One popular link building tactic for blog owners and businesses alike is guest blogging. It’s kinda been done to death but still offers some really high quality link building opportunities when it’s done correctly.
I’ve spent a lot of my time over the past year building relationships with influential blog owners and writing content for them.
Guest blogging shouldn’t be seen as a one-off event on a blog; you should be looking at becoming a regular contributor and tapping into the site’s community to increase your online reach.
Another mistake that many bloggers make is to only look for guest blogging opportunities based on domain metrics like ‘Domain Authority‘, a method that I’ve succumb to in the past.
We should be looking for websites with an engaging audience and an active social media following; websites that are likely to get our content seen by more people within our niche.
How to Find The Right Guest Post Opportunities
The first thing I do is identify key influencers within my niche – this is usually through using Followerwonk, where I can find a whole host of great content writers that have a good social media following to match. Check out the video below to see how I go about this:
Once I’ve got an idea of the influential writers within my niche, it’s time to ‘follow their paper-trail’.
This uses the same principles as a common SEO technique, the competitive link analysis.
In a competitive link analysis we would look at some of the websites that we are competing with for keyword rankings in the SERPs and then find out who links to them – this is so that we could try and also gain a link from the same site.
Unlike with this method, we’re not going to be looking at the paper-trail that websites leave, instead we’re going to be looking at the content writers themselves to find out where they have gained guest posting/regular contributor opportunities and then try to establish these for ourselves.
Analysing Google+ Contributor Lists
This will probably seem so obvious once you read this, but by simply checking out the Google+ profile of the influential content writers that we’ve identified, we can find out a load of the websites that they’ve had their content published on.
The next step that I take is to use the Scrape Similar plugin for Chrome to quickly scrape the links from the page and add them into a spreadsheet.
This way, you’re able to start building a good list of link prospects as well as identifying websites that have accepted a few of your targets for guest posts – these might work out to be easier targets.
Author Image Breadcrumbs
This method is another that relies on Google Authorship being set up from the targets that were outlined in the initial author prospecting (in the video above).
I also need to give a hat-tip to Brian Dean of Backlinko for this method.
The first step is to locate the Google+ profile of an influential writer and grab the URL of their profile image.
Once you’ve gathered the Google+ profile image URL , take a trip to Google Images search and click on the little camera icon to ‘Search by image’. You can then paste in the image URL and press the ‘Search by image’ button.
You’ll now be left with a juicy list of link targets that you can scrape via Scrape Similar and add to your spreadsheet – thanks Brian!
Author Bio/Author Archive Footprints
The final technique that I use caters for websites that may not have set up Google+ authorship on their guest posts – which is fairly common within niches outside of digital marketing.
One commonality that nearly all guest posts share is an author bio. As well as this, most blogs will have an author archives page that lists all of the posts from any given author.
Whenever we’re trying to follow a paper-trail, it’s these commonalities that become important, and it’s here where we call on one of my favourite tools – Scrapebox.
Step 1: The first thing that is needed for this technique is to find a little information from our list influential authors.
We need to find information that they regularly state within their author bios, and a prime target for this is either their job title/company or their personal blog – this is where we can create our first footprint:
intext:"SEO & Social Media Strategist at Wow Internet"
The above footprint is my own job title which, like many others, I state within my Twitter bio. Luckily for us, we’ve pulled off the Twitter bios for all the influential targets we found via Followerwonk.
This should, when searched for, display a list of websites where I’ve disclosed this line within my author bio.
Alongside this footprint, we can search for the author archive pages that our list of authors have featured within.
Most WordPress author archive pages follow a syntax of “%authorname%, Author”, so we could use the following footprint to find author archive pages that I’ve appeared within:
intitle:"Matthew Barby, Author"
Step 2: Once I’ve put together my list of footprints, I add these into ScrapeBox so that I can search for a load of the different author’s guest posts at once, saving me loads of time.
From just a 20 second wait and eight different footprints related to four different authors, I’ve managed to gather 1,154 URLs.
The next thing I’ll do is filter out the duplicate URLs within ScrapeBox and export all of them into an Excel spreadsheet.
An hour’s work here can result in some seriously good link prospects – give it a try and let me know how you get on!
