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My Trip to Oz: Developing a Niche Blog

March 17th, 2008 Posted by Chanya

I feel like I’m wandering along the yellow brick road looking for a new direction for this blog. Along the way I’m also working on a couple of niche sites. Perhaps the wizard can help.

Until then I thought it would be interesting to share my experiences with one of my niche blogs. To get started, let’s look at some of the stats:

Domain Age:	10 weeks old
First Posting:	8 weeks ago
# of Posts:	22
Page Rank:	0
Inbound Links:	51
Highest PR of Inbound Links:	PR4
Target Audience:	1) search traffic, 2)readers
Total Visits:	635
First time visitors:	588
Return visitors:	47
Traffic Analysis
Search engines:	66%
Other:	34%
Monetization
Type:	Amazon.com affiliate sales Google Adsense for Content
Income:	$0

Let’s chat about some of this:

Domain Age (10 weeks). I searched and searched but couldn’t find an existing domain that contained any of my keywords. Actually I did find one domain that would have worked: it was 5 years old and the seller simply said “make me an offer.”  Unfortunately after digging around a bit I discovered that none of the site’s pages had been indexed, a sure red flag I was told.  Therefore I decided to go ahead and purchase a new domain.  I mean heck, each day it gets a little older.

Inbound Links (51).  Most of these links are the result of visiting similar sites and leaving interesting comments.  This is by far the most time consuming part of running this particular niche site.  I try to leave good comments.  If someone writes a post that I can’t relate to I don’t say “good post.” I simply move on until I find something that I can comment on.

So, how did I find the relevant sites and determine their page rank?

I used these tools:  Comment Hut Lite and SEO Elite.  Comment Hut Lite rocks.  You simply enter your main keywords and it searches the Internet for sites with similar keywords.  It then provides a nice report that gives you the page rank of each site.  Comment Hut Lite is free.  It only provides results from WordPress sites and will only report on about 10% of the potential backlink opportunities but again, it’s free.   The full version runs about $150.

SEO Elite is outstanding (see the sidebar ad).  It works similar to Comment Hut in that you enter your main keywords, tell it to find similar sites, and let it provide the page rank for each relevant site.  SEO Elite however has numerous other options that help you analyze, target, and improve your SEO efforts.  For example, you can determine how many results you want to see per keyword (10-1,000) and choose the minimum page rank you’re interested in targeting.

SEO Elite also has several other features which to be honest I’ve not thoroughly explored yet.  However, in addition to the feature that lets you find relevant sites  with backlink potential it’s got a feature that lets you analyze your current backlinks.

With this feature you enter the name of your domain, determine how many backlink results you want to see (10-1,000), select which search engines the software should query, determine which (if any) domains should be excluded in the analysis, determine whether you want to see the page rank, Alexa rank, and age of the website where your backlinks reside, etc., etc.  It’s a fairly feature rich piece of software.

The resulting report shows you all of the information above in addition to displaying the page on which your backlink resides, the anchor text that’s associated with your backlink, the total number of outbound links on the page, and most importantly, whether the site uses nofollow!  This immediately lets you know whether the backlink from that site is any good from an SEO standpoint.  I’m sure you can see how powerful this tool can be.  When I run this report I base my website visits on the page rank of the site and whether it uses nofollow. I know that might sound somewhat calculating but, well, it is what it is. I think this is necessary when running niche sites. Some may suggest it’s a necessary attitude that internet marketers looking to make money online should adopt. Oh gracious, did I just use the term “make money online”? Gulp.

Back to business. SEO Elite costs about $167.  You can purchase SEO Elite here (yeah, I get a small commission if you do that) or go directly to their website. I can’t stand their web page (it looks too spammy to me) but I’m here to tell you that it’s a great product. To be fair to the Comment Hut folks I’ve only used their free product so I don’t know how the full product compares to SEO Elite.

Highest PR of Inbound Links (PR4).  My new site has been added to blogrolls at 3 sites, one of which has a PR4.  I didn’t ask the site owners to do this, they added me on their own.  I’ve been told to contact site owners to see if they’d be willing to exchange links for free but advised only to do this if the website’s content is relevant to your site.  I haven’t done this yet because I feel like I need to get some page rank before asking.

