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The Unconventional Guide to Niche SEO

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unconventional SEO

This post is going to cover white hat backlink and traffic generation tactics that you’re unlikely to have come across. The post is aimed at beginners and those who are frustrated with how difficult it is to get traffic to their posts.

The Unconventional Guide to Niche SEO

There are many people out there who believe that building links and gaining awareness is as simple as:

  1. Creating a piece of awesome content
  2. Posting this content on social bookmarking sites and telling your friends
  3. Waiting for the traffic + backlinks to come streaming in

This is a strategy that has merit for anyone who already has a presence online, who already has followers/friends, who already has access to sufficient human capital to have some guarantee that their excellent content will receive enough traffic and interest to spread and gain backlinks.

The problem is that beginners out there looking to improve their SEO efforts and get more traffic to their niche site do not have access to a network of people who will read their posts and give them backlinks. They believe (because of misinformation out there) that once they write an awesome piece of content, everything else will follow. This is untrue for the vast majority of people.

The rest of the post will cover some techniques that you can utilize to spread that awesome piece of content without relying on a network of existing readers.

I will cover mainly paid techniques with which to give your content legs. The paid methods do not involve any back-alley transactions such as paid links and automated submissions. I will give a few quick suggestions relating to free methods, but I truly believe that the paid methods are the gamechangers where exposure is concerned.

Paid methods and resources to give your content legs

The list below outlines some awesome methods you can use to get your content out there – generating traffic and encouraging links.

  • BuySellAds.com – this site allows you to place display ads on any of their network of sites. The cost of the ad placements depends largely on the amount of traffic the site receives, so you can find small sites related to your niche where you can get targeted exposure. Make a display ad that entices people to come view your content, and make sure your page makes the most of any views by encouraging newsletter signups and backlinks.
  • Safe-Swaps.com – this site allows you to pay somebody with an email newsletter to include your content/site in an email to their subscribers. I haven’t used this service much personally but I think it has great potential if you can find someone who’s newsletter relates to your niche.
  • StumbleUpon.com/pd/ – StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is a great way to get your content out to a targeted audience. You can have your content appear only to people in or related to your niche. These people are more likely to link back to your content from their own site or blog if they are targeted.
  • Fiverr.com – this site can be used for anything from paid tweets to facebook fan building. People list something they’re willing to do for $5, and you can often get a great deal of exposure for very little money.
  • Google.com/adwords – if your content is that good, but you just can’t seem to get it out to an audience, it might be worth using Adwords to get exposure. Adwords can be extremely cheap in uncompetitive niches, but very expensive in other circumstances.

Free methods to build exposure

Below are some techniques for those with no money to spend. To reiterate, the paid methods are by far the most effective exposure techniques.

  • Guest Blogging – this is an obvious technique, but one that is hugely underutilized. Here is a recent article with a great list of blogs to guest post on (including this very blog) . The added benefit of guest blogging is that you receive a backlink from any articles you write.
  • Quora.com – Using Quora to answer questions people have relating to your niche is a great way to build authority and incentivize people to come to your site.

Some closing thoughts

The early days of a blog or piece of content are the hardest, and the techniques I listed above are those that will help to get you to the greener grass – once you have a network of people interested in what you write or promote, exposure becomes much more natural and requires much less concerted marketing effort. Content does in fact become the king.

First though, your content must ascend the ranks, and with each ascension, more people will hear your voice. It’s stupid not to use the most powerful techniques at your disposal to get to this point. Write great content, and market the shit out of it. Give your content legs. That’s how you build links.

Using these techniques is how as a 21 yr old youngster, I can compete with the big players in the Brisbane driving school and Toowoomba driving school markets (the cities I operate in Australia).

About

I'm a 21 yr old entrepreneur from Brisbane, Australia. I'm deeply interested in marketing and social entrepreneurship, and I'm currently running a Brisbane driving school. We provide the best driving lessons Brisbane has to offer.

