How to Search for Guest Posting Opportunities

The meteoric rise of search engines to their current dominant position has revolutionised the way people retrieve information. No longer do we need to trawl through libraries to track down great literary works or the Yellow Pages to find a local plumber, search engines like Google and Bing facilitate this function and they do so in a matter of milliseconds.

Despite their amazing ability to hunt down information, the algorithms used by the engines are not faultless and there are certain streams of data that are not easily trackable. More specialist searches do have their pitfalls, and one that I’ve encountered issues with recently is Google’s blog search.

You see the problem is, if I want to track down a ‘health and fitness’ blog, this should be simple enough right, just enter that search term? Not so fast. The Blog search actually brings up individual posts rather than blogs, so a search for the aforementioned may give me posts that mention ‘health and fitness’ on say, a local government blog.

So how do we find the blogs we want? Considering the size of the blogosphere and growing popularity of the medium as a communications and marketing tool, it’s not as easy as you’d expect. Here are some sure-fire way to track down the blogs you are looking to write for:

Technorati

This is a great resources which crawls the blogosphere for the best performing blogs in a number of niches. Unlike Google, Technorati can be used to find blogs as well as individual posts. Blogs are constantly assessed and ranked using Technorati’s own algorithm, meaning it’s easy to find the most powerful ones.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck can be fruitful when it comes to searching for blogs that require geust authors, having multiple columns running in the background with searches on ‘write for us’. ‘guest posts needed’ and the like can present you with some great opportunities.

Follerwonk

This another twitter tool that utilises keywords found in user’s bio to track down useful information. Simply search for ‘health and fitness blog’ or whatever other niche you wish to find and you’ll be given a list of Twitter users with those keyword sin their bio, ranked in terms of their following.

Advanced Operators

If you insist on using Google, there are a number of ways you can get around the clunky blog search using advanced operators. These are sophisticated searches that give the algorithm a much better idea of what you’re looking for. Here is an example

inurl:guest-post –how to – seo intitle:fitness

This tells Google that you are looking for fitness blogs that have a page requesting guest posts. This can still be a tad hit and missed but it’s far more focused than using the standard ‘blog search’.

Negotiating the blogosphere can be tricky at the best of times but these tips should help you hone in on exactly what it is you are looking for. Happy Blogging!