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