MasonWorld Late Night Internet Marketing » super niche site

Niche Super-Site: Checking In On Elvis

Mark E. Mason — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:00:00 +0000

Several months ago, I started a case study of the Elvis Niche. I built a site, added content, and demonstrated that I could rank for a very long tail keyword with no competition. As I mentioned in that post, I felt like there was no stopping me after I ranked for “Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie”, and I announced my intention to attack higher competition phrases — “elvis presley collectibles” (74 searches per day), the “life of elvis presley” (226 searches per day) and “elvis presley history of” (4383 searches per day). My plan for ranking was to use Link Directories and Article Marketing.

Well, I have not started my article marketing, but I am accumulating backlinks

Backlinks Make The Difference

Because of this post series on niche sites, I have quite a few backlinks for terms similar to "history of elvis" and history of elvis presley or "elvis presley history of". A quick check of Google shows that we are magically on the front page! Woo hoo!

Obviously, the next goal is to move up the page.

Using Link Directories - OK or Not?

Sometimes, you learn as you go along based on the advice that you get. One guy that I trust recommended that I use free link directory submissions as a way to get backlinks. When these directories are new (and free), they have very low page rank. Once they get older, the page rank may increase, making the link more valuable. This takes a long time.

I tried to figure out if this was "white hat." According to Google's Webmaster Guidelines, they recommend:

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Now, free link directories are not exactly "industry specific expert sites," but it is pretty clear that Google does not consider all link directories to be bad. When these directories are new (and free), they have very low page rank. Once they get older, the page rank may increase, making the link more valuable. So, I'd be interested in your comments regarding the acceptability of free link directory submission (and the effectiveness).

Next step is article marketing as described in Article Marketing Domination. I've hired someone on ScriptLance to write some content for the site, and I'll be writing about that experience in a future post.

Thanks, Mark

Be sure and check out these related posts.

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Niche Super-Site: Plan for Building Traffic

Mark E. Mason — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 04:52:59 +0000

So much has been going on in the last few weeks. Most obviously, I was able to convince Garry Conn to redesign my blog and create this killer custom theme just form me. Garry is a great guy, and he knows a heck of a lot about niche IM. On top of that, he is pretty handy at php, CSS and graphics. If you need someone you can trust to work on your blog for a fair price, I can honestly recommend him unconditionally. I am still turning some knobs and adjusting some dials (most notably, Aweber), but I could not be happier with the new look (and the amazing service from Garry).

Turning my attention back to Elvis Presley

Now that the new theme is up, I simply cannot believe that my plan to document my creation of a Niche Super-Site started on February 4th. Man, time flies when you are having fun with part-time Internet Marketing. In case you missed the press frenzy in early February (LOL), I am quite literally taking a page out of Caroline Middlebrook's free eBook and documenting my experience of trying to create a niche site. I picked a random topic (Elvis Presley), and so far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

At the end of the long-tail keyword test, we were able to declare victory because I now rank on page one of Google for the killer MMO phrase "Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie.” This shows that on-page SEO works to get listed for a search term. The problem is that where you rank for that term depends on your off-page SEO. For more on this, I recommend the free EasySEO eBook from Josh Spaulding. As I mentioned in my previous post, with “Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie” under our belt, it is now time to attack higher competition phrases -- “elvis presley collectibles" (74 searches per day), the "life of elvis presley" (226 searches per day) and "elvis presley history of" (4383 searches per day).

Simple plan for niche market SEO

Simply put, my strategy is to create a landing page for Elvis Presley collectibles and another for Life of Elvis Presley. I'll write good SEO copy and pay attention to details like making sure the keywords appear in the title tag, headers, beginning of the article, exerpt, etc. Basically, I will simply do all of the things that are documented in the free EasySEO eBook. Once those pages are complete, I plan to use the variation on Bum (article) Marketing taught in Josh's Article Marketing Domination (AMD). If you are not familiar with article marketing, the basic idea is to write articles about your niche containing your keywords. At the end of the article, you include links back to your site for your keywords. You submit the article to article directories. These directories are well indexed, and they allow you people to copy your article, propagating your links. (Note that you do not put these articles on your own site).

In Article Marketing Domination, Josh outlines some key steps for article marketing, including

Creating effective articles
Creating an effective signature block
Submission strategies

So, I plan to put this to the test starting in a few days. The problem is, I need some articles. I am not sure I have lots of Elvis Articles in me (this is why it is useful to choose a niche you really care about).