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{ 40 Responses }

  1. Abhi Balani says:
    So many useful links in this article. Thank for sharing your knowledge.
  2. Cherie says:
    I am very interested in guest blogging, I think in future I will take it into serious consideration, both in my blog as in other blogs outside as a guest blogger to build good backlink. - Cherie
  3. Brady Lewis says:
    I love the results from guest blogging. Too many people are to afraid to use this method. It does seem like an intimidating or daunting task, but it's really not. Once you do it, you'll see how great it is.
  4. Richard says:
    Be careful with stumbleupon traffic as in my testing it has a pretty low engagement rate and can be quite costly.
  5. Matthew says:
    Useful article - we tend to steer away from paid links, but an avenue we've not yet explored is quora. So many of our clients get worked up about the lack of mention of their company in the key words analysis - we start from product positioning and the target consumer before getting involved in any keywords. Matt
  6. abhilash says:
    it is a nice post till now i do not try paid method .
  7. Justin says:
    Matt, Great info. I hear so much about free methods of traffic generation yet everyone is rehashing the same tired ideas. I'm not saying the ideas don't work but as you said, if one doesn't already have a large audience then just guest posting or producing great content is not going to drive large amounts of traffic to a site. Thanks for the tips. I'm going to try some of you ideas. I'll come back and let you know how they work! Justin
  8. Michael says:
    Good content. I have personally enjoyed using fiverr to promote my business. I recently purchased 100 pr 7 backlinks for my new blog. Guess what? I now have a PR2 with less effort. It's awesome how much quality backlinks affects page rank. Kudos!
  9. Karen Young says:
    With Google dancing around all over the place, it is important to monitor everything you do, and if something isn't producing results, move on. I personally find my efforts better rewarded if I stay away from social media, and I find other aspects of marketing more enjoyable anyway. As an article writer I have written for successful people and newbies alike, I am amazed how little some newbies understand about keyword research, some don't even send me keywords, and when I reply back they get all bent out of shape! It all takes time and a lot of experimenting and I just discovered how much I like Stumbleupon so that's my next objective. Since the Panda slap, article writing has decreased in importance, social media is time-consuming and for some not very productive. All we can do is keep on learning, watch Google in the rear view mirror and keep experimenting.
    • Matt Williams says:
      Hi Karen, StumbleUpon is certainly worth looking into for exposure. Social Media requires a pretty big time investment to get anything out of it, but it can worth it in the long run as you can receive regular returns. StumbleUpon Paid Discovery can give instant exposure for a relatively low cost, and the price is fixed regardless of your niche (unlike something like Adwords where it is in auction model).
  10. Teatree says:
    Guest blogging definitely works. As to the rest: with Google Panda, on-site SEO has become more and more important. I think the days of spamming your way to the top have gone.
    • Matt Williams says:
      This is definitely true, Google are getting on top of spam, and their algorithms are only going to get more powerful.
    • Damon Day says:
      I agree that with the changes that google is implementing that it is making it very difficult for spammers, which is a good thing. Guest blogging on quality sites is very difficult for spammers to do and it certainly isn't fast. I think the updates that google are making will go a long way toward helping bloggers with good content get their information out to consumers looking for it.
  11. red says:
    I prefer to use free ways to increase traffic. Sometimes I use Yahoo Answer
    • Matt Williams says:
      What sort of results do you get with Yahoo Answers???
      • red says:
        not much, but i like it
        • courtney stodden says:
          I always get some good results, clever people on it.
  12. Sonali Joshi says:
    i too used fiverr to build facebook fans, but they now deleting those kind of gigs as indicated by Facebook...
    • Matt Williams says:
      Hi Sonall, I think that fiverr will only provide you very low quality exposure. It's good for projects where that's all you need, but you are never going to get commited facebook fans or quality paid tweets - for $5 you will almost always get more quanitity than quality. It can still be worth finding quality deal on fiverr, but I think money is better spent through a service like buysellads where you can find a site that fits into your demographic and create a targeted ad for your content or site.
    • Vijayraj Reddy says:
      Yes Sonali, i also noticed that all gigs related to facebook fans are deleted...
  13. trudy says:
    classified ad sites are another source of traffic depending on what your site is about. I have found traffic on classified sites without selling anything on my site many times!
    • Matt Williams says:
      Hi Trudy, do you have any good examples of classified ads sites? Thanks for the comment
  14. Riya says:
    SEO starts with keywords selection and it's the most important part. You can't just start promoting your site on any related keyword, you need to find out how users search about your niche and then you need to work out accordingly. In my opinion Google Adwords is great way to get more exposure to your site and it's also not costly. Solid points mentioned here and I really love it.
