Guest Post Sites That Accept Submissions

On this page, read the Effort column in hours rather than minutes.

On a directory page, an effort of 1 is a five minute form. Here, an effort of 1 still means a piece of writing someone has to want to publish. The gap between a 1 and a 5 is the gap between posting straight to an open platform with no editor and pitching an editor who turns down most of what arrives.

So the two ends of this table are really two different jobs. The open platforms are a place for writing you already have, and the edited publications are where you spend a week getting one piece right. Doing plenty of the first does not prepare you for the second, and lumping them together in one list is how many people decide guest posting does not work.

Start on the open platforms, and publish something you would be happy for a customer to read.

The first two or three posts are less about the link and more about having something to show. An editor finds it much easier to say yes to a pitch that points to work you have already published, and much easier to say no when there is nothing to look at. You are building the proof they will ask for before they ask.

Write about the part of your work people ask you about most often. You can write that piece faster and better than a professional writer could, and specific working knowledge is the one thing you can offer that a publication cannot get from a more experienced pitcher.

Then choose one edited publication, read four of its recent posts properly, and pitch an idea that only makes sense for that site. A first pitch from someone who has clearly read the site beats a polished pitch from someone who has not.

Give the audience column most of the weight and pay little attention to the link type.

Where a link is nofollow, it passes no ranking credit at all, and plenty of the larger sites here mark some or all of their links that way. For you, those can still be the most valuable entries on the page, because their readers are the people you want to reach. A post that lands well sends visitors on the day it goes live and keeps sending them for months.

Judge these sites the way you would judge a speaking slot at a conference. Who is in the audience, what will they do after reading, and can you write something that holds up in front of them? If the honest answer to the last question is no, this is the wrong channel for now, and sending more pitches will not change that.

When a ranking benefit does come, it usually comes from readers finding the post and linking to you from their own sites. That takes longer than the link you first wanted, and it is worth more.

If an email has offered you fifty guest posts on DA 50 sites, it helps to know exactly what is being sold. DA, or domain authority, is a third party score of how strong a site looks to search engines.

Those placements sit on sites built to host paid articles. You can often spot the network from outside: the same layout, the same categories, no real readers, and an archive of articles on unrelated industries published minutes apart. Google's link spam policy lists exchanging money for links as a violation, and it applies to the buyer as well as the seller.

People accept these offers because they turn a hard problem into an invoice. Nothing on this page can do that for you, and a list that claims to is usually a list of sites that pay to be included.

If you have budget but not time, a better use of it is to pay a writer who knows your subject and pitch real publications with their work. It costs the same, it takes longer, and nobody can take the result away from you later.

Expect most pitches to go unanswered. Silence is the normal outcome with edited publications, and it does not mean you did something wrong. Send the pitch, note the date, move on to the next one, and follow up once after two weeks.

Expect your first accepted post to take longer than you planned and to come back with edits you did not see coming. That is part of what makes the acceptance valuable, because a site that edits its writers is a site whose links carry weight.

Expect one link, usually in your author bio rather than the body of the article, and expect plenty of publications to make it nofollow as a matter of policy. That is no reason to skip them, but it is a reason to choose them for their readers.

Do not expect volume. Someone doing this properly places a handful of posts a year, not a handful a week. If your plan needs thirty placements, you are really planning to buy links, and that carries a different set of risks.

None of this is yet a record of what happened when we pitched these sites ourselves, because that test has not been run. When it has, this section will turn into counts: how many we pitched, how many replied, how long they took, and what kind of link each one gave.

Skip this page if you cannot write and will not pay someone who can. There is no low effort route through guest posting, and trying to find one produces the kind of article that gets a site banned from the very publications it was aiming at.

Skip it if you need results this month. Even when everything goes right, the gap between sending a pitch and seeing a live post is measured in weeks, and most of the value arrives later still.

Skip it if your site is brand new and has nothing worth linking to yet. A guest post sends readers somewhere, so that somewhere needs to exist first. Two hours on the page they will land on is a better use of time than two hours on a pitch.

And skip it if what you really want is lots of links quickly. The paid networks are built to sell exactly that, and this page will keep advising against them. The directories are the safer way to get volume: each link is worth less and there is no writing involved, but nothing there can be held against you later.