Buying Articles

Article marketing is the perfect place to use a writer for hire (ghost writer). I was able to hire a lady on ScriptLance to write 20 300 word articles about Elvis for $70 ($3.50 per article). ScriptLance is neat because your job goes out for bids, and you can select from the people that respond. This writer has a BA liberal arts and is US based. The $70 is held in escrow until I am happy. Now, I might not always want to spend $70 on a marketing -- but this is an experiment...

So, we'll see how it goes. The traffic data for HistoryOfElvis.com is contaminated by this case study, so it may be hard to judge. Again, we'll see.

Topics remaining on my list for this niche super-site series include the following:

eZineArticles Content
Write your own content
Set up AA404 plugin
Set up a pseudo-link-directory as pillar content
Remember to back up your data.
Comment Kahuna
Secure WordPress
Other marketing ideas
The 50 site checklist
Others…

Best regards,

Mark

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Niche Super-Site: Testing the Long Tail Keyword (3)

Mark E. Mason — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:48:40 +0000

Well, I did it. In a previous post, I declared my intent to test long tail keyword theory. Now, I proudly rank on the first page of Google for the highly competitive term "Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie." What does this tell me? Look out "internet marketing" and "make money online." Mark Mason is an unstoppable SEO POWERHOUSE.

Well, not exactly. Actually, it tells me that if you can identify long tail keywords with low competition where you can make money, you can easily rank on the first page of google. If you read the free EasySEO Book, you will begin to believe that you can rank in google for any term you want.

So, let's try that. I still have the goal of writing several articles for ezinearticles. So, let's attack something harder -- "elvis presley collectibles (74 searches per day), the life of elvis presley (226 searches per day) and elvis presley history of (4383 searches per day). To do this, we are going to create three specific "landing pages" (one for each term), we are going to write 5 ezinearticles (with a resource box targeting each term), we are going to pay to get submitted to directories, and we are going to buy a few blog posts. Let' see how we do." More on this 4-part traffic strategy in the very near future (like tomorrow). For the meat of my strategy, i plan to follow Article Marketing Domination.

For now, I will bask in my glory.

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Beginners Guide to SEO (Free)

Mark E. Mason — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 05:30:09 +0000

OK, this is simply the best free SEO book I have seen. That's right, I said free. This is everything that you need to know about Search Engine Optimization to get started on your site. Best of all it's free. the kicker is, if you If you download it from Josh, I get two dimes! I don't really care about the $0.20. If you are just getting started and are mesmerized by all the SEO noise on the Web, this eBook will get you started (and finished).

In the book, Josh makes it really simple -- on page and off page SEO. A few key tips, all good solid advice that it takes most people weeks or months to learn.

Check it out. Download Josh Spaulding's Easy SEO Report now. It's free. You'll be glad you did.

Niche Super-Site: Adsense

Mark E. Mason — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 23:00:00 +0000

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

Over the last to days, we have talked about how you could diversify your niche income by taking advantage of the eBay affiliate sales program using phpBay Pro and how you can make affiliate sales of niche items using PopShops. The third piece to our monetization puzzle is, of course, Adsense.

If you don't know about Adsense, you are living under a rock. In fact, you are living under the same rock that I was under until my wife learned about Adsense on the Today show and asked me about it three months ago. Adsense ads are everywhere, but I never stopped to think about how I could benefit from them.

If you are following along in Caroline's eBook on how to build a niche site with WordPress, you will be using the Prosense template from Dosh Dosh. That is a great template because the Adsense stuff is already done for you. All you need to do there is change your publisher ID, and optionally set your ad channel. I wonder how many clicks Dosh Dosh gets from people who forget to change that?

In our case, I wanted something a little different for HistoryofElvis.com, so I am using the k2 WordPress template. To make Adsense work with that, I am also using the Adsense Manager WordPress pluging. There are other managers, and you are free to choose the one that you really like. I am placing the following Adsense ad blocks on my nice site:

An Adsense for search box at the top of the middle column.
An Adsense link unit block at the top of the middle column, just under the search box
An Adsense skyscraper adunit in the second column under the link unit
An Adsense link unit at the top of every page at the start of the 1st post
An Adsense ad unit at the end of single posts

I usually set one ad channel for the entire site. that way, I can tell the difference between ad clicks coming from historyofelvis.com and those coming from masonworld.com. If traffic gets high, it might be worth setting one channel for each ad placement. But, until we have enough traffic to optimize for, it does not make much sense.

