Find your next 100 guest blogging opportunities using Google’s Search operators

Finding guest blogging opportunities can take a lot of time if you don’t set up the right process in place.

I’m not talking about the “spray and pray” method, but actually getting to write for quality websites that fit your niche, get traffic and will help you build your brand and audience.

In this post, I want to share with you a method you can use to find tons of guest blogging opportunities by leveraging Google’s search operators and a simple hack to organize all your new opportunities in minutes.

Here’s the post-breakdown:

1. Why you should guest blog
2. Finding Guest Blogging opportunities (Overview)
3. How to leverage Google Search operators to get tons of guest blogging opportunities
4. Downloadable bonus: How to manage the new guest blogging opportunities [Hack + template]

Why should you guest blog?

If you’re reading this blog post, I’m guessing you’re not new to why you should guest blog.

But if you’re still not a 100% sold on the idea, here are some highlights:

Guest blogging is the best way to generate quality backlinks from relevant and respectable sites.

If you’re looking to establish thought leadership, writing for other leading publications in your industry is a great way to go. By showing that they trust you, their followers and other leading players in your field will trust you as well.

Another benefit, is getting your content in front of a whole new audience that might have not know you exist (did anyone say leads leads leads?)

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing to a site that has 20k readers a month or 500k, as long as it’s not the same readers you get on your site, there’s benefit to it.

(I hope you know that 20k relevant targeted audience is better than 500k unqualified readers, right? )

How to find Guest Blogging opportunities:

So great, you’re sold and excited to start writing for every relevant site in the world!

But Before you go into the process, you have to remember that not all guest blogging opportunities were created equal.

You have to make sure the ones you choose are a good fit for your marketing and brand goals.
But that’s a whole different topic we will cover in another blog post soon.

Here are a few things I’d recommend you to consider before choosing the sites you want to guest post for:

1. Do you share the same target audience?
2. How much traffic is the site getting? (You can use SimilarWeb for this).
3. What’re its average’s post shares
4. Domain Authority (you can use Ahrefs or SEM rush for that).

Now, let’s move on to finding good blogs in your niche that accept guest blogging.

There are many ways to find great guest blogging opportunities.
Here is a very partial list:

1. You can reverse engineer your competitors’ blog backlinks
2. Leverage Google Search operators
3. Play with Twitter Search Operators
4. Simple go through your favourite blogs and see if accept guest posts
5. And so much more.

Each option has its different tricks to make the most out of, and of course, speed up the research process.

You’ll also get different results from each, with its own pros and cons.

Today, I want to focus on how to find the best guest blogging opportunities with Google Search Operators.

I think Google Search operators are almost a secret gem when it comes to doing smart marketing research.

There are so many great strategies to obtain useful information in making your research life easier, that it’s almost a crime not to leverage them.

In the next section, I will share with you how to use those operators to research and find niche blogs that accept guest contributions and you can actually start pitching to in the following week!

How to leverage Google Search Operators to find guest blogging opportunities.

The idea behind leveraging Google’s search operators is to think about what is the potential keyword a site would use to describe the guest posting opportunity.

I want to share with you variations based on 4 approaches:

1.  Sites openly asking for guest posts
2. Sites that are open to idea but don’t promote it.
3. Finding opportunities through URL clues
4. Analysing where your competitors / favourite marketer’s write.
5. Bonus: A nice URL trick for .edu and .org sites.

The “write for us” approach:

“[your keyword]” +”write for us”
“[your keyword]” +”write for me”
“[your keyword]” +”become a contributor”
“[your keyword]” + “guest post”
“[your keyword]” +”blogging guidelines”
keyword + “guest post guidelines”
“[your keyword]” +”contribute”
“[your keyword]” + “guest column”
“[your keyword]” +”submit a guest post”
“[your keyword]” + “accepting guest posts”
“[your keyword]” + “Now Accepting Guest Posts”
“[your keyword]” +”contribute to this site”

Here’s how your results should look like:

How crazy is that you can so easily pitch giants like CoSchedule and Marketing Profs, right?

Find opportunities based on other guest posts:

“[your keyword]” + “guest post by”
“[your keyword]” + “this is a guest contribution”
“[your keyword]” + “contributing writer”
“[your keyword]” + “guest author”
“[your keyword]” + The following guest post”
“[your keyword]” + “guest blogger”
“[your keyword]” + “guest column”
“[your keyword]” + “guest article”

In URL hacks

“[your keyword]”+ inurl:guest-posts
“[your keyword]” + inurl:write-for-us
“[your keyword]” + inurl:guest-post-guidelines
“[your keyword]” + inurl:profiles/blog/new
“[your keyword]”+ inurl:category/guest
“[your keyword]”+ inurl:contributors

Go where your competitor’s / hero writes:

“Guest post” + “[influencer name]”
“Contributor” +“[influencer name]”

Note: When you search for your competitor’s or hero’s guest posts,, it’s important to add -“site url” in order to filter their original content.

For example, one of my favorite content marketers is Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer (though not in Buffer anymore).

Leo wrote so many blog posts for Buffer’s blog, that if I’ll search for his name with any combination of keywords, I’ll probably get results from Buffer’s blog.

This is where adding the “-site url” comes in handy.
For example:
“leo widrich + “guest post by” -https://blog.bufferapp.com”

This makes sure I’m getting the results for the “”leo widrich + “guest post by”” search, but the “-https://blog.bufferapp.com”” tells Google, that I don’t want to get any results back from this specific URL.

This way, I’ll only get Leo’s guest writer, it will look something like this:

It’s not bulletproof – but 99% of the results will be exactly what you were looking.

Bonus: Looking to get links from edu, orgs, etc?

Use these operators:

• inurl:.edu keyword + helpful sites
• inurl:.eu keyword + resources
• inurl:.edu useful sites + keyword
  

In conclusion:

It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in, there are tons of blogs you can contribute to if you want to build authority or brand awareness, it’s just a matter of having the right methods to find and prioritize them.

Let’s take this opportunity and make it fun, leave your blog name and URL and niche in the comments – so other readers know you’re accepting guest blogs, and make it easier to help each other find quality opportunities and great content.