Guest posting strategy - advice on guest site requirements?

You could use the Alexa Rank as a basis for the sites you or your VA contacts. You can also look at the blog itself and see if there are any interactions going on. A good way to tell if a blog is good for guest posting is to find actual guest posts on that specific blog and look at how it is doing comments-wise and social media-wise. Hope this helps!

Worrying about pagerank and such tells me you aren't looking at guestposting for traffic. You're guest-posting for SEO rank, just not on your own site.

Obviously, you don't want to spend time creating content for a dead backwater blog, but worrying about pagerank is futile. Better to concentrate on things like activity (both posting and comments) and relevance.

That blog that only gets 100 visitors a month now could be the next rising star, while the high flyer everyone wants to post on could disappear or go dark without warning.

Here's the basic criteria I would give a researcher:

1. Relevant to my topic. 'Fitness' is such a broad term that you could embrace ever-widening tangents that could draw beneficial traffic for you.

2. Evidence of guest posting or an invitation to submit content.

3. Activity, in posting, comments and moderation. (I've come across autoblogs with long lists of spam comments that appear very active on the surface but no one has touched in months.)

I want my researcher to find me a list of prospects, not make the decisions for me.

I would focus on BRANDING. You have to find blogs that match YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE DEMOGRAPHIC. Not necessarily the same niche but the same core demographic with the same core needs. I do guest posts professionally and let me tell you-your chances of success are higher if you don't come off as some dude just off to poach PR or traffic. People are very territorial. So if you are out to BRAND and you are not a direct competitor, your chances of getting published are better. Also, it helps if you are not a link hog. Only 1 link per article and put the link in the Guest Post Author section. This makes your writer WORK HARDER because the post must be GOOD ENOUGH to read all the way through.

The easiest way to find a guest blogging site is to go to My Blog Guest. It is a free site to join and it connects guest bloggers and site owners.

John's comments above are spot on. Relevance would be my number one concern, over pagerank and even traffic - thought other might disagree.

You may also find this post helpful ...

http://www.warriorforum.com/mind-war...gs-2013-a.html

Cheers,

Will