Guest Blogging is a great way to expand your reach to new audiences. There’s only so much that native SEO can do for you.

To expand into a new niche, you need to piggyback off someone else’s appeal and authority.

That’s not a bad thing, though.

Think of it as standing on the shoulders of giants to see further. Perhaps that’s a little too dramatic, but it’s the same concept.

Use Your Personal Connections

This is the best way to begin. You should look for opportunities that you’re already aware of. For example, if you know someone that already has a successful blog, ask if you can contribute. If you have connections through your social media with industry leaders, ask if you can feature on their blog.

These connections will become a starting point for you to guest blog. It probably won’t be something that will bring thousands to your blog, but it’ll be a start. You can always refer to Guest post writing services to help you dish out your first piece for them.

Check Out r/GuestPost

Reddit has the answers to nearly everything. r/GuestPost is a subreddit that lists the best guest blogs that you can post on. It also lists the rates they charge and if they do it for free. This is a great resource you should plunder. It will allow you to find the best guest blogs for you to contribute to. It will also answer any questions you have since Redditors are known to be responsive.

Use Social Networks for Guest Blogging

You can ask for guest post opportunities on social media as well. No matter if you’re on Twitter or Facebook, or LinkedIn, you can straight up ask for them. You can try reaching out to your friends, or other people that you know professionally.

You can even ask them to recommend someone else. Recommendations go a long way.

To do this efficiently, it’s better to send out a specific message thread to every contact you know.

You can also search for opportunities on social media through their own search engines. Go on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and try to come up with guest blogs and guest writer opportunities.

Join Guest Blogging Communities

Yes, there are such things as guest blogging communities. They form groups on social media and share opportunities. r/GuestPost is one of them.

However, there are some on every social media platform like LinkedIn or Facebook. You can even find them on Instagram, though of course, the target market will be much more niche.

Blog directories are also great places to start to search for guest blogging communities.

Technorati is one; so is Alltop.

These will help you identify guest blogging opportunities that can boost your blog’s traffic. It will also classify blogs through their status as A-List or B-List.

Target Your Niche

Make sure that you’ve targeted your niche when you publish on a guest blog. You shouldn’t publish a blog about gardening on a financial blog. You also shouldn’t talk about politics on a blog about self-care or beauty tips.

That being said, some niches do overlap.

For example, you can blog about financial tips on a healthy living blog. You can also talk about how to budget for a gaming console or a luxury electronic item on a gaming blog.

If you do come across a blog that you can write for, but are finding it tricky, hire content writing services.

They will help to mold your content to the kind of audience that reads the other blog. This way, you can be sure of your reach expanding.

However, never go for niches that are clearly unrelated.

List Down Influential Writers in Your Niche

This is something you should do for posterity. When you need a quick boost, you can look up this list so that you can post on a new blog.

This way, you will always have new avenues to explore and new audiences to target.

Google Search Terms for the Best Results

Googling your search terms is a great way to find guest blogging websites. The first websites to pop up will show you how popular they are.

It will show you how much they serve their niche, which happens to be your niche.

Search up a variety of terms that lie in your niche to get a large list of blogs that you can explore. You should typically come up with a list of 20 blogs that you can explore.

The reason for this large list is so you don’t get stuck with blogs that you can’t write on.

Know that your style and the topics you write on shouldn’t change for a guest blog. Otherwise, you may come across as inauthentic or forced.

Always go for blogs that naturally gel with your line of thinking.

Look at Your Competitors

You can search for guest blogging opportunities through your competitors. You can look for the places that your guest posting rivals have popped upon.

The easiest way to do this is to look for industry leaders in your field and find out where they’ve been.

You can search for these results on Google this way:

Site:domain.com “guest post by”

Site:domain.com “guest contribution by”

This will yield the desired results.

Use Tools for Guest Posting Opportunities

You can also use content research tools in order to find guest posting opportunities. These include social listening tools, audience overlap tools, content research tools, etc.

Some of these search tools include Buzzsumo, which you can use to look up guest blogs.

These tools combine a keyword and the name of the person that did the posting. These are great resources to find what kind of blogs are popular in your niche as well as guest blogs.