Keeping up with a blog writing schedule for your own site can be quite taxing, so why add to your list of things to do, by creating posts for someone else’s site?

The simple answer is traffic.

By writing for other sites you are able to:

• Reach new audiences
• Get backlinks
• Increase your brand awareness
• Improve your writing skills and
• Promote your business

Ideally, writing for another site that covers the same niche as your site would make writing guest posts easier as you will be able to write about the same topics.

You may even be able to hone in or expand a point you may have mentioned in one of the published posts on your blog.

An advantage of guest posting for a site that is in the same or similar niche to your site is being able to reach a larger audience. This means by increasing your brand's awareness, you could also get more people added to your email list and more followers on social platforms.

When searching for sites to guest post for, always stick with sites that are in the same or in a related niche to your site. There would be no real benefit of writing for a site about hair, if your site is about home decorating.

There are different ways to look for a site to guest post for. Here are a few ways you can find sites:

• Go to a site and look in the footer to see if they accept guest posts
• Ask the owner of a site if they would be willing to publish a post you have written
• Ask other bloggers in your niche and related niches
• Use social media to inform people you are looking for guest posting opportunities
• Asking friends with blogs

Initially, getting accepted to guest post will result in a lot of rejection. This could be for a variety of reasons, such as:

• You are new to guest posting,
• You have no visible body of work you can showcase as examples of your writing
• Or new contributors are not accepted

To combat this, publish as much as you can on your own site. If you do not have a site or a blog, you can set one up on a blogging platform like blogspot.com or wordpress.com. You can then refer people to the site for them to look at what you have written and your writing style.

If new contributors are not being accepted, you can ask to be kept on file and wait for an opening. While waiting, you can approach other sites to guest post on.

Once you have been accepted to write a guest post, it is important you add one or two links back to your site.

You can either have the link to go to your sites domain, i.e. www.sloppysuccess.com or you can have the link go to a related section or post on your site.

For instance, if this post was a guest post, I can have it link back to a post I have about writing blog posts. This way, the link is relevant to the post. It is also for this reasons it is best to guest post for sites that are in the same niche or a related niche to your site.