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About the Guest Post Prospecting Tool

The Upper Ranks’ Guest Post Prospecting Tool is designed to help you find sites that will publish your content. Using selected search modifiers, our tool finds websites that have already published relevant guest posts in your industry and/or vertical. 

Simply put, we want to help you find the perfect home for your guest post and we want to help you save time when you’re prospecting for potential websites. Any link builder will tell you that site finding takes up a lot of their time, and we will help you streamline that process.

This Guest Post Prospecting Tool is powered by Google’s own search engine (since your ultimate SEO or link building goal is ranking your site on Google!) and has been modified to find you quality, relevant websites that are likely to publish your content.

This tool should greatly reduce the time it takes you to build a list of prospective guest post sites so you can focus on outreach, link building strategy, and writing relevant content.

Just plug your industry or topic into the tool and press the ‘search button.’

For example, if you enter the term ‘wrist watch,’ you’ll find websites that publish guest posts on fashion, technology, style, and luxury. Then you can manually look through those websites and find the ones that best fit your content and your own website.

You can also get more creative or more specific with your search terms. If ‘wrist watch’ isn’t finding you the websites you’re after, then maybe ‘digital watch,’ ‘sports watch,’ or ‘men’s fashion accessories’ might bring up something you like more. 

Don’t be afraid to experiment and try multiple searches. The Guest Post Prospecting Tool is already doing most of the site finding work for you, so feel free to use it to its full potential. 

Give it a try. It’s free!

What is a Guest Post?

Boiled down to its basic essence, a guest post is a blog post, article, or other written piece of content written by someone who does not regularly write for or post to a given website. A guest post can come from a site owner’s friends, industry experts, freelancers with great ideas, or from other bloggers within the website’s niche.

The internet thrives on guest posts. A quality guest post helps a website show different perspectives, introduce new ideas, and give exposure to up-and-coming writers.

Guest posts can also help relieve the burden on busy bloggers who don’t have quite enough time to post as often as they’d like.

A good guest post must be relevant to the website that’s hosting it, however, and needs to be helpful and enjoyable to the website’s readers. Relevance and quality are the two most important factors when it comes to guest posting. If someone is hosting your content, you need to make it worth their time. 

Why are Guest Posts Important for SEO?

If you write a good, relevant guest post for a website that’s happy to publish and host it, you can earn a backlink. A backlink is a link from the target website back to your own, which allows interested readers to see more of your work, your products, your services, or your knowledge. 

A link must be carefully inserted into a guest post and approved by the target site’s owner. As long as you’re not doing anything spammy or misleading, most websites are happy for you to point a link back to your own website– if it makes sense, of course.

The link has to make sense within the context of the post. It needs to be a link anyone reading your post would be happy to click. The link also needs to take them to a reputable website that doesn’t surprise them in a bad way.

Building relevant links to your website helps search engines like Google know that you’re relevant for certain search terms. If you run a fashion brand and write guest posts about fashion, Google sees other fashion-related websites linking to you. In turn, Google’s algorithm is more likely to place your website higher in the search engine results pages. 

How to Maximise the Information of our Guest Post Tool

To make the most out of The Upper Ranks’ Guest Post Prospecting Tool, you’ll need to catalog and organize the information the tool provides. Good organization is simple and it reduces errors and wasting time on redundant work.

If you don’t keep track of which websites you’re reaching out to for your guest posting efforts, you might email the same website twice or completely miss a website you’re excited about. 

We recommend using a simple Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet. Google Sheets are free if you have a Gmail address, so they are ideal for this work.

You can keep the spreadsheets as simple or as complex as you want. I recommend having a column for the website’s name, a column for the website’s URL, a column for a contact page or email address, and a column for the date you first reached out to the website. You can add more columns for anything else you want to catalog, but those are the essentials.

Add a new row for each website you reach out to and refer to the spreadsheet when you need to either send more outreach or you need to remind yourself of what you’ve already done.

Tips on Guest Post Outreach

So now that you understand the importance of guest posting and want to use this tool to find websites, you’ll have to send some outreach. That means emailing blog owners and webmasters– asking them to publish your content. 

We’ve written extensively about link building outreach before. This post called ‘The One Killer Secret to Link Building Outreach’ is one of my favorites.

We can also give you ideas for templates and help with other ideas if you visit this post.

When you’re reaching out to a prospective website to host your guest post content, observe these best practices:

• Be Polite

• Be Professional

• Don’t Talk Down to Anyone

• Don’t Beg or be Forceful

• Keep it Short

• Talk About The Website and its Owner (instead of yourself)

• Don’t Be Overbearing

• Accept Rejection Gracefully

Above all else, try to be helpful. Prove to the webmaster or blog owner that your content will improve their site and satisfy their readers. Give them something they’ll be proud to publish.

Tips for Writing a Successful Guest Post

• Research the target website and its audience to understand their interests and needs. This will help you to tailor your guest post to their interests and increase the chances that it will be accepted and well-received by the website and its audience.
• Create unique and valuable content for the guest post. The content of your guest post should be original and not published elsewhere, and it should provide value to the audience of the target website. This can help to make your guest post stand out and increase the chances that it will be accepted by the website.
• Follow the guidelines and requirements of the target website. Most websites will have specific guidelines for guest posts, such as required word count, formatting, and content requirements. It is important to follow these guidelines carefully to increase the chances that your guest post will be accepted.
• Promote your guest post on your own channels. Once your guest post is published, you can promote it on your own website and social media channels to drive traffic to the guest post and potentially attract new visitors to your own website.
• Engage with the audience of the target website. After your guest post is published, you can engage with the audience of the target website by responding to comments and questions on the post. This can help to build relationships and establish yourself as an expert or thought leader in your field.

If you have any questions about this Guest Post Prospecting Tool, feel free to Contact Us.

Thanks and happy guest posting!