@jessicammarie Hi Jessica!  You should start with adding a page or post on your blog that says Write for Us, Guest Post Guidelines, etc. This way people searching for guest posting opportunities can find you.  Also, post your needs at http://myblogguest.com/ – a forum designed for blogs looking for writers and writers looking for blogs.  :)

@jessicammarie I have heard a lot of good reviews about My Guest Blog. I found an alternative/supplement but I haven’t checked it out myself yet. It looks a lot like My Guest Blog. I just signed up today, so we’ll see how it goes.
http://www.guestblogit.com
Good luck!

Great suggestions here – we’ve been discussing this in our biz too. I’ll go check some of these links out! Thanks for posting this question @jessicammarie!

@jessicammarie @amylang

I publish guest post guidelines on my blog — feel free to borrow and adapt at will. (There’s also a permanent link to them in the sidebar on my site’s main blog page).

Also, when I run guest posts on Wednesdays, I always start off the post with a little blurb: This is a guest post by so and so. If you would like to submit a guest article, please check out our guest post guidelines.

Having guidelines helps immensely, although I still get a truckload of unsolicited pitches of this variety:

“Dear Madam. I love your blog and read it frequently. I write blog posts about house cleaning, online education, and politics, and I think my posts would be a perfect fit for your blog. Just tell me what you want me to write about and I’ll do it, as long as you include two links to the company that’s hired me to write guest posts for them so they can boost their SEO.”

(Well, they don’t say that last part but they might as well.) Needless to say, these pitches go straight to my Deleted Items folder.

It’s very hard to get guest bloggers these days. Because everyone has a blog and wants their content to be unique to their own site. I get a few every now and then and have used some of the guest blogger sites. But for the most part people are unwilling to post content on another site because they are so overly concerned about traffic..