Find Good Guest Blogging Opportunities

Are there any good guest blogging opportunities available these days, or are they all low-quality spam? They still exist—let me tell you how I find them.

The Death of “Guest Blogging”

A couple of years ago, in yet another infamous announcement, Matt Cutts told people to stop posting guest articles to gain links. After modifying his statement later, it was clear that he was referring to those one-and-done, low-bar-of-acceptance blogging opportunities. He admitted that a Google-compliant marketing strategy still has a place for productive guest contributions.

Great, but where can we find those opportunities?

The Search for Real Guest Blog Opportunities

From the way I read Cutt’s announcement and modification, I think one criterion we could use to determine what is a “real” guest blog opportunity that is acceptable to Google and what is not is by traffic. Are real people reading the blog and finding it helpful and useful, and is it relevant to the link to the webpage?

The latter two of these criteria are easy to meet: produce good content. But how can we tell if a website we are thinking of pitching has any traffic without access to its website analytics?

Alexa.

I don’t recommend asking your Amazon-powered voice assistant. Alexa was a website ranking system. It is no longer active (it ended in 2022), but the lessons from this post still apply.

I must admit that my eyes have nearly rolled out of my head for the number of times I’ve heard someone advocate for Alexa Rank. It was always a metric that offline marketers would bring to the digital world because they don’t understand the power of internet marketing. However, there were some valuable insights from this data.

How Alexa Rank Worked

Like the old Nielsen TV ratings, Alexa measured a sample of people as they viewed the web and projected that number to rank websites by traffic. How are they doing this? People who had the “Alexa Toolbar” installed on their web browser.

“But I don’t care what websites my grandma is visiting!”

Maybe not, but it’s more than that. Alexa had all sorts of data partners out there sharing this information with them. At first glance, it might seem like a silly source of data, but we have to remember that as marketers, we’re more attuned to how we’re being tracked than the average internet user. Most people have no idea that they helped Alexa collect this data.

Thus, Alexa Rank was a good way to know which websites are most popular. From there, we could tell which websites we’d want to pitch for guest blogging opportunities.

My Method

First, I collected a list of 113 different search queries that you might use to find a guest blog post. I then broke these into two categories: pitched and submitted content. “Pitched content” was posts likely written exclusively for a particular website. These had a higher bar for acceptance because you needed to suggest a topic before you could even have the opportunity. “Submitted content” was a website where you could submit something that had already been written. These could include some low-quality sites (because they will take anything written by anyone), but some quality sites were still looking for contributors in this way.

Next, I pulled the list of the top 1,000,000 websites, as ranked by Alexa. I thinned this list a little, removing adult sites, tracking websites, and non-English websites (just because that’s my focus). I then pared this list down to the top 200 or so.

That’s when the real work began. I started looking for the number of results in the search engine for each of these websites and each of the search queries. That came to nearly 23,000 different combinations. Yes, this took a couple of months of work.

Results

Finally, I had a list of the number of pages on each of the top 200 Alexa-ranked websites for several guest blogging-related queries (pitched content [CSV] and submitted content [CSV]).

Conclusions

Even if the data in the spreadsheets (above) is outdated, we can learn some things from this.

How can you find websites where you can pitch content?

Looking at the pitched content sheet, you will see 33 different ways websites might invite people to write something new for them. The top ten are:

1. “Become an Author”
2. “Community News”
3. “become a contributor”
4. “want to write for”
5. “Guest post by”
6. “contributing writer”
7. “write for us”
8. “guest column”
9. “write for me”
10. “The following guest post”

If you were to do a Google search for one of these phrases (in quotation marks) and accompanied by a topic about which you’d like to write (the broader, the better), you could find some websites that might welcome a new and unique article written with your expertise. For example:

• “Become an Author” cybersecurity
• “Community News” Charlotte, NC
• “become a contributor” manufacturing

Pro-tip: Replace a “keyword” with your competitor’s name and find out if they’ve written for any periodicals. If they’ve been accepted, why wouldn’t they take your pitch?

Which websites are looking for submitted content?

We can do the same thing with the submitted content sheet. There are fewer queries in this sheet, so here are the top five:

1. “Add Content”
2. “Submit News”
3. “Submission Guidelines”
4. “Submit an Article”
5. “Submit Article”

Admittedly, this strategy has a few limitations. For one, if the bar is so low that anyone can “add content” to a website, any link you might get from that site won’t be particularly helpful. This tactic brings another problem: if everyone is accepted to submit to this website, you might find yourself in a bad neighborhood, which could reflect poorly on your brand, let alone your link. Use these queries cautiously.

Be responsible

SEO’s can’t have nice things because they always take advantage of opportunities until they burn them to the ground. Sure, there is a way to do this in a scalable, automated, and low-quality fashion. You might even get some links as a result. It might even help your “rankings” – at least for now.

But I’d recommend taking this a step further. Write something new. Make it unique for the site to which you’re pitching or submitting. Take time to do your research. Yes- this is much harder. Yes- you’ll only be able to produce a few articles for these sites. However, these articles will remain valuable even as Google changes over the years.