You’ve finally chosen your niche and you’re ready to go and take action, but how can you really turn the dial and make rapid progress when you start?
The thing about working on niche websites is that you usually don’t get to see the benefits of your work for at least 6 months and usually not for over a year or potentially even longer. This is one of the main reasons why people give up, as they just can’t correlate the effort they are putting in with any type of reward, and in today’s ‘instant’ society, that’s just not good enough!
The good news is that I’ve found 3 shortcuts for you that will help you create a really solid base for your niche site and start to bring you your first traffic within weeks, if not days.
I’ve learned a lot of this from the training over at Human Proof Designs, so I’d definitely recommend signing up with their monthly membership, where you have access to over the shoulder video training as Dom builds out a couple of Niche sites, week by week.
For now, however, lets focus on these 3 massive tips:
Tip #1 – Blog Commenting
Now, you’ve probably heard that blog commenting is an old hat way of getting links and traffic to your site, and to a large extent that is still true. However, personally I still think this has massive benefit…
- Firstly, you are building up a relationship with other blogs, who you may want to work with and outreach to at a later date.
- Secondly, you are diversifying your link profile, so that it looks more natural to Mr Google.
- Thirdly, you’ll probably get a tiny bit of traffic coming from the sites, where you left your comments
My advice would be write really detailed comments and if possible ask questions, rather than just saying something like “I really like your blog!” as this will give you a much greater chance of getting your blog published.
Make sure that you are commenting on blogs that are either in your own niche or in a related niche, so for example if you had a niche site promoting juicers, then you could comment on other blogs in the whole wider health niche.
The other thing that you want to do is make sure that the blogs have been updated fairly recently, as it would be a bit strange commenting on a blog that had its last comment in 2012.
How do you find blogs to comment on?
Well, you can either use a tool such as dropmylink.com but I found that a bit hit and miss.
Instead I would add the following search criteria into Google : ‘Search term + “Leave a Reply“‘ so you would enter ‘Juicing + “Leave a Reply”‘
If you then goto ‘Tools’ you can select the time frame that the comments would be from:
I wouldn’t overdo this, but really think it’s a good way to start to get a bit of traction on your site.
Most of the links that you will get will be nofollow links, however, if you can get some dofollow links that would be a bonus.
Tip #2 – The Keyword Golden Ratio
This really is a gem of a tip, which was developed by Doug Cunnington over at Niche Site Project, which focuses on finding long tail keywords that are really low competition, which means you’ll be able to rank for a lot of them relatively easily.
So what’s the secret to this magical potion?
- Look for Keywords that have less than 250 searches per month
- Find out how many search results in Google have the exact search term in the title – Do this by using the following criteria: “allintitle: searchterm“
- Divide the #of exact search terms in the title by #searches
- If this number is less than 0.25 then you are in business and if it is less than 0.5 then it’s worth targeting as well
If you don’t have any Keyword Finding Software such as SECockpit then you can use the free Google extension ‘Keywords Everywhere‘ to find search volume
Example: ‘best apple juicer’
Has a search volume of 40 per month and looking at the below screenshot has 1,020 results with this keyword in the title
1020/40 = 25.5 so this is clearly not a good keyword to target using this technique
However, if you searched for ‘best juicer for apple cider’ this has only 10 searches per month and only 7 exact matches, so has a KGR value of 0.7 – this still isn’t great, but you get the idea.
The downside with this approach is that you’ll need to do a lot of manual work to plug the keywords into Google, however, the results are well worth it.
What do I do with the KGR Keywords? Once you have found a bunch of these keywords, then all you need to do is write an article of 600 – 1,000 words and maybe include a video and you’ll find that you’ll go straight to the top of the rankings for this keyword, as well as a bunch of other keywords that you might not even have though of before.
What is this so great? Well, within a very short space of time you’ll see visitors coming to your site from these search terms, and that really is encouragement in a bottle right away!!!
Tip #3 – Finding Forum Keywords
Last, but not least of our killer tips today is a technique where we will help you find keywords where forums are ranking on the first page in Google.
Why is this important? Well, a forum really is an easy target in the search results and something that you can easily beat with a half decent article.
To this you’ll need to
- Find a list of forums that are in your niche, which you can do with a simple Google search with ‘keyword + “forum”‘
- Get access to Semrush.com. Usually, this is a really expensive tool, however, if you do a quick search online you’ll usually find places where you can get a free 30 day trial and can use this time to do all your intense keyword research
- Add the URL of the forum into Semrush.com and see the list of keywords that it is ranking for
- Use the advanced filter to filter down the keywords so that they are on the first page of Google and have the word ‘forum’ in the URL like this:
BOOM, there’s a list of great keywords that you can easily target and get instant traffic with.
To make this even better, use this in combination with Tip #2 to find a sure way of getting traffic to your site easily, whilst your site is still in the sandbox
Summary
If you use these 3 techniques then for sure you’ll be attracting visitors to your site in no time at all, and if you are clever with your keyword research this will be traffic, which is related to your niche and will potentially lead to sales further down the line!
cies2016 says
Fantastic website you have here but I was curious about if you knew
of any discussion boards that cover the same topics
discussed in this article? I’d really love to be a part of community where I can get advice from other knowledgeable people that
share the same interest. If you have any recommendations, please
let me know. Many thanks!
martinos74 says
Hi Tammy, Thanks for the kind words. With regards to other commnunities I would recommend Authority Hackers, Human Proof Designs, Doug Cunnington from Niche Site Project and also Niche Pursuits. All of these sites have great information and podcasts that you can follow with fantastic information!
Sammy says
KGR keywords is a mine field that most people are yet to mine. I have used it on my sites and currently using it with my clients. The only problem you need to publish lots of content. Though funny enough i have targeted keywords with 200 searches and ended up with related keywords with 2k plus search. They don’t rank easily like KGR keywords but a few quality links do the trick. When am lazy to do the research, this is my to go to gig. https://www.fiverr.com/beatricecool/get-you-10-kgr-keywords?arrived_from_manage_gigs=true&display_share=true
shubho says
good article