Niche Website Update 17 – How I Went From Spot 500 to 14 in the Google Search Ranks!

One of the most frustrating things about starting a new niche website or building up the one you have now is getting little-to-no traffic!

Taking it a step further, “little-to-traffic” can be EXTRA frustrating if the whole point of that website you’re working so hard on is intended to be one of your “money sites”.  In other words, you were counting on it to earn a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars each month.  But obviously that isn’t happening.

For any money site, it’s a numbers game.  The higher the targeted traffic, the more likely you are to get more clicks on products you’re promoting and the more conversions (or sales) it will lead to.

Little-to-traffic is a killer.  It equals zero conversions.  No money for you!

That’s exactly what has been happening (up until this month) with my latest niche website, NS4.  NS4 is my music-niche related site with links to products on Amazon.  I’ve worked very hard to put together what I think is a quality website ( … although we’ll question that assumption a little further down …) and I haven’t had hardly any traffic at all!  Ugggh!

But then this month I had a revelation.  I was able to take NS4 from total obscurity (No. 500 in the Google search engines) all the way up to No. 14 for my main target keyword!!

That’s an outstanding step in the right direction!  I think my target audience will have a much easier time finding my website on the second page of the search results than somewhere past the 50^th page.

So how did I do it?  That will be the main topic of this month’s Niche Website update.

Recap – How April Started Out for NS4:

Up until now, I haven’t tried anything too fancy or special when it comes to trying to get NS4 to rank well in Google.  The site itself is up to about 30 posts in total with another 5 -10 to go.

For each post, I’ve:

• Researched a low competition long-tail keyword using Long Tail Pro, constructed the post around that single keyword, and then written the post according to proper SEO structure (header tags, meta description, alt tags, etc)
• Each post is then submitted to the social bookmarking service SocialADR for totally automated, natural (and super cheap) distribution throughout the social universe (Stumble Upon, Diigo, Delicious, etc)
• While all of this is going on, my VA posts about 12 comments per week on niche relevant blogs.
• For an extra “bite”, I got a few blogroll links to my homepage through Fiverr.

What did that result in?  Not much at all.  Ranking somewhere beyond No. +500 says it all, doesn’t it?

If you remember from the last niche website update, I was pretty disappointed with my results thus far.  I needed to dig deeper and figure out how I was going to start making some traction.

The only thing is – I didn’t expect the answer to completely fall right into my lap (or rather laptop) from nowhere.

A Gift from Above (in the Form of an Email):

Sometimes the answer you seek comes to when you in mysterious ways just when you most need it.  And that’s exactly what I got when I opened my email one morning early in April.

I’m on the email list for an outstanding website called Backlinko.  The founder, Brian Dean, had just finished a short eBook entitled “How to 25,000 Unique Visitors per Month” and had emailed everyone to let them know it was available for free download.

What a God-send!  I encourage you to download the ebook yourself, but just in case you don’t here’s a quick summary.  The ebook was an expansion on a topic that Brian has talked about before called The Skyscraper Technique.  Basically the way that works is this:

1)      If you want to rank well for a certain keyword, first research what the top 10 competition did to rank well for that same phrase.

2)      Take a hard look at your own content and out-do your competition by making something “bigger and better” (think of it like building a taller skyscraper).

3)      Reach out to the people that are linking to those ranking top-10 pages and encourage them to link to your new “bigger and better” post instead.

Brilliant!

It sounds so simple.  But yet I’m willing to bet most people don’t even get as far as #1.  I know I didn’t.

This was exactly the slap in the face I needed.  Directly after reading this ebook, I went straight to the top-10 pages for my main target keyword.  You know what I discovered?  My page wasn’t anything like theirs at all!

In fact, the more I read their work, it became obvious why my page wasn’t ranking.  Mine wasn’t nearly as good or useful!

This is exactly the kind of honest approach you need to have if you want to have any kind of success with ranking for keywords or building niche websites.  Being ignorant to the problem or overly confident is not going to help.  I believe it was Steve Jobs who said we need to always be asking the question: How can I make this better?

So that brings us to #2 of the process.  It was now crystal clear to me that if I really wanted to get in the game and have my work compete with the Top-10, I was going to need a major re-write of the homepage.   I was ready for the challenge!

To speak specifics, the main things I noticed about the Top-10 pages were that their pages were more descriptive about actual guitar models whereas mine was more general.   Also they had a lot of big photos of guitars whereas mine only had 2 generic photos.

Given that, I completely re-wrote the homepage more in the fashion of the top-10.  We went from 800 words of general text to over 2,000 words of very product specific content.  The new re-write also included lots of authority links and partial keyword matches as well as exact matches.  I also linked to each specific guitar from the homepage.  Then for indexing I submitted my homepage to SocialADR.

And then it happened …

2 days later I checked the search engine results and my niche site homepage had leap from total obscurity to No. 31!

Talk about the power of value-added content!!

Making a Good Thing Better:

As you can imagine No. 31 got me really excited and absolutely hungry for the No. 1 slot!  But it was going to take a lot more than just a re-write to get there.  As Brian pointed out (and is true in SEO), you need to spend just as much time (or more) promoting your post as you did writing it.  That brings us to the #3 point.

