Begin Building the Niche Network
July 28th, 2008 | by ScottIt appears that you're new here, if you like what you read, please subscribe to the news feed or sign up for the Leap eTips news and updates email list. Thank you for visiting :)
This is part 8 of 10 in the Niche Network Marketing with LAMP series.
I became diverted from this series for a while but for those of you who have followed along and asked about the last 3 parts I will be posting them over the next week or so.
At this stage you will begin building your niche network around your primary site. I like to use a mixture of personally owned domains as well as some 3rd party hosted pages for this; places such as Blogger and Squidoo. NOTE: these are not spammy or splog pages, they will be true resources with tailored content targeting specific visitors.
What this step involves is building a ring of satelite sites arund your primary niche site, and the truth is you only need to use your own domain and hosting for 1 of these. You could use 3rd party (free) publishing platforms for the rest, but I like to balance it with an even amount of each. The choice is up to you though.
Before you begin building your secondary sites, you’ll need to review the search traffic to your primary site and see what terms are bringing you visitors.
What you’ll want to find is all of the terms that are “information seekers” rather than buyers. For example, “Red Widgets free shipping” is a buying term, but “how are Red Widgets made” is information seeking.
You don’t want information seekers landing on your primary niche site, so your goal is going to be to rank your secondary site pages higher than your primary site for those terms.
By positioning your secondary sites above your primary site in the search results for information seeking terms you’re basically adding a filter to the search traffic that directs most of the non-buyers away from your primary site. It also allows your secondary sites to gain “informational authority” for terms related to your primary site, making your links from the secondary sites more valuable to propping your primary site up.
Plus, this way you can provide information seeking visitors with exactly what they’re looking for on a secondary site, and hopefully funnel a few of them along to your primary site later for sales.
What you’re also going to be looking at while reviewing your keywords are buying terms that your primary site isn’t ranking well enough for. If you were building a single site then you could work to improve the performance of your primary site for these terms, but since we’re building a niche network it’s just as easy and more beneficial at this stage to build secondary sites targeting those terms.
I’m not going into the actual development of your secondary sites because it’s identical to building your primary site from the earlier parts of this series. The only difference will be in how you select your keywords for the sites since you’ll be taking them from your primary site as I’ve described above; but the rest of the process is the same.
When completed, you should have anywhere from 8 to 20 secondary sites online, with about two-thirds of them targeting information seeking terms and the final third targeting buying related terms.
You should have an email list ready for visitors to subscribe to, whether you use a 3rd party option or a self-hosted list is up to you, but every one of your secondary sites should have an opt-in form to this list displayed.
None of your secondary sites should have affiliate links or other advertising on them. They should all funnel straight down to your primary site only.
Even the secondary sites targeting buying keywords. The goal isn’t to make sales with your secondary sites, it’s to build your email list and funnel visitors to your primary site for the conversions.
Be sure to follow the same steps for promoting these secondary sites as you used for your primary site. Articles, bookmarking and etc. Look at how strong your primary site is in search engines today, that’s where you want all of your secondary sites to be in a month or two–which will prop your primary site up even further.
Since several of your secondary sites are likely to be on blogging platforms (self-hosted or 3rd party) a great tool for adding tons of backlinks and literally thousands of additional “point of entry” into your niche network is RSS Submit.
You can use this to submit the RSS feeds from your blog sites, as well as the RSS feeds that article directories give authors to dozens of RSS directories.
To see just how powerful this is check out this video I made a few months ago about backlink power through RSS. At that time I wasn’t yet convinced about RSS Submit and was using my own software for submitting feeds, but after lots of testing I’ve found RSS Submit to be superior to everything (including my own program) for this so I highly recommend it.
Part 9 of the series should be available in a few days so please check back, or better yet subscribe to my RSS newsfeed and be sure to get it as soon as it gets published.
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