The One Thing You MUST Do As A Newbie Niche Site Builder

This is a guest post by Tom Ewer of Leaving Work Behind.

 

Niche sites are a much-discussed topic in the world of internet marketing. Everyone has an opinion – whether the topic is keyword research, content creation, backlinking strategies, or any other marginally contentious point of discussion.

 

Let’s be honest – your head is probably spinning with the wealth of conflicting advice out there. Fortunately, I am not here to compound your misery. I just want to give you one solid piece of advice and then point you off in the right direction.

 

What I am about to tell you is something that I desperately wish I had known when I first started building niche sites, some eight months ago. I know for a fact that I would be much further along in the development of my niche site portfolio if I had followed this one simple rule.

 

Okay; that’s enough suspense-building. Here is the one thing you absolutely must do as a newbie niche site builder.

 

Diversify

I spent the first four months of my niche site building efforts on just one site. I poured an enormous amount of energy into it, producing three articles a week, every week, without fail. I spent hours creating web 2.0 properties and feeding mass article submissions to them.

 

Do you know what happened? I got Google slapped. Terminally. I got a little too overexcited with my backlinking, and got what I deserved. Whilst the experience taught me an extremely valuable lesson, I was essentially left with nothing.

 

 

Do you know how much that niche site earned me in total? $82.36 gross. In reality, I made a massive loss (relatively speaking) on the project. Although the site was making $4-5 per day at its peak and growing, all of that was now lost.

 

Don’t Make It Difficult For Yourself

So please, learn from my mistake. If you are brand new to niche site building, you need to prepare yourself for a huge learning curve. There are so many little intricacies that catch you out – that is the nature of the beast.

 

But do not fear – it’s not all doom and gloom! Not by a long shot. Let’s talk about the right way to start your niche site building endeavor.

 

Your short term goals should be to (in order of importance):

1. Persevere
2. Learn
3. Earn

 

I call it the PLE principle – mainly because it sounds funny when you say it out loud (you just did it, didn’t you?). The numerical order of the PLE principle is extremely important, because if you do not persevere, you will never learn. And if you do not learn, you will never make any money. It’s that simple.

 

 

The Key To Niche Site Success

The key to niche site success isn’t effective keyword research, masterful content creation, or brilliant backlinking (although all three are of course very important). The key to niche site success is perseverance. Everything stems from your willingness to approach your niche site projects with enthusiasm and determination, over a prolonged period of time.

 

Which brings me back to diversification. Unless you are particularly masochistic, you will want to see results in order to persevere. Whilst we all understand that ranking in Google takes time, we don’t want to be sat in our chairs three months from now, with no pages in the top ten, or worse, a one-site project that has just been Google-slapped to hell.

 

So do yourself a favor – don’t build a site. Build a portfolio. Don’t build a quasi-authority site with 10 posts – build 5 micro-niche sites with 2 articles each. If you are targeting 10 different keywords on five different sites, you’ll feel like things are happening. You will sense that undeniable sensation of progress. And that is what will drive you to persevere. And as I have already said, everything else will fall in place behind that.

 

 

Practical Considerations

As long as you are not throwing vast quantities of money at your sites by outsourcing all of your work (which you really shouldn’t be doing if you are brand new to niche sites), you need to adopt the attitude that failure is okay, or even welcome. Failure in niche site building will teach you lessons that you will never make again.

 

So with that in mind, do not be afraid to target modest keywords. There is no shame in focusing your efforts on keywords sharing the following characteristics:

• 1,000 exact match local searches per month
• CPC in excess of $1
• AdWords competition in excess of 50%/medium

 

Just make sure that you target really low-competition keywords. Whilst you may not immediately pick up gems, you will be really heartened to see your niche sites getting onto the front page of Google. You will begin to realize that it is actually possible – that you are learning how to build profitable niche sites.

 

When it comes to competition, look out for a top 10 that shares the following characteristics:

• Three or more sites with a PR and domain age of 2 or less. This is more of a rule of thumb rather than a set-in-stone requirement, but low-PR/domain age sites can be exploited, and also suggest that the barriers of entry are low.
• Poor onsite optimization. Check that the exact match keyword is not featured in the URL, title, headers, and meta description of your potential competitors. Good onsite optimization can make a huge difference to your ability to rank above more influential pages.
• No root domains.
• Less than 10 domains (as opposed to links) pointing to the page (as opposed to the domain on which the page resides) that is ranked.

 

If you target keywords by following the above instructions and engage in some modest backlinks building, you should see positive SERP rankings before long.

 

 

Now Get Going!

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

~ Dale Carnegie

 

The sooner you start building these sites, the closer you will be to seeing the kind of results that will drive to you persevere. You’ll soon get hooked into the PLE principle – and then it is just a matter of time. If you have any questions at all, just leave a comment below or ask me via my Facebook page.

 

 

Tom Ewer is the owner of Leaving Work Behind, where he blogs about Keyword Research & SEO, as well as his quest for internet marketing success and location independence.

Creative Commons photos courtesy of Bev Sykes, dingatx, MoneyBlogNewz, gin soak and Gina Parody

Tagged as: guest post by Tom Ewer, how to conduct good keyword research, keyword research for success