One of the most effective ways to leverage your written content online is to post it on websites other than your own. Similar to contributing an article to a magazine, posting a blog as a guest writer — or guest blogging — can be a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Content is currency in our Digital Age and websites across industries need a steady flow of it to attract and inform their visitors. As a hearing professional, writing content for other blogs (as well as your own) is an excellent way to position yourself as an authority in your industry and showcase your knowledge to potential patients online. It’s also one of the most effective ways to boost your website’s visibility online.
Guest posting is excellent for your websites search engine optimization (SEO) since it’s one of the most accessible routes of establishing quality backlinks back to your website, which we discussed more in our recent post here. It can also increase your notoriety, which naturally guides readers to your site as well. What’s more — if you’re already writing quality content for your own blog, submitting it for guest posting opportunities is a minimal amount of work for an excellent return.
There’s no denying the benefits that guest posting can bring, but sometimes finding opportunities to post on popular websites isn’t as easy as it sounds. Consider our tips below for locating the best websites for your guest blogging needs.
Pinpoint Your Audience
The ideal website for you to guest blog for will be where your target market frequents. As you begin your search for potential websites to write for, it’s helpful to have a clear idea of the ideal audience for your goals.
If you’re interested in guest blogging to increase your online visibility for more in-person patients, then focus your efforts on reaching people who are dealing with problems that you treat. Don’t worry about them not all being local to you, either. Just having a backlink back to your site (rich with keywords, of course), and a boost in traffic from a guest posting, will create a significant impact on your local visibility for online searches in your area.
Or, perhaps you’re interested in guest blogging to establish yourself as an authority in your field. In this case, you’d have a wider array of options for getting published. Getting your articles hosted on industry-related websites would be best, but also having them published on larger websites hosting a number of topics would be beneficial for your end goal, too.
Get Personal
When you first begin your guest blogging journey, your main goal is to just get published (anywhere). Having a few published articles (on sites other than your own) is helpful when you pitch yourself to popular websites with stiff competition. This is where leveraging your personal connections can be very helpful.
Reach out to colleagues and friends of yours who have their own blogs and inquire about writing a post for them. Perhaps they’ll even want to do a swap for their own resume-building pursuits. Worry less about reaching your ideal audience with your post here, and more on delivering helpful content for their blogs and a helpful publication for your next steps.
Google Away
As with most of our queries these days, Google is a very helpful tool for finding the guest posting opportunities you seek. The key here is to search wisely. When you surround text with quotation marks in a Google search, it tells the engine to find that exact phrase in its results. So, if you’re looking for guest posting submission pages, you’d type it in like this: “guest posting submission” and then click the search button.
Try searching for the following phrases (and also try swapping out the word hearing for any other related keywords specific to your services):
- hearing “submit a guest post”
- hearing “guest post”
- hearing “guest post by”
- hearing “accepting guest posts”
- hearing “guest post guidelines”
Try Twitter
One helpful way to find places to guest post is by searching for other guest blogs that have been promoted on social media. Usually, both the blog writer and the website owner will promote these blogs as part of their mutual agreement for cross promotion.
You can search on all of the big social networks, but Twitter is the easiest platform to search for keywords in posts. To try this, simply type “guest post” into the Twitter search bar (at the top of the page) and look for posts about guest blogs written for websites within your industry or that attract your ideal audience. Once you’re on that website, look for any links related to guest blogging, contributors, or a simple contact page to reach out about guest blogging yourself.
Go Big (But Don’t Go Home)
It is true that very popular websites like healthyhearing.com will be harder to get into in the beginning, simply due to the competition for guest blogging being much higher. But the conversation doesn’t end there. The Huffington Post is a widely read online publication, for instance, and since being rebranded as Huffpost.com, is known to welcome guest bloggers regularly, hosting articles from a wide range of topics. That said, the more tailored the blog you’re writing for is to your ideal market, the better kind of traffic and SEO boost your website will receive
When you’re just starting out as a guest blogger, your main goal is to just get published. As with most things, you can’t be too picky before you’ve gained the experience with guest posting that makes your pitches more persuasive. The beginning is more of a numbers game than anything else — the more websites you submit your pitch to, the more likely you’ll be a published guest blogger. Don’t be discouraged if popular sites turn you down at first. Just keep coming back with excellent content and eventually, you’ll get your day in the online limelight, too.
Use Tools
The benefits of guest blogging are no secret and, as such, an entire industry has gradually risen around them. While this means that the guest blogging world is an increasingly more competitive one, it also means that there are plenty of resources to help bolster your efforts in getting published.
As you search for the right place to submit your article, consider this list of 500 websites that accept submitted articles or links, or this list of over 200 (but do expect to do some vetting). They might not bring you to the perfect audience for your content, but they will help you gain those initial publications for bolstering your experience and pitches going forward.
Like everything else, guest blogging gets easier with time. As you build connections and experience blogging for other websites, you’ll see the opportunities increase right alongside your own website’s traffic. We call that a win-win.
If you’re interested in more website traffic now, then we can help. With over 20 years in the hearing industry and a team of SEO experts, we’ve been helping clients across the hearing industry achieve the visibility they need online to realize the success their businesses deserve.
Contact us today to launch your business to new heights.
