Five Steps to Finding (the Right) Guest-Blogging Opportunities

Guest blogging isn't just a link building tactic (that has been spammed and abused). It's an excellent way to build your credibility, your community, and your customer base.

But you have to be strategic about it and put some quality effort into it.

When you guest blog, you've been provided the opportunity to leverage someone else's audience, someone else's brand, and someone else's established forum.

That means, if you're doing it right, guest blogging should be some of your best work. Think of it as a speaking engagement. You wouldn't get up in front of a group of people unprepared. You would take the time to carefully craft your message in order to make the biggest impact on your audience.

And when you're putting in all of that hard work, you don't just want to guest blog anywhere. You want to strategically put your effort into blogs that are a match for your values, philosophies, and company. Because ultimately, you're using guest blogging as a tactic to attract customers to your business.

Finding a guest-blogging match


So let's say you want to use guest blogging as a tactic for your business development and community building efforts. How would you find those opportunities?

How about these five simple steps:

[1] Determine goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)

Success in anything, but especially in guest blogging, starts with identifying goals. What are you trying to accomplish? What are you expecting to gain from it? And, also very significant: How will you measure success?

Let's say I'm looking for blogging opportunities. There are three things that I would like to accomplish:

1. Become part of new communities and build relationships with people outside of SEO. (Not that there's anything wrong with SEOs. It's just an example, folks. Carry on).

2. Attract business that is a match for Mack Web's culture and values.

3. Find new information sources (blogs) where I can learn, teach the team, and better serve our clients.



[2] Define your audience by developing personas


In order to determine the right guest-blogging opportunities, you've got to identify your target audience. One way to do that is to develop personas. This will help you define the specific people you want to attract to your community and your company through your guest-blogging efforts.

For example, if I'm looking to attract people who are curious about social media marketing, possibly community building, and how that can help them build their business, one of my personas may look like this:

Name: Joanna

Title: CMO

Company: A small SaaS startup

Desires: Rapid growth, increased revenue generation

Goals: Drive ROI through social and community building



Having an understanding of who you're targeting will assist you in filtering guest-blogging prospects later.

[3] Find some targets in your niche 


Now that you've figured out who in general you want to target, you'll want to actually find the specific people that you want to reach out to for guest-blogging opportunities. You can start by looking for influential people and then determining whether they have blogs to which you could contribute.

Using myself as an example, I would go to Followerwonk and do some searching. I'm going to start with the phrase "social media marketing" and then sort the results by Social Authority.

After sifting through just the first page of results, I recognize Jeff Bullas as a possible guest blogging target. He's not the CMO I'm looking to attract, but I'd be willing to bet there are CMOs that read his blog. So let's work with him as a possible target in the social media marketing niche.

[4] Qualify the source


Once you've found some possible targets in your niche, you'll want to do a little legwork to make sure they're the right fit. You may want to keep track of this stuff in a spreadsheet so that you can organize and filter your results later.

There may be bunch of things that you investigate with these opportunities, but if you're trying to do this quickly, try some of these:

1. Check for a blog

Clearly you cannot guest blog for someone who does not in fact have a blog, so that's step number one.

On Jeff Bullas's blog, I can conduct a simple search for [guest post]:

By clicking on these results, it's clear that he allows guest submissions (and, in fact, that he allows them quite frequently). So if this ends up being a good fit for me, I may have a greater chance of getting a spot.

2. Check for domain authority and link profile


You'll want to make sure that you're putting all of the hard work of your quality content on a blog that has strong credibility.

You can type the URL of the blog into Open Site Explorer to check their domain authority and link profile. You will certainly be earning a link from this blog, so even if it is nofollow, you want to ensure that you're being associated with a quality site. Not that a low DA is always an indication of a poor blog; some are just new and haven't yet built their authority. You just want to make sure you're building trust and not hurting your reputation, your brand, or your own link profile. In addition to DA, then, you'll want to check their profile:

At a quick glance, Jeff Bullas's link profile looks pretty swell; he's earned links from some reputable places. I would say he passes the domain authority and link profile check.

Just make sure when you're qualifying blogs that are not as established or well known that you're picky about this stuff so that you don't pay for it later. You want to be associated with high quality, so that's what you're looking for.



3. Check for engagement

You also want to make sure you've qualified this guest-blogging opportunity on the social side. What kind of engagement does the blog get? What does its community look like? What is its reach?

Looking at both Jeff Bullas's posts, and especially at his guest authors' posts, you can see that there's quite a bit of engagement. Not only do they get shared, but they even elicit comments:

Another way to look for engagement is to search for the URL of the guest blog post in Twitter. This will allow you to investigate the people who have actually tweeted this guest blogger's post:

Chances are many of the same people who read and tweet these posts are the same ones that may read or share mine (if I were given the opportunity, of course). Based on who is tweeting these posts, I can determine whether that audience is a match for the persona I've defined.

[5] Check yes or no

Once you've worked through each of the steps above, you're probably ready to make a decision about the guest-blogging opportunity that's in front of you. But before you check "yes" or "no" (and ask for the opportunity), I'd highly recommend asking yourself one final question:

Is this guest blogging opportunity a culture and value fit for your business?

Ultimately, if your guest blogging is a success, you will attract customers from this blog to your website and blog. So, most importantly, you've got to make sure the people who are part of this community are in alignment with your brand.

Go read the entries on the blog. Is the content of good quality? Do the posts resonate with your philosophies? Are the other contributors to this blog reputable? Would you hang out with them? If you were to guest on this blog, would it speak well of your brand?

 Are you going to want any of their readers as your customers? Would you spend time with their community?

Just some important things to think about before you spend a whole lot of time on guest blogging. Make sure it's a match for your business.

Time well spent

Guest blogging is a really powerful way to connect with people, build relationships, and find qualified leads for your business. If you take the time to strategically seek and qualify the right opportunities, it will be time well spent.

Have you had success in finding quality guest blogging opportunities? Share your successes and techniques in the comments below.