If your goal is to build a lead generation machine in your blog and as a real estate content marketer, then you are probably all-in on hyperlocal SEO, defeating Zillow with long-tail keywords, and earning Google love with backlinks.

And one of the most talked about ways of earning backlinks is writing guest posts.

Guest posting is when you write an article for another website. Often that website will credit you and your site, often in your profile, which earns you and your website well deserved recognition!

Why Submit Real Estate Guest Posts?

SEO and Backlinks

If you are building a website that you want seen on Google, you need to do SEO (search engine optimization).

Backlinks come when another website links to yours. It is one of the top two or three biggest ranking signals for Google. The way Google figures, if other people like your site enough to link to it, then you must have some pretty good content!

One way to earn backlinks (called “link building”) is by guest posting for other sites. Sometimes you might get an opportunity to link back to your site in the article you write. More likely, you’ll at least get a bio that includes your website with a follow link. It’s sort of the web publisher’s way of saying “thank you” for the free content for their site.

Authority and Branding

Another great reason to submit guest posts on other people’s sites is to brand yourself in front of your audience.

If you are writing an article on how to buy a home in the local newspaper, not only are you getting free exposure to your local market of home buyers but also coming from a source of authority – the newspaper.

If you write often and well enough, that exposure and reputation will start to stick to you, leading to future opportunities.

It’s a long game. But if you love writing, it’s a great way to consider promoting your business!

Are Guest Posts Useful for Local SEO?

Local SEO can be a little bit unique when it comes to guest posting.

I believe guest posts will only get you so far in real estate. You’re only going to get so many backlinks. You’ll need other strategies to build backlinks to a hyperlocal real estate website.

There are only so many sites that accept guest posts with high domain authority that will work in your market or on the real estate topic.

If you are a real estate agent, chances your site is about buying and selling local real estate.

The problem is that 99.9% of buyers and sellers in the country don’t care about your market’s real estate. They don’t live there. Online magazines accepting guest contributors don’t want your article about “Hot Homebuyer Trends in Wichita Falls, TX”.

Meanwhile, a lot of the local websites and blogs are probably small operations with low domain authority and weak “link juice” for your site.

The workaround for this is to do both.

A) find top local content creators that might want to feature your hyperlocal content (e.g. local newspaper, local college publication, and local lifestyle blogs)

B) write good but broad content for a national audience (e.g. “Avoiding a Commissionectomy” aimed at an agent audience, or “What to Do Before Picking a Lender” for buyers and sellers)

Pitfalls aside, there is some low hanging fruit to be had doing guest posts, and I definitely recommend a few guest posts for some quick and early backlink wins for your website.

Where to Find Sites Accepting Guest Posts

There are quite a few sites with very thorough lists of methods and best practices for finding sites that are accepting guest posts. I’ll focus on a few below.

Industry Publications

You no doubt know some of your top industry publications. Go check out their site to see if they accept guest contributors. Often they may have a note in the footer for submissions.

If you don’t see anything obvious, consider trying the “site” operator in Google. Search “site:website.com guest post” or “contributor” or something. If they have any pages soliciting guest posts, you’ll likely find it there!

HARO

HARO stands for “Help a Reporter Out”. Writers and journalists who need expert opinions or just making some listicles can crowdsource the members of HARO. You send in your answer that meets their needs, and if they use your piece in their story they are generally expected to credit you and give you a backlink.

The HARO email comes out 3 times a day, so there are lots of opportunities for real estate related inquiries like the one above.

HARO only lets publications ask questions who are on the top million most visited sites in the world, so right away you know you are dealing with a site with at least some domain authority.

HARO is technically not soliciting guest posts, but it is still a great way to perhaps share a quote or some content, and secure a backlink.

And it’s also possible to find sites that are writing in your niche. If you contribute regularly, there’s a chance you might build some relationships that lead to opportunities to submit a full guest post as well.

Competitor Backlinks

If you have a tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs, you can look up where your competitors are getting their backlinks from.

Now, this will show you all their backlinks. Most are probably not from guest blog posts. I would filter the results by anchor text that includes the word “website”, the author’s name, or the name of their website. That is most likely to be the anchor text in a backlink on a guest post.

Take notes, as you may see lots of opportunities to get backlinks in other ways by studying your competition.

