How to Land Guest Blogging Gigs on Popular Sites

Want to get published on Huffington Post? Or maybe Accounting Today? Great, because we’re going to walk through how to land guest blogging gigs on popular sites, whether they’re huge, niche, or somewhere in between. Here’s how to get started

Have a goal in mind

Your goal or goals will help determine the best sites to target. For example, if you want to increase thought leadership, you might want to write for a blog that is industry-specific or even niche (like Accounting Today). To increase brand awareness, a blog with a broader, more general appeal (like Huffington Post) might be better.

Ask yourself:

• Do you want to increase thought leadership?
• Are you looking for more high-quality links back to your site?
• Do you want to increase brand awareness or visibility?
• Are you trying to break into a new customer segment?
• Do you want more sales, plain and simple?

Do your homework

Spend time on the site. Read some blog posts – especially their most popular ones – and click around the site to get to know the brand a little better. You only want to work with brands who have a great reputation and produce high-quality content – or you could diminish your own brand by association.

Ask yourself:

• Do they accept guest contributions?
• Do they cover topics that intersect with your expertise?
• Do your customers (current or potential) read the blog?
• Does the tone of voice match your own?
• Is this a brand you want to be associated with?

Send fleshed-out ideas

You will be an editor’s best friend if you do two things:

1. Send a few blog post topics and more detail on what each blog post will include.
2. Briefly explain why you think these topics are relevant to the blog’s readers and will help drive even more traffic to the blog.

Also, keep your emails short. Avoid writing a canned pitch and then cutting and pasting emails – that reads as sales-y and inauthentic. And get the editor’s name right, or she’ll delete your email pronto (true story).

Read the guidelines – thrice

Editors are busy. If you submit a guest blog post that doesn’t follow the guidelines, into the garbage it goes. While I have come across some truly outrageous, why-don’t-you-just-ask-for-the-moon-too guidelines, the vast majority are very straightforward. But you gotta follow them.

Read them once before you submit ideas. Do they make sense? Great. Re-read them before you begin writing, just to refresh your memory. And read them for a third time before you submit your blog post to make sure your submission follows ALL of the guidelines.

At the end of the day, getting published on popular sites comes down to two things: being helpful, and remembering that the editor is a regular human being who wants to hear from you but doesn’t have a lot of time. If you don’t get picked up right away, keep trying!