I love niche sites. They are quick and easy to create, rank, at least if you did your homework well, and provide a nice return on investment. Sure, you can’t build a empire on them but that’s OK. There are better ways to achieve that.
It’s quite amazing to see the amount of people dipping their toes in the niche sites developement. Not only is this a great way to kill your time in a more productive way and earn some extra cash but also get a start in entrepreneurship, business thinking, planning and more.
However, it’s a very unfortunate fact that when it comes to technique, the only thing you can really develop with niche sites is SEO, and at a basic level at that. People like Hesham work really hard to build their authority, popularity, create good content not to mention working on their position in the market. They do so only to not have to rely solely on their search rankings when it comes to traffic. They build a loyal audience and, regardless of whether they have good rankings or not, they get constant traffic to the site.
3 Hard Facts About Niche Sites SEO
Niche sites, however, leave you with SEO as your only weapon to get anyone to look at your site, let alone buy from you. And, as with everything in life, there are certain things that might cause you problems with achieving that, or expanding your business in the future.
1. No matter what you might think, the most powerful SEO techniques are out of your range.
Web 2.0, article syndication, link directories or blog comments are all great but in reality they are not the best SEO techniques out there. They are only the most basic things used by professional SEOs to rank their sites. Guest posting is much better, yet still, the best places that you would want to guest post on will be closed to you anyway. Face it, no respectable blog will have a link to thebestpinkandshinylaptopbagswithsuperprotection.com in their resource box.
Big businesses gain links from professional organizations, their clients and business contacts, get on high quality resource lists, have press releases published by key publications in their industry and lots more. When it comes to niche sites though, all this is out of your reach, relatively lowering the strength of your efforts.
2. If Google catches you, you are done.
Because rankings are your only way to get traffic, Google is your master. If at some point it decides that your linking techniques are spammy, or targets you in its algorithm update, you are done. You have no other way to gain traffic and your website is pretty much gone. Even worse, if all your sites were set up and promoted the same way, all of them might be slashed in one go.
3. You will never be able to use your niche sites to your professional advantage.
Once in a while I meet a niche sites developer who discovers that since he or she knows some SEO, they may as well go after either their own clients or full time employment in the industry.
Here is the problem though, they lack skills. Especially the ones you need to work in an agency setting, analytics and research, link building outreach, reporting and even sales. They are a must have if you want to work in a professional SEO environment. The good news is that they are relatively easy to learn and master but without them, you are not going to make it.
Another thing is your portfolio. If the only thing you have to show for it are niche sites, then you might have a serious problem down the line. Face it, mygreatwonderfullaptopbag.com does not make a good showcase item.
Niche sites are a good way to get first hand experience in running an online business. You don’t have to spend much to get started and there aren’t that many difficult things to learn. On the other hand, there are many things that might cause you problems down the line once you get going. The things is, that’s typical for almost everything in life anyway.