Guest blogging is still one of the most popular link building tactics. It also helps you establish thought leadership, form valuable relationships, and increase brand awareness.
The biggest challenge in guest blogging is getting your pitches accepted on high authority websites. You need to:
- Identify targets
- Find decision-makers
- Demonstrate a relevant portfolio
- Pitch an idea that resonates with the intended blog’s audience
And even if you do everything right, your guest posts aren’t guaranteed to be published.
Grow your business with marketing automation
At Hunter, guest blogging is the key link building tactic that brings us the best results. In 2022, we published 68 guest posts that resulted in 174 backlinks from DR70+ domains. Here, I’ll show you the exact tactics we used to get our guest posts featured on highest authority websites in our industry—with the hopes it can help you do the same.
Step 1: Find websites that accept guest posts
The first step of a successful guest blogging campaign is identifying relevant websites that accept guest posts. Most websites don’t publicly state whether or not they accept guest posts, but there are clues you can rely on.
Your best bet for finding a sufficient number of qualified websites is to combine a handful of methods. These are the three that have always worked well for me.
Use Google to find relevant sites with a guest blogging policy
You can use Google Search operators and try several variations, such as:
- [Your industry] + inurl: “write for us”
- [Your industry] + inurl: “contribute”
- [Your industry] + inurl: “guest post”
- [Your industry] + inurl: “guest post guidelines”
This method works fine if you’re just starting with guest blogging. The issue is that the content strategy of these websites revolves around guest posts, meaning everyone can publish on these sites—which minimizes the return on investment.
The best strategy here is to find the gems and skip the rest. Once you get featured on a few websites, pitch to harder-to-get websites. Now, let’s move on to my two favorite tactics to find higher quality websites.
Reverse engineer active guest bloggers
The goal is to identify featured guest bloggers’ bylines on industry-relevant websites. Most of the time, these websites don’t publicly state that they accept guest posts, but since they’ve already accepted guest posts in the past, there’s a chance they’ll consider your pitch, too.
The first step is to find websites with an overlapping audience, find out if they publish guest posts, and then identify the authors of those guest posts.
You can use a Google Search like relevant niche + “this is a guest post by” to quickly get full names of featured guest bloggers.
Once you’ve identified relevant guest post authors, use Google Search operators to find other websites they were published on.
- “[Full name]” + “author”
- “[Full name]” + “written by”
- “[Full name]” + “guest post by”
I personally had the most success with the “author” operator, as this query returns the author profiles on websites, giving a better understanding of what content these websites are looking for.
After a quick search on Google, you can get hundreds of relevant targets that published guest posts. I like to enrich the data with Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis, where you can add up to 200 domains and get their visibility data in seconds.
Use Ahrefs Content Explorer
I’ve found that Ahrefs’ Content Explorer is the most effective tool for finding potential websites you can pitch guest posts to. It allows you to identify websites that mention specific keywords in their titles or copy. You can also filter the results using metrics like domain rating (DR), organic traffic (ST), referring domains (RD), and more.
Here are some of my favorite filters when using Ahrefs Content Explorer to find guest post opportunities:
- Search for the “keyword” mentioned in the page title
- Traffic > 5,000
- DR70 and higher
- Exclude homepages and subdomains, and only list one page per domain
Combining these three prospecting methods can give you hundreds of relevant prospects in less than an hour.
Step 2: Identify key decision-makers
Finding the key decision-makers to pitch can make or break your outreach campaign. These are the people you should focus on:
- Editors
- Heads of content/content managers
- Heads of marketing
- Heads of growth/SEO
- CEOs/founders (if the number of employees on LinkedIn is less than 5, you’re probably safe reaching out to the founders directly)
Navigate to a company profile on LinkedIn, search employees, and filter results by positions.
