It’s been over two months since I introduced my mass niche site project. And I have learnt rather a lot in those two months, as I revealed yesterday.
Here’s the situation in a nutshell – I have been spending a lot of money on unproven system. It sounds crazy – because it is – but it is easy to get carried away once you have an idea in your head. Whilst the system might work and I may have gotten a great head start if I’d carried on along the same path, on the flipside it could have gone disastrously wrong.
At the start of the year, I was in a huge rush to scale up a niche site building process. Now I am feeling far more laid back about the whole endeavor. My freelance earnings are healthy (and I am confident that I could increase them at any point if I wanted or needed to).
In January I was heading into the unknown. In April I feel under no pressure – so being patient and methodical is now the name of the game.
What Next?
The niche site business model that I originally laid out back in January is now on hiatus. I have cancelled all of my subscriptions, and my VA quit the other day, so my ongoing overheads are now non-existent. Here’s what I have right now:
- 6 fully built out and backlinked sites
- 7 fully built out sites
- 5 domain names
I will not be touching the first 6 sites now until they are at least 90 days old. Meanwhile, the other 12 sites are going to be the subject of some experimentation.
I have found someone else who is willing to build out the 5 remaining sites on a dollar per hour basis, so I will get her to follow the instructions that I laid out for my first VA. It’s what comes next that is interesting.
Backlinking Is The Issue
I’m pretty happy with every element of my niche site building process with exception to link building. That is the one area I am unsure of. So I plan to trial three different backlinking methods across the 12 sites in an effort to discover an effective strategy that I can scale up.
I have already decided upon one backlinking strategy – an article marketing service offered by a guy called Pat Jackson. This was originally brought to my attention a while ago by Tory McBroom, and I instinctively feel that it would be an effective strategy for niche sites. I am targeting very low competition keywords, so it shouldn’t take an epic backlinking strategy to climb the rankings, and this service targets several different article networks – which means that if some get de-indexed by Google, there should still be plenty of other backlinks from other services to fill the gap.
That is of course all theoretical – which is why I am testing it to see if it works. The question is – what other strategies should I test?
That Is Where YOU Come In
I know that a lot of you guys have good experience in building niche sites. So I would like to take this opportunity to ask what strategies you use to successfully build links to your niche sites. There is just one “rule” to this experiment – the strategy must not require signing up to a specific service. It would be completely uneconomical to do so, given the relatively small scale of the experiment. So we’re talking about services like Pat Jackson’s, Fiverr gigs…or anything else your imagination can permit.
I will be sharing the results (positive or negative) of my experimentation over the coming weeks, so it could be a useful learning experience for all of us. So please, don’t be shy – reveal your link building strategy in the comments section! If you don’t have a strategy but have something else to say, you are of course welcome to comment also.
Creative Commons photos courtesy of gripso_banana_prune
Thanks for the mention my friend! Keep in mind that the “system” you use for link building is more important than the type of links you build. SEO’ers are constantly looking for the holy grail type of link – HPBL’s, high PR blog links, etc. – and while those links can be effective, they make up a small part of an effective backlinking portfolio.
People often pick on profile links saying they are worthless in the current SEO landscape. Why? What makes them anymore worthless than any other type of link – comments, wiki’s, article’s, retweets, etc. – that can be produced in mass quantities? All of these links can play an integral part in an effective backlink portfolio.
This is where the importance of building an effective backlinking system comes in. You can scale a backlinking campaign and rank tough keywords through automation by simply using a system like the link stack modulation I described in our email conversation. It’s easy and relatively cheap to build hundreds of thousands of backlinks going 4 or preferably more tiers deep all feeding your money site. The machine needs links to rank websites, so keep feeding the machine links through multiple tiers!
People are running scared because of recent changes across the SEO landscape…but algorithmically not much has changed. In fact, that’s why big G has resorted to manual intervention. The strategies I’ve used YEARS ago are still working today.
More importantly, diversify your traffic sources so Google is just a blip on your referring sites screen, but I digress…
Long story short, you are now on the right track. Identify the system that works for your unique situation, rinse and repeat.
Tory,
Thanks again for all of your advice – I really appreciate it. Now I just need to sit down and read your email several times so I can actually understand the system you recommend 😉
Cheers,
Tom
Agree with Tory above, just use everything, and not all of that has to go to the money site. 😉
I agree with Tory as well. But to add to the specifics there’s 2 types of links I’ve been using with a lot of success:
Nothing new, but it’s working for me.