Spy on the Pros

A lot of professional writers in the real estate industry niche like to promote what publications they’ve written for.

These can be a great place to spy on where other writers have managed to earn guest posts in the past.

A few professional writers who work with real estate companies include:

• The Real Estate Writer
• Writing Real Estate
• Best Real Estate Writer
• Tara Mastroeni

Google Search

Search “real estate + guest post”, or “guest contributor”, or one of the example keywords below.

• write for us
• submit content
• contributing writer
• suggest a post
• become an author

Sites that generously accept guest contributors often have a page on their site that will hopefully come up in the search.

Here’s just a few I found this way:

• Become a Local Leader
• Abodo
• HOMEia.com
• Rent Buy N Sell

Local Publications

As an agent, a lot of your knowledge and content is probably focused down in your market.

Plus, your customers are in your local geographic area. It’s fine if your article on “Does a pool add value?” is seen by a homeowner in Fargo, but if you’re an agent in San Diego, it would be great if it the content were aimed at San Diegans.

Other than the local newspapers, your local college might have a publication they accept content in. Many States have university real estate centers like the Texas A&M Real Estate Center. These can be difficult to earn backlinks from and you need some solid content or market insights. But they are also often .edu or .gov domains that Google especially loves.

Another great local option might be a good lifestyle blog. Search [your city] + blog to see what comes up!

Real Estate Blogging Facebook Group

The Facebook group Real Estate Bloggers – A Group Designed To Help Promote Helpful RE Content! is a group designed for active real estate writers to share their content with one another. It is run by the well known and prolific Massachusetts blogger Bill Gasset. (There – I just gave him a backlink!)  You can use it for article inspiration, a chance to get traffic to your own articles, or a source to curate shareable articles for your own real estate social media accounts.

As some of the most active and savvy real estate writers, it’s possible some might be open to opportunities to guest post. Maybe you could swap posts!

In other cases, these bloggers may have ideas for other guest post opportunities. Definitely worth joining and checking out! Here is an example of an article real estate agent Bill Gassett wrote for the Massachusetts Real Estate News website.

List of Real Estate Sites that Accept Guest Posts

It’s a short list, sadly. But below are the sites I found in which it is relatively easy to find opportunities to contribute quality guest posts.

All of these below are national magazines whose audience is mostly other agents. So you may find yourself writing a good “how-to” business tactic that you know something about.

If you need more local magazines, as already mentioned, you’ll need to look locally.

Inman

Inman has a lot of guest contributors. And it is surprisingly easy to get started. It also has a very high domain authority of 73, meaning a single backlink in your author’s profile here is a great way to get your backlink game off the ground.

You’d need to subscribe if you haven’t already. But if you haven’t, you should.

It’s also the #1 online publication for real estate tech news and opinion, so it is an excellent platform to begin building your reputation and authority in your niche.

YPN

The Young Professional Network (YPN) is a group of Realtors under NAR targeting agents 40 and under (though you can join if any age). They have “The Lounge” which features various articles on all things real estate.

For NAR and YPN members, you can email articles and ideas you’d like to publish about just about any topic touching real estate sales and best practices.

The site is newer and has a relatively lower domain authority of 24.

BiggerPockets

BiggerPockets is a super easy platform to guest post – once you pay the membership fee, that is.

Even though it is geared toward investors, it’s still pretty easy for typical, non-investor agents to at least get some attention. Write about foreclosure trends in your market. Or multi-families. Or even just a profile of your market. Investors crave that information.

BP’s domain authority is a powerful 79.

The forums are also a great place to go all-in and network with investors in your market. It has personally accounted for nearly a third of my own sales in the past few years. BP is draconian about banning most outside links, but it is still the #1 place to network with potential investor clients.

Realty Times

Realty Times is an established site (domain authority of 70!) that publishes a lot of content. They make it very easy to publish your article, and actively solicit listing stories, advice from agents, advice from experts, market outlook reports, and announcements.

ActiveRain

And oldie but goodie – ActiveRain has been around a long time, and is still one of the top choices for agents to network and blog. It has loads of content and forums, and is very easy to get started with. It has a sky-high 83 domain authority.

