If you want to read about guest blogging in more detail, Glen of ViperChill recently wrote a great article covering most aspects of guest blogging. In this article, I’ll be giving you some tried and tested techniques for finding guest blogging opportunities.

1. Websites in your Blog’s Comments

If you have a blog yourself, you’ve probably got the ability for visitors to comment on your articles. Many of these visitors have their own websites, and they are very likely to be related in subject to your blog. Therefore search through the comments on your blog, and contact each commenter who has a website you want to write for.

Since the commenters are already interested in what you have to say, they are very likely to be interested in you writing for them.

2. BlogCatalog

BlogCatalog is my favourite source for finding other blogs in my niche. As the name suggests, it’s a directory of blogs, all arranged by category. Therefore you just need to find the category relating to yours, and then start contacting blogs that you want to write for.

3. Niche Web Directories

A web directory is basically a website containing links to lots of other websites. Links on the directory are categorised into different topics, and pretty much anyone can submit their website to them. There are also niche directories, which focus on a specific topic or niche of website.

For example, you can find directories that focus on just health websites, or perhaps shopping, etc. All you need to do is find some directories related to the niche of your blog, and then go through the directory contacting the blogs that you find. Offer to write an article related to both your website and theirs, and more often than not, you’ll get an acceptance!

As a starting point, you can find a whole collection of niche directories at VileSilencer (I don’t understand the name either, but hey!).

4. Google Searches

Sometimes blog owners create a page advertising that they’re looking for guest writers. We can actually use Google to find these pages by searching for phrases (including the quotes) such as:

• “Write for Us”
• “Guest blog for us”
• “Call out for guest bloggers”
• “Calling all guest bloggers”

You just then need to narrow down your search to include blogs from your niche. So you might do a search such as below. Notice that “Write For Us” is in quotes, but food isn’t. Basically that means we’re looking for the exact phrase “Write For Us” on a page, but including “food” somewhere else on the page. This helps us to find food-centric blogs. Even in the food niche, you might need to use alternative words for food, such as recipes, deserts, cakes, etc.

“Write for Us” food

5. BlogSynergy

Finally, there’s BlogSynergy, which is a platform to make it really easy to find guest blogging opportunities. BlogSynergy is a new project that brings together blog owners who are very enthusiastic about finding writers for their blogs. Blog owners add their blog to the relevant category, and then specify their writing requirements.

As a writer, you can then request to write for their blog, giving them some ideas on what you can write about. If the blog owner accepts (they usually do), then you go ahead and write the article for them! Blog owners can also find you on BlogSynergy if you fill out your profile, and they can send you a request to write for them!

BlogSynergy is currently free during it’s beta test phase. Even when it does start charging a fee, there will be a basic free account too.

Conclusion

Finding blogs to write for does take a little effort, but guest blogging does result in some great results in terms of growing your website and the number of visitors you receive. If you’ve never tried it, why not give it a go?

This is a guest article by Dan Harrison, who’s one of the founders of Blog Synergy and who is also a champion of guest blogging as a way of building communities around blogs.

What is guest blogging?

In short, guest blogging is where you write a great quality and interesting article for another blog owner. In return, you have a couple of links at the bottom of the article, which go back to your website. These links help increase the number of visitors to your website, in addition to establishing a relationship with fellow bloggers in your niche.

IMG: Guest Blogging – 1 – Approach

The Approach: The process starts by approaching a blogger (via a contact form, by email, etc) and asking them if they’d be interested in you writing an article for them. Often it helps to tell them the idea of the article you have in mind for them.

Important: Ensure that the host blog is related to your website, so that visitors of the host blog will be interested in reading your article.

IMG: Guest Blogging – 2 – The Article

The Article: When the owner of the blog (that you’re interested in) accepts your offer, you go away and write a fantastic quality article on the agreed topic. Do spend lots of time working on the article to ensure that it’s top notch content. You want the owner of the host blog to be enthusiastic to publish your article.

