In my previous post, I talked about why it was important to guest blog. Now I’m going to teach you a quick, easy way to find guest blogging opportunities.
A manual search of industry blogs via Google is a bad way to go. It’s time consuming, frustrating, and not very much fun.
Fortunately, UltraMarketer.com has provided a very nifty tool for finding places that are looking for guest bloggers with no muss, and no fuss. It’s called, appropriately enough, the Guest Blogger Finder.
The Guest Blogger Finder is a simple web form that looks like this:
When you hit “Find Blogs Now” it will take you to a highly filtered Google search results page. A “V1” search for guest blogging opportunities containing the keyword “chiropractor” brought up 5 pages of blogs – a far cry from the hundreds of pages of results you might have to dig through if you attempted it without the tool.
Sure, it’s possible to type the right search string into Google to find it all yourself, but why would you if you didn’t have to? I couldn’t even tell you what that search string is.
Ideally you’d choose 5-6 blogs to follow on a regular basis anyway. You need to do more than blog and leave.
You need to look for places where you can insert yourself into the broader industry community. You see, content marketing is about much more than simply writing reams of content.
Content marketing is also about consuming great content and sharing it. This is one of the ways that you’ll find things to promote on your social media channels that aren’t your own work and links.
Content marketing is about consuming great content and commenting on it in a useful way. You can’t do that at random. It has to be a focused, targeted strategy.
In fact, in the coming weeks I’ll be discussing this community strategy in greater detail. For today, the point is that you want to find 5-6 blogs that you’d feel comfortable “sticking around” for awhile.
You’ll want to designate a day to read these blogs. Just find one hour or so during the week.
You will, after all, want to read at least a few entries before trying to submit a guest post. You want to make absolutely sure that you’re not proposing to write on subjects the host blogger has already written about.
If you’re truly lucky there will be a focused archive page that will list a simple title and hyperlink for every single post the blogger has ever written. The titles will usually give you an idea of what the blogger has already done.
The titles will also give you a good idea of what kind of content the blogger likes. This is very important when you decide to “pitch” a blog post to the blog author.
Your chances of acceptance will simply be much higher if you can align yourself to the host blogger. In addition, you’ll have a better chance of connecting with that blogger’s target audience, which is important since getting a following for your blog or website is kind of the point. 🙂
Fortunately, it’s not hard to determine this. Usually it works best if you are nodding your head to a lot of the blogger’s posts, or if you find yourself voraciously clicking through for more of what the blogger has to say. Both of these are very good signs that the blog will be a great fit for some of your content!
Today’s Action Items
- Use the guest blogger tool to find 5-6 blogs you’d like to interact with on a regular basis.
- Spend some time reading these blogs and evaluating them.
- Submit a new guest post to one of these blogs.