    • Matt Williams says:
      Hi Riya, thanks for the comment. I agree that Adwords is great for exposure, but I personally prefer buysellads and stumbleupon paid discovery. :)
  15. Jitendra Singh says:
    Its really a nice guide for SEO. Guest blogging is the best niche here as what i think.
  16. Jym says:
    Great question to address Matt... It's all too easy once syndication networks are up and in place, but for the beginner, another approach is needed as you explained. Although it takes a little time, I still rate Blog Commenting as a powerful free method to market your posts, especially if you pick relevant blogs and make an effort to leave useful comments. Andy Bailey's CommentLuv plugin has added to the potency of this strategy. The other good option is to join a commenting or syndication tribe, of which there are many examples for different niches across social media and the web...
    • Matt Williams says:
      Hi Jym, thanks for the comment. Blog commenting is certainly useful, but from the Search Engine's perspective, 'natural links' carry far much more weight, as inbound links are meant to be signals of the quality/authority of a given page or site.
  17. greg says:
    >>>Creating a piece of awesome content LOL, easier said than done right? Ditto on the recommendation of StumbleUpon Paid, that service is great and StumbleUpon in general has been awesome for years. I remember using that back in the day when it first came out and nobody'd heard of it! greg
    • Matt Williams says:
      Hi Greg, creating an awesome piece of content is hard, and that is in many ways a good thing. One piece of content (article, video, infographic) that you spend 2 weeks on and pour your creativity and effort into is going to have a much better chance of spreading around the interwebs than the individual 7 articles that one might make over 2 weeks without putting a great deal of effort in to any of them. Writing 7 posts is time consuming, but it is easy. Making 1 AWESOME post that is truly useful or interesting to a lot of people is hard, very hard. Not only in execution, but in actually prepping yourself to pour a huge amount of effort into something that might not work. If your awesome content effort fails, accept that you did your best, then try again. Eventually you will hit the gold mine and make something that people love as much as you do.
  18. Andreas says:
    You can also answer questions via yahoo answers to get more feedback and notify users of your website. Another answer community is answer.com but i find it less lively than yahoo answers.
    • Matt Williams says:
      Hi Andreas, Q and A sites are great in a lot of niches, but they haven't really achieved mass adoption outside of the US yet. I personally live in Australia and I find yahoo answers to be underused over here.
  19. Shiva says:
    Hi Matt, Those are really some great tips about getting traffic to your website or blog. I think many people think that only posting content without doing any kind of SEO will help them get a lot of traffic but that is not the case. I think it is important to promote the content to get backlinks and traffic. And if it is a niche site then promotion becomes even more important. Regards, Shiva
    • Matt Williams says:
      Hi Shiva, thanks for the post mate. I agree, so many people romanticize the idea of 'content being king'. Great content is nothing without SEO or marketing of some form. Matt
  20. Steve says:
    Matt, Very true. So many of the SEO guides give you those basic steps you talk about in the intro. Nothing wrong with those steps, they work. But like you said they certainly do take a bit of a presence and a "launching pad" to make them work. Your additional methods for getting that exposure is great!
    • Matt Williams says:
      Hi Steve, The basics are important for everybody to learn, but the real breadwinners are more involved methods like guest blogging and content marketing.
  21. Tikyd says:
    Lately I began interested in StumbleUpon and today I found a mention of this website in your article. Quora is a site that I would like to explore. I would like to ask you a question: How effective is Quora is sending you traffic compared to guest blogging?
  22. DiTesco says:
    So true Matt. Misinformation about "how to get tons of traffic" by solely posting awesome content truly is all over the place. Although having quality content is important, what people don't realize is that alone will not be enough to "attract" visitors, unless you are, like you said, already an established blog. This guide if implemented can take anyone a long way... Thanks for linking to my post.
    • Matt Williams says:
      Hi Ditesco, thanks for the kind words. People focus too much on 'free' when they should be focusing on 'ROI'. If paid advertising can cut your promotion work down significantly and improve your exposure, you then have more time to focus on creating the next great piece of content to market.
  23. Joe Hughes says:
    Matt, Some great tips there I was not aware of the paid stumble upon option so I'll be checking that one out. Guest blogging is the way to go if you're just starting out but you do need quality content to share. I don't think forum marketing should be ignored from a traffic perspective anyway.
  24. Alexis says:
    Hey Matt, For my SEO I take keyword research very seriously. I then follow by lots of articles submission for backlinks using anchor texts from keywords research.I'll then bookmark and ping all articles urls after submission to have them indexed. From what you've listed there I've personally used ad-swaps and fiverr with some good results. Great post Matt. Thanks for sharing!