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Niche Sites, Search Traffic, and Say No to Amazon

March 30th, 2008 Posted by Chanya

I’m busy working on my 2 niche sites and fine-tuning two new sites that I just stood up. Still looking for a new focus for this blog. Reading up on BANS and link building. Checking out Vic’s vlogs at Blogger Unleashed. His advice is priceless.

The last time we visited I told you about my niche blog (which focuses on book reviews) that I developed for search engine traffic but has attracted a few readers (and authors for that matter). That blog gets about 66% of its traffic from search engines. My goal for that blog is to a) increase search engine traffic by increasing the keyword density in the articles, and b) get more inbound links by submitting posts to Article Marketer and Squidoo.

As stated previously people are busy clicking away on the Amazon ads at that site. This is great except for one thing: they’re not buying anything and the Amazon links aren’t pay-per-click ads so you don’t profit unless the user purchases something from Amazon. After viewing one of Vic’s vlog posts in which he talks about the challenges of Amazon monetization (I’m paraphrasing here), I removed every trace of it from the site and replaced it with a different affiliate program. I’m simply testing the waters here; I might end up replacing the new links a few weeks down the road depending on how things work out.

Now. Let me tell you about my second niche site. It’s about a surgical procedure I had about a year ago. Before my surgery I searched the internet looking for info. on the surgery and its after effects. Although I found a few medical sites I didn’t see much written in layman’s terms. So I did some keyword research, checked out the competition, and decided to put up a site. This site was written purely for search engine traffic HOWEVER the site actually contains some good information. I did my research to make sure I didn’t mislead anyone about the procedure.

The site is only 10 weeks old, contains 9 articles, and gets 94% of it’s traffic comes from search engines. I have ZERO inbound links but surprisingly enough I’m making the first page in Google for terms like:

xxx surgery recovery times
webmd xxx surgery recovery

where “xxx” is the name of the surgical procedure.

The site isn’t monetized and I haven’t written a new post in 5 weeks. But the search traffic keeps coming. Don’t get me wrong, we’re only talking about a miniscule number of visitors but understand that this is my first foray into building a niche site that exclusively targets search engine traffic.

My goal for this blog is to a) increase search engine traffic by writing new articles that focus on my keywords, and b) get inbound links by submitting articles to Article Marketer and creating a Squidoo lens.

Hmmn, those goals are similar to the ones I have in mind for my book review site . . .