundamentals.
Once you have decided which page you want to target for your guest-blogging campaign move to the next step.
Searching for contact information
Arm yourself with patience. Trying to reach someone is no easy task.
Finding contact email addresses manually
The most obvious method while looking for someone’s email address is checking the target site for the contact.
In most cases, this will redirect you to a contact form that will allow you to reach someone from the site’s managers. You should save the link to that contact form on your worksheet – this will be your last resort if other methods will fail.
Check the “about”/”about us” page on each site. Those pages can contain contact information as well as Name of the founder/owner of the website. This will allow you to add more information to your worksheet.
Check all the social media links. They are the source of potential contact information. Ultimately you can use them while using methods discussed in the next parts of this SOP.
Finding contact email addresses using Rocketreach
Rocketreach is a paid service (with 5 free searches each month) that will allow you to find contact emails based on the social media profiles. If the previous step leaves you with only a contact form but you manage to find the owner/admin profile in social media, you should consider using this method.
Creating Rocketreach account
- Go to Rocketreach site.
- Click on the “Sign Up” at the upper right corner.
- You can either fill in with your credentials and click on “create account” or sign up using Google or Facebook account.
Rocketreach will occasionally ask you for your phone number to send you an activation code. This is a security measure to prevent people from exploiting free trials.
- Once you create your account, move to the next step.
Using Rocketreach
- Once you log in to your account you should see a search bar at the top.
Simply put a social media link to the desired person’s page, name of the company/page and hit “Search” so you can check the results and find the one you are looking for.
In our opinion, the best use of Rocketreach is to search with social media accounts URL.
You should find the correct person directly, so we will put an exemplary LinkedIn profile URL. This method works best if you manage to find the name of the owner or administrator of the targeted site while searching for it in “about us” and “contact” pages.
- Fill in the search box with the social media account URL and click on “Search”.
- Review search results by checking “Name” and “Company”. Then click on “Get Contact”.
- Contact email addresses will appear In the place of the “Get Contact” button.
You should copy it and add it to your worksheet.
In some cases Rocketreach will fail to deliver 100% accurate information – in that case, no credits will be charged and you will be notified that the email address can be wrong.
Finding contact email addresses using Contactout Chrome Extension
For this method, you should install the Contact Out Chrome extension in your browser. This method is also used only to get contact information from LinkedIn profiles.
Installing Contactout Chrome extension
- Go to Chrome Web Store.
- Highlight “Extensions” on the left side of the screen.
- Type “contactout” into the search box.
- You should see the ContactOut extension by contactout.com.
- Click on it.
- Then click on “Add to Chrome”.
- Select “Add extension” in the pop-up window.
- Now you should see your Contactout extension visible in the upper right corner of Google Chrome web browser.
- Click on the “Contactout” icon and choose “Register”.
- You can choose to sing in using Google or Outlook account (1), or you can enter your work email address and create a password (2). Then click on “Register”.
Using Contactout Chrome extension
- Using Contact Out is straightforward. When you find a person that you want to reach on LinkedIn simply click at the “Contactout icon” in your Chrome extension bar.
- Contact Out will bring you the result of mail searching for that particular account.
Click on “show”.
- And there you will see your desired email address. Copy it to your worksheet.
Reaching out to Admins/Owners/Editors/Bloggers
You do all that hard work that allows you to collect all contact information you need.
Now is the time for the most important step. You should write to people from your list. You should take some time to compose a good template that will work in most cases. For each page you should also focus on that page’s content and show that your ideas for guest-post will be valuable for the site.
Here is a simple email template that you can edit for any situation:
Hi [Name],
[Your Comment] – This part will help you get noticed by the audience of your email. It is a good idea to write about something related to the most recent post from the direct page or for example Twitter account of the blogger/editor.
I’m writing to you because I’m interested in writing a guest post on your site.
Based on your content, I feel that your readers might like these ideas:
[IPut your idea title with a brief description]
[Feel free to add some more ideas in one email (BUT NOT TO MUCH)]
[Put a link to a post on your page that you find related to the target audience and tell that is an example of your content.]
Do you think these ideas would be a good fit?/Do you like these ideas?
Do you think these ideas will attract more readers?/ETC…
Best Wishes,
[Your name]
How to do proper outreach & cold email deserves their own SOP.
To dig further on best practices, please check these Blog Posts:
High-Converting Cold Email Template by Lemlist
Cold Email Guide from A to Z by Lemlist
26 Cold Email Example Broken Down by Dmitry Dragilev
To dig further on Link Building with Guest Blogging, please check these:
How to Start Guest Blogging When You Are Completely Unknown by Jeff Bulas
The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging by Neil Patel
Link Building with Google Sheets: Start Guest Posting in 15 Minutes by Sam Oh (YouTube)
Guest Posting at Scale: Get Tons of High Quality Backlinks by Sam Oh (YouTube)
How To Find GUEST POST Opportunities For SEO by Ben Heath (YouTube)
Finally, the secret weapon of any decent outreach is using the power of follow-up using tools like Lemlist or Snov.io to make an “email drip campaign”, that will be the topic of our next SOP.
We could also discuss how to scale Guest Blogging opportunities and create content outsourcing quality content from companies like Compose.ly, TextBroker, or WordAgents.
