How to Choose & Evaluate Guest Posting Sites

With well-chosen guest posting sites, you can publish content that will bring in more traffic to your own and boost your SEO. This branches out into other benefits such as the following: 

• Increasing brand awareness among a new (but highly relevant) audience;
• The potential to get more email subscribers or social media followers;
• The potential for increased sales and new customers; and
• The opportunity to become a well-known thought leader in your industry. 

The best part about guest posting is that it’s typically free to post. It’s one of the best models of value exchange in the digital world. 

In our article, 6 Benefits of Guest Blogging, we covered what this marketing tactic can do for your business. Bear in mind that the benefits you get from guest posting hinges on how well you’ve chosen the guest posting sites you’ll work with. 

To help make the decision process much easier, this guide covers the following:

• How Guest Posting Sites Work
• What Makes a Good Guest Post
• How Do I Choose a Website for a Guest Post?

Let’s begin!

How Guest Posting Sites Work

When done right, guest posting or guest blogging is the ultimate win-win situation. It’s typically free to contribute to a guest posting site—but then you might wonder how the value exchange works. 

Essentially, your business creates content for guest posting and you will have it published on guest posting sites. You may or may not be monetarily compensated for this, but either way, you get exposure to an established audience within a relevant niche. In doing so, your business can attract more customers and establish credibility in your industry. 

So what does the guest posting site get in return? First of all, they get enriching content for their website. The guest posting site can also get more exposure as you share your own guest post through social media.

And at the end of the day, both your website and the guest posting site can have extra points for search engine optimization. 

What Makes a Good Guest Post

Though it’s typically free to have a guest post published on a guest posting site, there are certain guidelines that you need to adhere to. These guidelines can vary depending on your chosen website. 

In general, guest posts are not intended for hard selling. They are skewed more towards being informative and educational. Along the way, however, you can include a number of links that lead to your website. 

Typically, mentioning brands is not encouraged, but this depends on the guest posting site’s guidelines. In some instances, you may be able to mention your business but not in a way that directly advertises. This is usually done in the form of case studies or real-life examples. In addition, your business may be mentioned in the part of the guest post that talks about the author.   

How Do I Choose a Website for a Guest Post?

1. Mind Your Niche

In order to get the right audience, choose a guest posting site that is tied to your industry. For example, if you sell furniture, you can try a guest posting site on home improvement or interior design. If you’re selling commercial insurance, you can choose a site that curates business tips.

2. Know Where to Look

Sometimes, you don’t need to look far to find a guest posting site for your niche. Try out search terms that you want your website to rank for. Then, scour through the top results. If you find non-competitor websites on the top results, try to see if they accept guest postings. 

A more direct way of finding a guest posting site is to literally search for it. Include your industry and your location in the search term. From there, you will see a list of guest posting sites to consider. The next step is to filter through them. 

3. Go for an Established Guest Posting Site

Imagine how frustrating it would be to work on a guest blog and then find out some months later that the guest posting site is no longer up. This is why you need to choose a guest posting site that has been around for a while. 

Being established also impacts the traffic of the site and the site’s domain strength, which are other factors that you need to evaluate. 

4. Seek Out Guest Posting Sites That Have Credibility

A website’s credibility is important because when you create a guest blog for them, you are connecting your business with that entity. Credibility is also important because this impacts the volume and quality of the guest posting site’s audience. Bear in mind that credibility may or may not be apparent for websites. 

For example, Forbes is a well-known business magazine. They also accept guest postings. A guest posting site like this has a reputation that precedes it. For lesser-known sites, you would need to be more thorough in checking their traffic, domain strength, and quality of existing content. 

5. Do a Quick Traffic Analytics

If your business has been doing digital marketing for a while, you may already have a paid tool for traffic analysis. If you don’t have a paid tool for this yet, you can try out free (or freemium) tools like SEMRush and SE Ranking. The higher the monthly traffic of the guest posting site, the better. 

6. Look Into the Site’s Domain Strength

Other factors to look at when evaluating a guest posting site are the domain strength, domain authority, or domain rating. SE Ranking’s free tool shows this on its results dashboard. Other tools like Moz and Ahrefs will also help you determine this. The higher the domain strength of the guest posting site, the better its SEO tends to be. Hence, sites with a good domain strength are great for guest blogs.  

7. Check if Existing Posts are High-Quality and Updated

Scour through the existing content that the guest posting site already has. High-quality, updated content boosts SEO and keeps traffic flowing to the site. 

8. Go for Guest Posting Sites with a Good Website Experience

Another aspect to consider is the reader’s experience on the guest posting site. If the website is badly formatted, hard to navigate, and cluttered with ads, chances are that readers won’t stay on it for long. If so, it’s probable that they won’t stay to read your guest post either. 

Mobile optimization is another key thing to look for. After all, more than 50% of search queries are typed on mobile devices. 

9. Choose a Guest Posting Site with Guidelines That You Agree With

Once you’ve assessed a guest posting site’s credibility, traffic, domain strength, quality of content, and UX, read through the guest posting guidelines. If these terms work for you, then get ready to start writing! 

10. Look for Added Perks

This last factor to consider can help you if you’ve found multiple suitable guest posting sites and you’re trying to prioritize which one to write for first. You might want to look at the added perks to help you decide. Some guest posting sites will pay you, while others will promote your article on their social media. These little extras can make a big difference.

Become a Contributor for The Influence Agency

This wraps up our guide on guest blogging and how to choose the best guest posting sites. If your niche is guest posting about digital marketing, video marketing, social media marketing, and the like, we’re accepting submissions!

As a leading digital marketing agency, The Influence Agency is well-known for consistently publishing high-quality content. As such, we’ve built an audience of professionals that are constantly on the lookout for blogs on digital marketing best practices and trends—and yours could be the next one they stumble upon. 

Learn more about becoming a contributor here!