In order to build links and generate traffic from industry websites today, you often need to “give something to get something”. In many cases, what you must give is your expertise in the form of content. If a link is easy to obtain on a website, you probably don’t want that link anyway since it would come in the form of a link exchange or a low quality directory listing. If you want to actually gain visibility and traffic from a website, you must contribute towards providing the content that people are actually there to read. They aren’t going to find or care about a page on the site that’s full of links. There’s nothing to differentiate you from the rest. What visitors will take note of is the great content that you provide and then click over to your site from a link in the “author bio” section. In order to obtain these guest posting opportunities the first thing you will need to do is spend some time looking for the sites that accept submissions.

Here are two places to look for guest posting opportunities:

The industry blogs you already read:

In order to stay up to date with what’s going on in your industry, you will need to spend time reading industry publications including industry blogs. Since you should already be visiting these sites on a semi regular basis, you will really just need to spend a few extra minutes browsing the site to see if it accepts contributions from guest authors. If there isn’t an obvious “Write for us” link, you could do some digging and look at the “Contact us” page or the list of current authors. Depending on the site, they might not accept guest blog posts but there could be other content opportunities, like the chance to submit a recent press release, white paper, or webinar. It’s often difficult to earn a guest posting opportunity on the most prominent and popular industry blogs, but you can work your way up by starting with some of the smaller sites that are more likely to be looking for content. If you prefer to read trade magazines or newsletters and don’t spend much time reading blogs, look up the websites of those publications to see if the online version is looking for content writers.

Competitor links:

As a part of your SEO link building campaign you should be looking at the types of links that your competitors have. This list is also a great source when looking for content marketing opportunities. Using a tool like Moz, run an inbound link report for each of your primary online competitors. It’s a manual effort, but you can visit each link to see what type of link it is and whether that site is worth obtaining a link of your own. See if the site has a blog that accepts guest submissions or whether it accepts other content formats. Remember, just because a competitor has a link on the site, it doesn’t mean that you should too. You need to evaluate its quality and whether the target audience is similar to yours.