To be fair, I struggled a little bit in this area.  Brian’s advice was to use a service like Open Site Explorer to reverse engineer who is linking to your competition and then reach out to them.  I did just that, but my results were lack-luster.  There were a few unique problems:

• The people linking to my competition were my competition.  It was obvious to me that they had used some sort of private blog network scheme or link-building service to get their results.
• Surprisingly a lot of my competition didn’t have any of what I would call “actionable” links.  The links lead to directories or things where there wasn’t really a “person” you could reach out to.  There was one link that went to some guy’s blog, but he did not reply to my email.

Darn!  Now what?

It was time to get creative.  I decided that what I needed were some quick and easy links using guest posts.  And that lead me to Fiverr.

Fiverr has a ton of guest post gigs that are niche specific.  For a relatively low cost, I decided to give it a “why not” and ordered a handful of gigs over the next few weeks.

Now before I go any further, let me tell you to use caution!  Not all gigs on Fiverr are safe.  Make sure you really read what you’re going to get, look for negative reviews, etc.

Fortunately my luck continued.  After just 2 guest posts, NS4 took another leap forward to the No. 14 spot!

For the record, both of those posts included direct links back to my main page using my exact match keyword as the anchor text.

As you can imagine, this was a big help to boost traffic to NS4.  Here is what the organic traffic results looked like month over month for April compared to March using Google Analytics:

The Problem – Still No Revenue:

Although I was pleased to report this giant step forward, at the same time I’m a little embarrassed to state that as of today NS4 has still not made a dime.  Zero revenue.

But then again what can I expect?  The site just barely came alive now.  For sure it wasn’t doing much of anything when it was at No. +500.  Now that we’re at No. 14 we’re heading in the right direction.

Despite all the fast and flashy niche website builders there are out there, to truly build up the authority of a new site in a way that will result in regular everyday organic visitors takes time.  NS1 and NS2 proved this.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Targeted visitors click on your links and create conversions.  Targeted visitors come from the search engines when people want to know more about something and look it up.  Therefore my success hinges on being relevant in the Google search engine ranks.

According to my Google Webmaster account, NS4 is starting to pickup rank for a handful of keywords.  As we’ve proven before, the best way to do this is to write relevant posts, get them indexed, and then build links to them.  This is how authority is created, and it’s what will help you get the attention you want in the search engines.

So going forward, here is what we’re going to do:

• With the exception of a few remaining gigs, I’ve pretty much exhausted all the opportunities with Fiverr.   There might be one or two more, but that will be pretty much it.
• My next campaign is going to be to reach out to other niche blogs and see what I can do to get a guest post on their site.
• For any new guest posts I write, my next goal will be to get links to the individual articles themselves rather than just always pointing to the homepage.  Linking out to your internal pages will pass on link juice to your main page and give you more well-rounded link diversity.
• Part of building your authority also involves simply adding more posts to your current site.  That only adds to the number of relevant sub-domains associated with your site and demonstrates the value-added to a potential visitor.  And don’t forget that internal links in your new posts also count towards your authority too.

Niche Website April ’14 Income Report:

Here are the complete results for all my niche sites for April:

I wish there was more to write about here, but it’s been pretty boring in terms of updates to my other niche websites.  All of my time and focus has been to get the stone rolling on NS4.  So these other sites have taken a seat on the back-burner.

Here’s a few notes to pass on:

• I did manage to achieve having one guest post published on a friend’s site that had a link to NS1.
• I had my VA start commenting building links back to NS1 and NS2.
• I changed up the Adsense look for NS2.  Although I think it makes the website look better, it didn’t really seem to accomplish a whole lot in terms of extra revenue.
• NS4 continues to be the walking-dead niche website (it was dead to Google at spot No. +500, but then it came back to life as high as No. 39).  However, the site is receiving less than 10 visitors per day and making almost no revenue.  Again, I don’t really expect to do much here for now.
• The next priority I have after NS4 gets going is to build up NS1 even bigger!  The site has 60 posts, and I can only imagine how kick-butt it would be if I could get that number up to 100 or more posts.  But I’m not prepared to do so until I can put together a list of great low competition keywords and make sure I’ve got a fighting chance of ranking for each one.   So for now this one has a pin in it – perhaps we’ll make some time for it in May or June.

Readers: How have you taken your niche website or single post from total obscurity to the fore-front ranks of Google?  What kind of steps of tricks do you think   actually pay-off and which ones don’t?  Has anyone else gone the Fiverr route?

Previous Niche Site Chapters:

1. Starting the Next of My Extra Income Ideas – Building a Niche Website
2. Niche Website Project Part 2 – The Unveiling
3. Building My Money Earning Sites – Niche Website Update Part 3
4. Building My Money Earning Sites – Niche Website Update Part 4
5. Building My Money Earning Sites – Niche Website Update Part 5
6. Building My Money Earning Sites – Niche Website Update Part 6
7. Niche Website Update 7 – Site Number 2 Launched!
8. Niche Website Update 8 – NS2 on the First Page Search Results Already!
9. Niche Website Update 9 – Criticisms of My Second Niche Site
10. Niche Website Update 10 – NS3 is a Failure (So Far) and I’m Glad
11. Niche Website Update 11 – Doubling the Size of NS1 and NS2
12. Niche Website Update 12 – Getting Click-Bombed and Over $600 of Passive Income!
13. Niche Website Update 13 – NS3 May Be Lost But We Still Made $933 in Passive Income!
14. Niche Website Update 14 – Creating an Amazon Niche Site and $439 in Passive Income!
15. Niche Website Update 15 – A Slow Start for NS4 and $935 in Passive Income!
16. Niche Website Update 16 – NS4 is Growing – Plus My Passive Income Report

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