In my case for the k2 theme, I actually edited the theme to so that the Adsense ads related to posts (the link unit at the top and the ad unit at the bottom) would appear where I wanted them. So, if you know a little php, this is a nice thing you can do (and something that you don't need to do if you are using the Prosense template from Dosh Dosh.) If you want to attempt that, be sure to check out the complete usage instructions for Adsense Manager. The other thing that I like about Adsense Manager is that you can send a percentage of the click revenue to the plugin developer. Pretty neat.

So, that is about is for Adsense. There are 16 other Adsense Plugins for WordPress if you don't care for Adsense Manager.

Tomorrow, talk about one more revenue tool from Amazon.com.

Niche Super-Site: Making Money with phpBay

Mark E. Mason — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:00:29 +0000

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

You'll recall from our List of Niche Super-Site Design Goals that we are striving to create a niche site that generates $2 per day in residual income. We said that we did not want to rely only on Adsense alone to accomplish that. So, one thing that we can do to diversify our niche site income is add affiliate sales. One great affiliate program to look at is the eBay affiliate sales program.

As I reported previously, phpBay Pro is the way to go when you want to add eBay auctions to WordPress. According to the Wired Studio’s website, phpBay Pro enables web publishers to quickly and easily add keyword rich eBay auction listings to WordPress or php driven sites to generate serious affiliate revenue in a matter of minutes! Boy, can I confirm that claim personally. In our case, we need to focus on the feature rich phpBay WordPress Plugin (for more information on why, see Build Niche Sites with WordPress). There are at least two great ways to use this plugin. You can embed auction items in posts, or you can created entire pages of auction listings.

Wired Studios’ product boasts several important features:

Simple installation takes minutes to get up and going
Keyword rich results adds SEO value to your content
List auctions from specific categories
List auctions from specific vendors
Mask outgoing Ebay links
First Class support in case you have a question or need help

From my point of view phpBay Pro delivers all of this and more. Specifically, the support is over the top - outstanding. In fact, since I was new to WordPress, I had a couple of newbie questions that were answered by the developer himself (Wade) the same day.

You will recall that our niche site (www.historyofelvis.com) is up and running in WordPress. When people visit there, we would like them to buy things (thus helping us make our $2/day). The great thing about phpBay Pro is that we can install the plugin and have a page up and running in just a few minutes after becoming an eBay affiliate. Generally speaking, the steps are as follows:

Sign up with Commission Junction (www.cj.com)
Apply to become an eBay affiliate.
Install the phpBay Pro plugin for WordPress
Set your affiliate sales ID in the software
Insert one line of code in any WordPress page and see your auction come alive.

You can see an example on HistoryofElvis.com implemented in the Elvis Autographs page. The cool thing is that phpBay content is indexed by Google. If you mix in some ad copy, this can have a dramatic impact on your page SEO for your search keywords.

So, that's it for today. Tomorrow, we'll talk about PopShops.

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Niche Super-Site: Google Update

Mark E. Mason — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:17:16 +0000

Some progress. Three pages showing up (including About and Login).

Niche Super-Site: Getting Your Site Up

Mark E. Mason — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 23:00:43 +0000

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

So now it's time to register the name and set up the site. You will remember that last time we settled on www.historyofelvis.com. We had confirmed that it was available by checking either AjaxWhois or DomainBot.

If you don't have a webhost provider, now is the time to find one. I can recommend two -- LunarPages and ServInt. I have used them both with good results. Caroline Middlebrook recommends BlueHost (I think she uses them to host her blog). Note that while I think these are all great hosts, the previous links are affiliate links (I get paid if you use my link to sign up with them). So, do your research if that bothers you.

At this point, I am going to recommend that you read chapters one and two of Caroline's excellent free eBook entitled "How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress. In that book she teaches

Signing up with a host
Using Fantastico to install WordPress

There is a lot of debate about this, but I believe that if you are serious about running a business around WordPress, you should consider learning to install it yourself too. If that scares you, the fantastico route is great.

For installation, I recommend you install WordPress into the ./wordpress directory in your home directory and that you modify your wordpress configuration to make pages appear from your webroot directory. This keeps you from having the word "wordpress" in every URL, and generally makes things prettier. Here is what that setup looks like on the MasonWorld blog.

We are going to need lots of plugins and a theme to make things nice. I'm even going to recommend that you buy phpBay (you can check it out before we discuss it tomorrow if you like). Anyway, we will start to install plugins tomorrow.

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