Finally, I would like to conclude that my dream to build a micro niche site officially failed!
It is sad to see myself failing but I have to accept that I was doing poorly on my niche site and it doesn’t seems to be as easy as it seems.
Basically, I tried building a niche site based on what I had posted on how to build links to your niche site.
So, what failed me?
In fact, one of the key reason is because I think that building a niche site is easy, doesn’t require much work and the profit is high.
All of these assumptions are wrong!
Building a niche site is definitely not easy and it requires lots of work. As for the profit, it highly depends on the type and amount of traffic you get and how you monetize as well.
As a result, I concluded that building a niche site is not easy and here are the things that I would like to share on lessons that I had learned.
1. Multi-tier link building is not that easy
As Google and other search engine evolved, they are getting smarter than before and performing a multi-tier link building (a.k.a. grey hat SEO) is becoming a bigger risk.
Even I had couple of my Squidoo lens were not indexed due to the reason that it lacks of quality.
On the other hand, article spinning is quite popular among this multi-tier link building and it is definitely not working anymore for your Squidoo lens if you had posted your article elsewhere.
This also means that the article spinning software that you had invested might have an even lesser usage opportunity than before.
However, this doesn’t mean that you will not succeed. If you notice, there are couple of internet marketers who had successfully build a niche site and profit from there.
So, it is very possible that multi-tier link building will work but my key point here is, don’t expect the entire process to be easy.
2. Link building is not the key
I mean, link building is the key but not really you have to do it in the way that you try to build links based on keyword.
In my niche site project, I build links completely based on long tail keyword to my important posts where I don’t build links at all to my home page at all.
So, there is something called the Domain Authority is probably not being focused here and you can find out your Domain Authority from Open Site Explorer.
Why I need to have a high Domain Authority here?
A high Domain Authority in my opinion enables your post to be indexed by search engine faster and also your posts to rank better as in overall.
In addition to that, guest bloggers today start to look for high Domain Authority when guest posting simply because Google Pagerank had not been updating since early this year and there isn’t any other way for them to evaluate a site apart from using the Open Site Explorer tool.
As a result, I personally think that building links via keyword to your important post is not the key here. Instead, I will focus into building links to my home page regardless of the keywords to increase the Domain Authority.
3. Content matters
In my niche site project, I seldom write contents for my own site. What I did was to write a few post that I think awesome and leave the site as it is.
Once I am done with that, I focus into building links using the multi-tier link building method.
Why it is a failed move here?
Firstly, search engine loves fresh content and if I don’t produce fresh content consistently means search engine don’t love me and they don’t rank me well.
Secondly, even if my visitor managed to land on my awesomely written post, they have nothing left to move from there and they leave after that which gives me a poor bounce rate.
So, with these two reasons, I strongly believe that it is important to produce content consistently.
As what been said by Neil Patel of Quicksprout, the traffic to his blog dropped from 45k to 35k when he reduced his blogging frequency from 5 times a month to something lesser.
4. Search Engine is not everything
Normally, it is very difficult for a new site to rank well on search engine.
Simply, this is because the site does not have sufficient content and quality links back to the site.
So, the best way for new site to do it’s marketing stuff is to do it through social media.
For instance, I had been driving traffic from Twitter to Blogging Fever over the last few months.
Although this blog is not completely new, but based on the number of links that point to this site, I would consider it as very low and still not able to do well on search engine.
Why driving traffic from Twitter works better than search engine in the early stage?
First of all, I can get Twitter followers easily.
All you need is to complete your Twitter profile page, tweet good stuff consistently and start following people.
I had done that and now I have more than 6,000 Twitter followers at @Blogging_Fever.
With this amount of followers, I can easily get traffic from Twitter by tweeting consistently.
So, my point here is, you don’t have to rely completely to search engine.
You can always start from somewhere else and it does not have to be Twitter as well because you can also do it on Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn or other social media sites.
5. Interest matters the most
Why interest is such an important key when my niche site failed?
Well, I started my niche site by selecting the cloud computing niche after going through keyword research.
Due to the lack of interest, I begin to run out of ideas for my writing.
An when I run out of ideas for my writing, this means that I no longer update the site and without fresh content, search engine will not love my site.
Compare to my ex-blog, a security blog where I consistently produce new content to it because every single day I read about security news and I aware of what’s happening in this niche.
So, it is important that the niche site that you are working on is something that you really interested with.
Will I start another niche site?
The answer yes but not as soon as it seems.
Since I am running Latte Hosting now, I would like to focus into this business first and then only think of a new project.
What about you there?
Have you learn any great stuff building a niche site or any kind of site?
Share with us below.
Thanks for sharing the experience so we can all learn from this,
i just had to make a comment about the “Domain Authority” thing,
i just wanna say that nobody can read what’s in Google’s mind, this whole “Domain Authority” is too much overrated, it’s only a “Moz” product and it’s not like Google will follow “Moz” standards .
Google is trying to rank sites that are trusted that happen to contain information on the search term, they couldn’t care less for the inbound links, and Google made that clear when they almost abandoned PageRank.
Many thanks and Best wishes!
Mitch recently posted..Loading, Web Design Lebanon, full-service marketing and advertising company
Thanks a lot for this awesome article. I am failing to compete in my blogging niche blog. Now i will work even harder to prove myself.
kunal gupta recently posted..How to become successful in blogging :- Factors to write an awesome Blog Post
Hey,
You’re exactly right throughout your article. I had also failed in many of my niche sites at starting. What I say is “Make content which matters” then promote it like a boss. š
If the article is properly on page seo optimized then small number of links can get it to page 1 and we can enjoy the taste of high organic traffic. Isn’t it? What are your thoughts?
Thank you!
~Nitin Singh
Nitin Singh recently posted..5 Simple Strategies to Start Perfect Link building Campaign
Great of you to share your experiences with us, this article will be a great lesson for me in the near future. Thanks for sharing.
Omar Nawaz recently posted..3 Top Mind-Blowing Tips to Optimize Your Social Media Marketing