Others

Related to guest posting is writing content or answering questions in some of the popular forums. Some places to consider writing for and answering Q&As include:

• WikiHow
• Quora

These are no-follow links, but they are also easy to get started with and you can more closely target the user’s intent.

For example, even if your site isn’t getting backlink SEO love, an article titled “How to sell my home in Anchorage” that sends people to your site in Quora ain’t bad!

Advanced

Some of the biggest names online accept guest posts that could work for a real estate agent. Forbes and CREtech are two examples. But these are pretty tough to get accepted.

Some publications don’t advertise their guest contributor offerings at all.

What to Look for in a Site

Domain Authority

The value of a site’s backlinks are based in large part on the site’s domain authority.

Domain authority is a scale of 0-100 that shows approximately how “authoritative” Google and other search engines think a site is. For example, established brands like Facebook have a DA of 98-99.

• 0-20: Weak Site
• 20-40: Good Site
• 40-60: Strong Site
• 60-80: Very Strong Site
• 80-100: Major Brand

You can discover a site’s domain authority by downloading the MozBar Chrome Extension. When the extension is active, each page in the search results, as well as when you are on a page, will have a par listing the page authority and domain authority for that specific page.

Here’s an example of the MozBar with the Realty Times.

No Follow vs Follow

It’s not good enough to just write a post and link back to your own site.

Many of the sites that accept posts use no-follow links on many external links, possibly including the link to your website.

No-follow links simply tell Google not to crawl through to the linked page. It is essentially cutting off the link juice and SEO benefits of having that link.

Sites do this in order to keep people from spamming them just to build links.

The easier it is to submit content, the more likely it is that the links you are adding are no-follow links. There are ways to tell if a site is using follow links or not on their guest posts or guest contributor profile pages.

The Do NOTs of Guest Posting

REtipster’s page with their guest post requirements gives a pretty thorough expectation of the kind of editorial standards most professional sites are going to expect from their guest content.

Backlinking to Your Own Stuff

Yes, the point of guest posting is to get backlinks to your own real estate business’ website.

But it is generally frowned upon and tacky to fill your article with backlinks to your own content.

If your site has relevant content that you want to link to, keep it to a single, highly relevant link and ask the editor’s permission before including it.

Editors are already doing you a huge favor by letting you rent their audience and domain authority. Don’t push it.

Forgetting to Internally Link

Internal linking is important for any good article. It gives the user relevant resources to dive into a topic that you may only have briefly mentioned but is discussed in depth more thoroughly elsewhere on the site.

By keeping visitors browsing more articles on your site, the time on site increases. Additional ads are shown. Additional monetization opportunities are seen. And the brand gets more exposure.

Your editor is going to want to see some internal links in anything you submit. Search their site for any related content that you can sensibly link to or reference within your article submission. That shows you know their content as well.

Teasing

I remember reading one guest post about marketing in which the article had very little detail or value, just very high-level, banal observations on the importance of good marketing.

Duh.

At the end, the author invited readers to learn more by going to her site.

The comment section excoriated her for it. The article provided no value. The editors probably did a poor job letting it slip to be published at all.

Be sure your article has lots of value.

Duplicating Content

No – you can’t write an article and then share that article to a dozen different outlets each to post as their own. Google penalizes publishers who do that.

There are creative, SEO friendly ways to get around that, and exceptions when a publisher might allow republishing a post that has been published elsewhere (like your own site).

But most will require your submissions be 100% unique and owned by the publisher you are submitting it to. So sometimes you have to make a choice, if the sweet new article you are writing will show up on your own site, or as a guest post on someone else’s.

Forget Their Audience

You might be a Realtor in Wichita Falls, TX, but chances are other agents on Inman.com don’t want to read the Best Place for Date Night in Wichita Falls, TX.

Learn and keep in mind the new audience you are writing for when submitting a guest post. Inman are tech savvy agents and brokers. Forbes are business owners and professionals. Trulia is for home buyers and sellers.

Each demographic has its own needs and you need to be speaking to their needs.

Conclusion

I wish I had more ideas to share. There are only a few really good options for real estate agents and content creators to contribute.

But there are some easy ones, and an easy way to quickly juice your digital marketing efforts with some high-quality backlinks and exposure!

Updated August 20, 2020; Originally published February 18, 2019.