IMG: Guest Blogging – 3 – The Results

The Results: Once the article is published, you’ll receive more visitors to your website and potentially more comments on your blog’s articles.

You can also reciprocate by offering the blog owner to write for your blog. You will also have expanded your network of fellow bloggers in your niche too, which opens up all kinds of opportunities!

The Benefits – More Visitors

Regardless of your motivation for having a website, you essentially want as many visitors as possible. More visitors might result in more clients or sales. It might even help you earn more from your advertisers. Writing a great guest article will encourage readers of the host blog to visit your blog.

The Benefits – Quality Links

From a search engine optimisation (SEO) point of view, links (aka backlinks) are the real backbone to getting top ranking positions in the search engines. You of course will appreciate, that the higher your rankings in the search engines, the more visitors you receive.

When you write an article for a high quality blog in your niche, you are getting links from a trusted and related website. The search engines have algorithms that place surprising emphasis on links from websites that are considered trusted and relevant. Therefore you’re not just getting any old link, you’re getting a link that has potential to really influence your search engine rankings.

The Benefits – Subscribers

Regular readers (aka subscribers, aka RSS subscribers, etc) are your committed followers. These are your visitors who love to return again and again to read the articles on your blog. Subscribers are the people who recommend your articles to their friends, the people who enjoy your articles, and potentially they may end up being clients, customers or friends.

Whenever you have extra visitors to your site, such as those gained from guest blogging, some of those visitors will become subscribers. Learn to love those regular readers!

The Benefits – Branding

Every time you mention your blog name at the end of a guest article, you’re imprinting your blog name (or business name, or your name) on the reader. Studies show that the more familiar a person is with a brand, the more they trust that brand.

With that trust, a visitor is more likely to refer you to their friends, subscribe to your blog, or buy something from you.

The Benefits – Free Content

Up until now, I’ve mainly focused on the benefits of being a guest writer. However, as a blog owner, guest blogging is a great opportunity for you to get some free content and give your regular readers a little diversity in what articles they can read on your blog.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to guest blogging! I also hope that the benefits I’ve mentioned have convinced you to give guest blogging a go yourself.

This article itself is a guest article by Dan Harrison, who is the founder of a platform called Blog Synergy, which helps writers to find new guest blogging opportunities.

Blog Synergy is completely free during it’s beta phase. Even when the beta phase finishes, there will be a completely free basic account in addition to a fee-based account with premium features.

We love guest blogging, but then I suppose we’re a little biased! Especially since we run a guest blogging opportunities platform! So I thought it was about time that I explained the benefits of guest blogging from the perspective of improved search engine rankings. For those that don’t know, boosting your search engine rankings is a process called search engine optimisation or SEO.

Search Engine Ranking Factors

If you take a look at the SEOMoz Search Engine Ranking Factors, you’ll see that a large proportion of the factors that influence your search engine rankings are all about external links. In particular, you’ll notice that the following factors are at the top of the list:

• anchor text matching desired keywords
• quantity of external links
• quality of external links
• link diversity

Since guest blogging is about writing a quality article and then getting links back to your website, guest blogging is basically a form of link building. Guest blogging offers you the opportunity build links whilst meeting the above ranking factors.

And here’s why.

1. Choice of keywords

As long as your article is relevant to the host blog and it meets their requirements, you have a great deal of freedom in your choice of anchor text. You just need to ensure that the anchor text fits naturally within the author credit paragraph.

I say natural, because you don’t want to take advantage of the goodwill of the host blog, nor do you want to irritate readers of the host blog by creating grammatically-awkward sentences.

For example:

• Good: This article is by Dave Smith, who’s an orthodontic dentist based in Basingstoke, who’s a bit of geek when it comes to dental care.
• Bad: This article is by Dave Smith, who’s an orthodontic dentist Basingstoke, who’s a bit of geek when it comes to dental care.

2. Quantity of external links

If you look around your niche, you’ll find potentially hundreds of blogs who are interested in you writing for them. That’s a lot of links!

