Have you ever wanted to get your business in front of more people? Then, perhaps you should take up guest posting, whether you are a freelance writer or a content agency looking to get noticed online. It is a surefire way to grow your brand and connect with people in your industry.
By now, everyone has heard of the benefits of guest posting, from engaging with your viewers to raising conversion rates on products and services. While it sounds like a lot of unpaid work, it can be rewarding if you play your cards right.
Is guest posting still an effective marketing strategy?
Getting your content published on a high authority website will help increase your brand visibility and direct a large amount of traffic to your business blog. By building a network of back links, you’ll be able to take advantage of referrals from external sources as well.
But before that, you should think about what you’re trying to get out of guest posting. Are you planning to obtain a huge following on social media or are you expecting to attract more leads to drive your sales pipeline?
Guest posting is a great tool for optimizing your content strategy. That being said, you want to steer clear of sketchy-looking sites stuffed with low-quality articles, or else it could ruin your reputation down the line.
While some places demand payment just for publishing your guest posts, there are others that allow you to get published for free, as long as you follow their submission guidelines and manage to get your articles approved.
What are some places to guest post for free? Here is a curated list of my top recommended guest posting sites by topic:
SEO:
These blogs are great places to share tested and proven SEO strategies from white-hat link-building techniques to growing your site traffic, for those who can collect insights using Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and other tools.
Blogging:
Do you usually have a fun story to tell your audience? Have you been running a successful blog for years? These websites will give you a place to present helpful blogging tips to anyone who has trouble engaging with their viewers on the platform.
Business:
Do you have the motivation to accomplish your goals? Have you ever tried to launch a product or start your own business? Guest posting on a business site is an effective way to reach out to the entrepreneur community and share your insights on being self-employed.
Technology:
Do you keep tabs on the latest gadgets? Is it your hobby to collect new electronics? If the answer is yes, you could be qualified to write for technology publications. There is a lot of demand for well-researched product reviews, technical guides, and developer tutorials.
Digital Marketing:
Businesses will continue to leverage digital marketing methods to promote their brand. With social media advertising and sales funneling on the rise, the following blogs are calling for marketers to disclose their top strategies for lead generation and customer retention.
Web Design:
Have you been creating websites for your portfolio? Does the idea of styling web pages personally appeal to you? In that case, you can write front-end tutorials and how-to articles to show off your expertise with web design. Knowledge of WordPress is useful but not necessary.
Health & Fitness:
Many lifestyle blogs will cover health and fitness topics. They are currently accepting pitches from those that maintain a healthy diet and are open to posting their favorite vegan or paleo recipes. So if you like to hit the gym, you can drop them a line.
Finance:
Do you want to invest in your future? Budgeting is key to securing your finances and preparing for an ever-changing economy. At the moment, finance publications are accepting a wide range of topics from contributors like credit spending, retirement, and managing debt.
Family:
Are you a busy stay-at-home mom? Or do you juggle a career while taking care of your kids? You can write about your personal experience with raising a family on parenting blogs by sending them your most thoughtful ideas and essays.
Keep in mind that major publications are generally harder to break into than small business blogs so don’t get too discouraged if a mainstream news outlet rejects your article. With so much competition, I know it can be difficult to get noticed among a sea of other applicants.
How to find free guest posting sites
You might be wondering, where are all these amazing sites that accept free guest posts? Well, you’re in luck because there happens to be a site called Guest Post Tracker where you will receive an updated list of blogs actively seeking guest posts.
To learn more, I encourage you to sign-up with Guest Post Tracker to access over 1000 different blogs from a wide range of industries. It’s easy to get started: Simply reach out to blogs you’re interested in and present them with your best ideas.
Another platform worth checking out is guestpost.com. It serves as a guest post marketplace that lets you browse through countless websites currently looking for guest posts, with powerful tools and resources to support guest bloggers like you.
The only downside is that you have to upgrade to Pro before you can unlock a complete list of sites that accept guest posts. The good news is, this list contains mostly high-end publishers and is frequently updated to remove any inactive sites.
Subscribers have the option to search for guest posting sites based on their URL, category, and whether they are free or paid. Moreover, it has a web scraping tool to identify guest posting sites for any relevant keyword.
Choosing the right guest posting site for your niche
The important thing is to specialize in a certain niche so you can position yourself as an expert in that field. Truth be told, there are all kinds of possible topics to choose from, including business, finance, digital marketing, real estate, and wellness. Some blogs will ask for a conversational tone whereas others prefer that you take a more salesy approach.
In order to maximize your exposure, you should aim for sites with a domain authority of at least 50 or more. Ideally, you want to pick sites that give out do-follow links so you can get a hold of high-volume traffic referrals. You could settle for no-follow links if you only care about attaching your name to an article and not how well it performs on SEO.
But there are other factors to consider too. Regardless of the industry you’re in, you have to maintain a consistent brand identity to gain the trust of your clients. Many of them will look up your past writing samples before they decide to work with you, so it may be risky to express contradicting opinions on separate publications.
Your online reputation is important so you should stay away from low-quality sites that peddle outdated or misleading information. While getting a byline is nice and all, you wouldn’t want your article to be associated with bad grammar and plagiarized content. Therefore, the best place to guest post is on a blog that matches your writing style and is relevant to your audience.
Best practices for submitting a quality guest post
Now that you’ve thought of a newsworthy idea, the next step is to pitch it forward to your dream publication, in hopes of getting your guest post accepted by the editorial team. But this has always been easier said than done. Editors can be picky about which guest posts to approve and will toss out any article that fails to meet the minimum requirements of their site.
With that being the case, it’d be in your best interests to read the guidelines carefully before you send in your article ideas. Make sure your guest post submission covers topics actually featured on the site. They might also specify what kind of articles they accept such as roundups, short essays, features, reviews, or even opinion columns. Avoid pitching stories or topics on their list of “Don’ts” since they aren’t looking to publish them anyway.
If you get stuck on what to write, you can simply draft an outline to summarize the main points of your article. Start with an attention-grabbing headline and break up the article body into skimmable subsections. Most publications request articles between 600 and 3000 words long. A good practice is to use subheadings and cite your sources whenever necessary.
Strengthen Your Brand Image with Guest Post Marketing
Most blogs allow 1-2 backlinks to your site to help boost your marketing, though they won’t impose limits on external links. In terms of SEO, you should use targeted keywords and phrases related to the subject at hand to draw in more visitors. And above all, don’t forget to proofread your guest post to check for typos and grammar errors.
To reiterate, guest posting is one form of free marketing that continues to be effective today. Guest posting is an excellent way to connect with other contributors and expand your social network. And if you want to grow your brand, there’s always the option of back linking to your site to acquire some much-needed traffic.
Of course, this is just based on my experience with getting published, so it’s better to try guest posting for yourself first to see if any of this applies to your writing career.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