Hey Wesley,
I think your first idea is a no go for me, as it labor intensive and not scalable.
The second idea is something worth considering – you could simply hand PLR articles over to a VA and have them set the sites up. It’s essentially a form of article marketing, but you can get some relatively high authority sites like Squidoo and WordPress.com in there. Tory suggested (I’m sure he won’t mind me mentioning) that you can actually target long tail keywords for your money site’s subject matter with your Web 2.0s, and perhaps even get them ranked for them. Then you can actually indirectly drive additional search engine traffic to the money site.
Food for thought – thanks! 🙂
Tom
The scattergun approach, I guess you would call it? Great for link variety, great for “spreading the risk” with tiered linkbuilding…but how easy is it to scale? Will be looking into this. Cheers Andre!
There are really only 2 ways that I scale link building: outsource or automate. Regardless of whether you tier your links or not you basically scale links the same way that you build them towards your money site. Except that you point them to your first tier links instead.
i am still new to all this myself. Thanks Wesley for the tips on the web 2.0 properties..everytime I hear this term I think ..what are web 2.0? some sort of high profile sites? sounds like they may not be but I will google them to see what I find
Hey Aleshia,
They’re really just websites that allow you to build your own subdomain websites. Like http://yoursite.wordpress.com/. The sites immediately carry some authority because they are related to the main site, so they pass a bit of “link juice” from the get go. Anyone else feel free to chime in if I haven’t described this particularly well or accurately 🙂
Cheers,
Tom
Hi Tom,
The service offered by Pat Jackson looks like a good deal, but are you not concerned with the limited use of anchor text? According to his sales page you get two links max, and only one keyword per link. Unless I am missing something, this means all of the links are going to have the same exact anchor text. So unless you plan to build a lot of other links with varying anchor text, outside of Pat’s service, you are going to create an unnatural linking pattern that is sure to raise some red flags.
I emailed Pat yesterday to ask about spinning the anchor text, and possibly adding in some random “click here” anchors too, but have yet to hear back from him.
Or I guess you could use multiple article submissions from Pat for the same URL, but with different anchor text to help diversify the anchor text profile. But this seems like it would get expensive and unnecessary, especially for sites that do not need a massive amount of backlinks to rank well. If you do your keyword research right and properly assess your competition, I would think one article submission from Pat would be enough to rank well considering all the different services Pat will be submitting the article to.
Agreed! 🙂
Hi Kevin,
I share your concerns and asked Pat the same question – I’m am also awaiting a response.
Cheers,
Tom
Please let me know if you receive a response from Pat, and I will do the same.
Thanks!
Will do 🙂
Hi Tom,
Last week I created a blogpost with a simple backlink strategy that still works for me most of the time (if not, my keyword is bad, not the strategy 😉
If you are interested you cluan find it on my blog:
http://www.nichewebsitesforsale.com
Sincerely,
Mark
Hey Mark,
That link isn’t working for me…
Cheers,
Tom
Ooops, slight typo on the link 🙂
Here’s the deeplink: http://www.mynichewebsitesforsale.com/simple-and-cheap-linkbuilding-strategy-that-works/
Hopefully it will help you!
Thanks Mark, I’ll take a look 🙂
You may have heard about all the ‘hype’ around Chris Munch’s Hook pigeon training. I brought it but didn’t have the time to go through the live training when it was on. So i’m going through the recorded sessions now. I don’t know if the course is still available and I can’t give all the details of it yet as i haven’t finished!
In short it involves using viral content (mostly pictures but also video if you’re able to) which you get people to share. In doing this they provide completely ‘natural’ back-links to your site. The viral content doesn’t have to be directly related to your niche- and you can use it in any niche (i.e I am planning on applying the strategy to some fairly unremarkable Amazon review sites)
There’s a fair bit to it – getting the right viral content, installing it on your site in the right way and getting initial traction on the sharing. Its kind of like getting your content to go viral (ie other people doing the backlinking) without all of it needing to be the hottest most newsworthy thing. Is it a bit of a ‘trick? yes but one that it seems Google can’t help but love.
The point of me even mentioning it is that its so outside the normal line of events in back- linking efforts… In the these times of entire private blog networks disapearing from Google overnight It should probably give us all pause for thought with this back-linking craziness
I’ve had good luck with buying blog posts on Fiverr but this only works on a small scale as there are a limited number of sellers willing to post your keyworded article to their blog. You want relevance, too, which narrows it down even further.
Interesting – didn’t realize that was possible…