For example, if you own a homemade sweets blog, you could write for home craft blogs, recipe websites, sweet shop blogs, blogs aimed at parent-child activities, cake blogs, etc. With a little imagination, you can end up with a massive audience.

3. Quality of external links

If you find a blog that has 100% unique content and is regularly updated, it’s a reasonable assumption that the blog is a high-quality website. The word ‘quality’ has many different meanings, but in this context, I mean three things:

1. the articles on the blog are worth reading
2. the blog has a regular readership
3. the blog isn’t using spammy or unethical practices for marketing and promotion

Based on this, the search engines are also likely to consider that website to be of reasonably quality, and therefore assign some value to any links you get from that blog. The greater the quality of that link, typically the better the rankings you’ll achieve from that link.

4. Link diversity

If you have links from a variety of sources (i.e. many websites), that means you have a broad link profile. I believe that diversity is considered a ranking factor simply because:

“…if everyone thinks your site is worth linking to, then it must be a good website, and therefore deserves good search engine rankings…”

Good guest blogging should be about writing for a large number of websites in your niche, which means you automatically add some diversity to your incoming links.

5. Link context

Although not a top-ranking factor, context is a factor for search engine rankings. All this means is that you have links from related websites linking to each other. Too many links from unrelated websites is often a sign of spammy link building.

For example, it’s reasonable to have a website about cakes linking to a website about confectionery, however, linking to a website about cars is out of place.

By focusing on getting links to your website from only related niches, all of your links will be from websites relevant to your website’s niche.

Conclusion

Simply put, guest blogging can be a time-efficient method of building backlinks to your website as part of your SEO work. It shouldn’t be the only link building and SEO process you use, but it’s certainly worth doing.

And if you’re looking to find host blogs to write guest posts for, be sure to join Blog Synergy!

Dan has being doing some interviews about Blog Synergy recently. So here they are if you’d like to read them.

Interview on Piggy Bank Pie

BlogSynergy – Interview With Dan Harrison, Co-Founder Of The New Guest Blogging Platform – This was my first interview about BlogSynergy on Piggy Bank Pie with Charles Cridland.

Interview with Darren Singleton

Guest Blogging with BlogSynergy – This is my second interview about BlogSynergy with Darren Singleton on his personal blog.

• Menubar now features number of blogs, requests and unread messages.
• Writers can now select the categories for which they can write for.
• The find users section has been made easier to use.
• You can now invite friends to join BlogSynergy, and get notified when they join.
• There’s now a progress bar in the dashboard so that you can see what aspects of your profile need updating.
• There are now “Blogs of Interest” and “Writers of Interest” which are chosen based on a crude matching of the categories relevant to your writer profile or blogs.

Well, BlogSynergy has been live for a few weeks now, and word is slowly getting around. We’re currently at 48 blogs and 92 active users. I’ve been tweeting the statistics every few days on our twitter feed. Why not help us to grow more quickly? Do tell your friends about us!

I have been thinking about a prize for the person who adds the 500th blog. What do you think would make a great prize? An Amazon voucher? Let me know what you think! Please keep the requests sensible! No requests for flat-screen TVs or cars please!

Some of the most recent blogs that are now listed on Blog Synergy are:

• Piggy Bank Pie (BlogSynergy profile) – A blog dedicated to the topic of guest blogging.
• Be The Middleman Blog (BlogSynergy profile) – A blog dedicated to property lettings and sales.
• Quick Online Tips (BlogSynergy profile) – Publishes technology news, blogging tips, computer software and web 2.0 services.
• Gifts 4 Men (BlogSynergy profile) – Gifts perfectly suited for men.
• New York City (BlogSynergy profile) – New and stories relating to living in New York City
• Eloisa & Abelard (BlogSynergy profile) – A blog dedicated to interior design, art and fashion.

So if any of those blogs are in a similar niche to your blog, why not offer to write for them? Remember, BlogSynergy is completely free during the beta phase.

Whilst you’re waiting, why not read the background to Blog Synergy and the Tips on Guest Blogging. You can also find out the second we launch by following us on Twitter.