You know that you need quality links to your website and you’ve decided to target bloggers, but you don’t know where to start. Follow our link building tips to find blogging opportunities to get the best links for your company.

Links from blogs can come in many forms, but the most useful are links from the body copy of the post. There are three main types of blog post that generate these inbound links for you: Guest blogging, product reviews and company features.

Guest Blogging for Links

Guest blogging is writing blog posts for other bloggers to feature on their website. It’s a popular technique due to its win-win nature: the blogger gets high quality content and you get a high quality link.

So how do you go about finding blogs that will accept guest posts? First and foremost, turn to Google.

General searches for [your keyword] blog will provide you with a whole raft of relevant blogs – potentially thousands, or tens of thousands in fact. So, to save trawling through them all, you can run an advanced search query to filter out the bloggers that are highly likely to be receptive to your request.

For example, a business consultant may want to write guest blogs to increase their online presence and to establish their expertise. So, they may run a query for business consultant “guest blog”:

Google searches to find guest blogging opportunities

You now have a list of blogs that include the words “guest blog” somewhere in their site – and this is likely to be because they have accepted content from guest bloggers in the past. You can then review the sites and choose which bloggers to contact with your guest blogging request.

Or, if you want to know that your request will have a greater chance of success, you can run another more targeted search, such as:

  • business consultant “submit post”
  • business consultant “guest bloggers needed”
  • business consultant blog “write for us”

To find bloggers who have actively sought out guests for their blogs. If you find that your specific keywords aren’t returning good results, try a broader phrase, e.g. business advice or just business. If you have too many results you can narrow the search down to the past month or a custom date range to find recent results.

Finding Bloggers to Review Your Products

Maybe you don’t have the time to spend writing content for other websites, but you have got products that you’d be willing to give out for review.

You can apply the same method to finding bloggers to write product reviews for you by searching for office supplies “review”:

Finding bloggers to review products

Whatever niche you’re in, you can find a blog to suit. And if for any reason you can’t, don’t forget to try searching Google’s other content. Running the same query, office supplies “review” in a video search, may turn up unexpected gems such as websites dedicated to video reviews of office supplies:

Video Product Reviews

Finding Bloggers to Feature Your Company

You don’t want to write for them or give them something, you just want a mention on their blog. So, you need to find bloggers who are interested in talking about what you do. Once again we’ll use Google, but you’ll need to think creatively.

Phrases like “industry news” suggest an overall interest, so your query might be b2b blog “industry news”:

Finding Bloggers to Feature your Company

Equally you might search for “a day in the life”, “interview” or “q & a” for opportunities to be featured on blogs in your specialist area. So your search query might be b2b blog “a day in the life”:

Searching for Relevant Bloggers

Of course you may have other reasons for approaching bloggers: To hold a competition or giveaway sponsored by you, to feature your products in a tutorial or moodboard (most relevant for design and lifestyle blogs), or to promote a discount code or voucher to name just a few.

The above technique can be adapted to search for any blogging opportunity you can think of – just replace the words in quote marks with what you are looking for.

Found the Right Blogger: What Now?

Of course, finding the right blogger is only half the battle. Now you need to pitch your idea to win the link. Here’s a few tips on great pitches for successful link building:

  • Get the blogger’s name and email address. “Dear Susan” always sounds better than “Dear Sir/Madam”
  • Personalise your pitch. Look through the blog to get a feel for what they do, and craft your idea to suit them.
  • Focus on the blogger. You’ve got to sell your idea in this email and tell the blogger what benefit they will get from it.
  • Give your credentials. They don’t know you, so be transparent and give details of and links to what you do, e.g. previous guest blog posts.
  • Keep it short. Bloggers are busy people, get to the point quickly and clearly.
  • Be polite. If nothing else it shows that you are a person who cares about working with them.
  • Follow up. Leave it a few days then send a quick reminder, but don’t be overly pushy.

Building inbound links from bloggers can be time-consuming, but with clever use of Google, you know that when you come to pitch, you’re more likely to strike gold.

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