How to Find the Perfect Guest Post Opportunities and Topic Ideas

Note: This is a two-part series. Today is all about finding the perfect article topics and websites to pitch guest posts to. 

Before we dive in, let's first define the term money pages that I use so frequently. 

Money pages: Pages on your website that, if you rank them, will drive revenue to your business, not just traffic.

For e-commerce, this would be category and product pages.

For SaaS, this would be solution and landing pages. 

For blogs, this would be all of your “review” and “best of” content. 

We need backlinks to these pages so they can rank but no one wants to link to a money page without payment.

The most common way to get around payment is through guest posting, which works great!

However, 97% of people are doing it wrong. 

The wrong way to write a guest post

• 500 words of trash content: This type of content not only annoys editors but is also a poor representation of your brand.
  

• Not targeting a keyword: Without proper keyword research, your guest posts won't rank or drive any traffic. Hell, half of them don’t even get indexed unless you throw tier-two links at them.
  

• One link within the article (back to your site): A single link buried in the content is spammy and doesn't carry weight in terms of SEO.

These mistakes result in guest posts that don't rank, don't pass any link juice, and ultimately waste your time and resources.

Here’s what to do instead

Let’s assume I’m Costa (sells sunglasses) and I want to rank a category page for the head term fishing sunglasses. To do this, I need to figure out two things straightaway. 

1. Keywords and article topics that I can write about and naturally link back to my category page, i.e., topics related to fishing sunglasses in some sense
   

2. Which websites would actually benefit from this article and have a chance at ranking for it

Step 1: Keyword research

Drop your head term into Ahrefs keyword explorer and go to:

Matching terms >> Questions

These sort of questions are perfect for guest posts and one keyword has already stood out to me: what is the best color for polarized sunglasses for fishing.

Ahrefs search volume only shows 60 here, but don’t be fooled by that number. 

Give that question a search in Google and the top ranking article is getting ~802 visitors per month.

Again, this convinces me that it’s a prime topic to target via a guest post.

To double-down on this, open up the organic keywords of that top-ranking article from Yellow Dog Fly Fishing and take a look at other keywords it’s ranking for.

This will uncover more questions and long-tail keywords you could write about for multiple websites.

For instance:

• best color lens for freshwater fishing

• best color lenses for saltwater fishing

• green or blue lenses for fishing

Step 2: Find websites

We now have a list of four article topics we can pitch to websites, but who will actually benefit from this?

There are basically two types of websites to target.

The first group of websites is my favorite — those that have written content already on your topic but are ranking at the bottom of page one to the bottom of page two, i.e., they’re in position 7–19.

These websites already have articles on the topic and are close to ranking, but they need a little help.

If we search best color lens for freshwater fishing, I find this website.  

DR 42 but only getting ~two visitors to this page each month.

Shoot this person an email and say: 

Hey, read your article on the right color lens for your fishing. It’s currently ranking #15 in Google. If you feel that it would help your business, I would love to update this content for you. The website ranking #1 for this article topic is getting 802 visitors per month.

Would you be interested in an additional 800 visitors each month to your business? 

Now, that’s a crappy message, but you get the point. Make sure to personalize your email, and this strategy works great.

You get a link and they get more traffic.

Pro tip: Highly recommend checking out HasData’s Google SERP Scraper to speed up this process. Super easy and it’s no-code for noobs like me. 

The second group of websites you want to target are people within your niche that have a decent chance of ranking for your keyword(s) but don't have an article on the topics yet. 

For this, you want to jump into Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and type in the head term and look at websites that have relevance for the topic.

From here, apply a couple of filters to make sure the websites are of quality.

• DR 30–60: You can play around with this range, but I generally find this to be the sweet spot for cold-email outreach. Anything below 30 and it’s too small. Anything above 60 and it’s hard to get a hold of a team member.
  

• Traffic value $1,000: I like using traffic value instead of pure traffic because this shows websites that can actually rank for money terms, which are more competitive than generic info content. 

Once these filters are applied, export all these results and start filtering out the noise.

When the results are in a sheet, apply a filter in the “Website” column to delete all forums out. Some words to look for and filter out are:

• forum

• thread

• index

• topic (or viewtopic)

• wiki

Now, there will still be some junk in there, so don’t go loading this into your outreach tool yet. 

Take 10–20 mins and open up the websites and trash anything that isn’t relevant. 

As we can see in the screenshot above, 666casino isn’t going to make a good fit.

But Salt Strong is a perfect example of a website that would benefit from our article about the best color lenses for saltwater fishing.

Now, I’m going to address the million-dollar question everyone is thinking.

“But Alex, don’t we want to write those articles on our website and rank for those keywords as well?”

Don’t be worried about this.

Remember what makes you money. Given the above example, we want to rank for fishing sunglasses because this is what’s going to drive revenue to our business. 

Don’t be so concerned about capturing literally every SERP within your niche. Focus on what matters. If you write an info piece of content for another blog within your niche and they rank for it, who cares as long as in turn you rank for the money page?

Info pieces of content hardly drive any revenue, and sure, you can make an argument about brand awareness, but resources are limited.

Focus on what matters the most for growing your business. 

In addition, you can still write the same article on your website and just switch the content up a bit.

Best case scenario, your website ranks in the top five AND so does the guest post you’ve written. Therefore your brand is mentioned in two of the five top results.

Worst case scenario, your site doesn’t rank but your guest post does. But guess what? That guest post still mentions your brand and links back to your site. It’s a win-win.

That’s part one of this series! Next week I’ll dive into the nitty-gritty and teach you how to optimize your guest post so it ranks. 

Hint: It’s the same way you would optimize a piece of content for your own website.

See you next week and, as always, hit me with any questions you may have.

Much love ✌️

P.S. I’m closing the doors to my Lazy Link Building cohort on Friday. If you’re interested in getting 100% white-hat, high-tier backlinks in the world’s most reputable publications, shoot me an email and we’ll chat.