How to Score a Piece With a Website That’s Out of Your League

If you’ll pardon the cliche, an influential man once said: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

While I presume Wayne Gretzky had little to no experience with freelance writing, his historic quote applies perfectly to this article. How does a writer go about landing a guest post on a site with a high domain authority—that is, a website Google deems hyper-relevant for its subject area or industry, thus ranks high for related search terms? Well, if your philosophy is that there’s no point in even trying, it’s simply never going to happen.

Thanks, Mr. Gretzky.

Intimidation factor aside, these sites often don’t have an open call for submissions. Their editorial standards are very high, and finding a relevant topic that they haven’t covered already isn’t easy. These are only some of the challenges you’ll face when trying to get your work out there. 

Still, guest posting on high-authority sites has enormous benefits. You gain authority by proxy and position yourself as an expert. And it can bring additional traffic to your website, both directly from clicks to your site and via the boost in Google rankings you get from getting backlinks.

Here are the most effective strategies you can apply to get your writing published on high-quality blogs.