Perhaps I should reconsider based on the breakdown of the 51 inbound links. Here’s the detail:

PR4: 4
PR3: 12
PR2: 14
PR1: 4
PR0: 18

Most of these links were obtained BEFORE using SEO Elite by the way.  As you can see I need to spend more time using that product so I can target sites with higher page rankings.

Target Audience.  Grizz will tell you that you have to decide whether you’re writing for search engines or readers.  It’s that simple.  I’m writing for search engines but what’s happened is this: as a result of visiting relevant sites I’ve picked up regular readers and RSS subscribers, which helps explain the return visitors (I think).  I’m still targeting search engine traffic though and most of the search terms that bring visitors to the site are completely relevant to the site’s content i.e., organic traffic.

Traffic Analysis (search engines: 66%).  As you can see the majority of my traffic comes from search engines but I want this number to be much higher.  However I can tell you that the search engine traffic I’m getting is directly linked to my keyword optimization efforts.  Duh, I finally get it.  Almost each post title contains long tail keywords.  My articles vary in length from 250 to 750 words and I include keywords at the beginning and end of EVERY article.  Additionally, I try to link to other articles on my site whenever possible.  As a result I’m ranking on pages 1 - 3 in Google for some of my long tails.

Monetization (Type=Amazon.com & Adsense; Income=$0).  Almost each post contains an Amazon link (some are text only, some contain both images and text).  Readers are happily clicking away on the links but they haven’t purchased anything yet.  I tried adding Adsense ads but no one clicked on them at all even though they were configured to blend in with the rest of the text and embedded inside the articles. So I eventually got smart-priced.  I can only assume Adsense didn’t work because the “readers” know better.  I’ve got to rethink this strategy so I can reintroduce Adsense and get the search engine visitors to stay longer, poke around, and click on Google ads.

I recently reconfigured my Amazon links so it’s crystal clear to visitors that if they click on that particular anchor text they’ll end up at the Amazon site.  This hasn’t slowed them down much, they’re still clicking away but not buying.  Each article reviews a particular niche product that can be purchased at Amazon.com so it’s not like I write an article about a digital camera model and then insert an Amazon link for the I Am Legend DVD.  No, the links are directly related to the content of the articles.

Hey, I just thought of something.  My Amazon links are always located at the end of the articles.  This means visitors are reading through to the end of the article (or scrolling through to the end) and then clicking the Amazon links.  Hmmn.  Perhaps I’ll revisit Google and run some tests where I won’t include Amazon links but instead place Google ads at the end of a few articles.  I’ll let you know what happens.

In Summation

Here are the things I need to continue working on:

1. Use SEO Elite and Comment Hut Lite to locate potential backlinks.
2. Optimize titles and post content for keywords.  For the niche site in question I can tell you that this is getting a lot easier to do; it’s almost become second nature.  I think that’s because it’s a focused subject area that I know a lot about.
3. Rewrite posts and submit them to Article Marketer.  I just submitted my first article to them (related to the niche site we’re discussing).  It’s supposed to be reviewed today so I can’t wait to see if the article gets picked up.
4. Experiment with Adsense ad placement.

This may seem elementary to some of you but for me it’s new territory. Also, I know my traffic stats are pretty pitiful but they’re slowly getting better.

This is by far the longest article I’ve written since I started blogging; it was also one of the easiest ones to write.  I guess that’s because I’m simply writing about my personal experiences setting up niche blogs.  Hmmn, could this be it?  The focus for this blog? Nah, that would mean it’s another blog about blogging.

My next post will be about my other niche site. It’s totally different from the one above in that it’s only 5 weeks old and is getting about 80% organic search engine traffic. I’ll also write about the other niche sites I’m trying to get up and running. As Vic says, diversification is key.

Enough of that, it’s now your turn. Have you started a niche blog? If so, how’s it doing? Also, if you have something to add about my monetization efforts I’d love to hear from you.