Make Money Online with Backlinks?

The longer I work at this niche site building game then the more obvious it becomes what is really important when it comes to the making money online. It has very little to do with your logo, your stylesheet, your color selection or anything of that nature. Sure those things have their place, but they are pretty low on the totem pole for the types of niche sites that we build.

What you need are backlinks. Backlinks are absolutely crucial to Making Money Online.

Know Your Customer

I don’t think anyone would argue that one of the keys to making money in any business is to know your customers. When it comes to niche sites, what you want to know is what they are looking for and how they got there. These two factors are critical when developing niche sites.

Blog readers are “recreational” readers and what I mean by that is they are here to read something for entertainment. They are no necessarily here for any other purpose than to check out what you have to say. A search engine (niche site) reader is a very focused visitor. They are searching for something specific, they entered keywords into Google and if you are lucky (or good), your site was the one that came up.

Once there, you either have what they want or you don’t. They will move on and likely won’t be back for quite some time, if ever. You solved their problem or you didn’t.

Cater to Your Customer

So knowing who your customer is was the easy part, when it comes to niche sites, your customer is the search engine user. The hard part is how do you get them to your site instead of one of the millions of others out there.

One of the most overlooked issues when it comes to building search engine traffic is backlinks. Backlinks play a large part in how much authority Google gives your site. The more relevant backlinks you have from quality sites, then the more authority you earn from Google. The more authority you have via Google, then the better you will place in SERPS.

This seems to be one of the many mistakes that most novice niche site builders make. I see example after example in the BANS forums of people complaining about not making any money with Bans. They often blame EPN but on the odd chance that any of them will offer up a URL to look at, the site has no pagerank, no backlinks, is barely indexed and is simply a mess.

If your target customer is a Search Engine customer then you simply must have a solid game plan when it comes to your SEO. It isn’t as hard as everyone thinks and if you stick to the basics and execute them well, then you will probably do better than most.

Backlinks aren’t the answer to it all, but they are a critical part of the overall machine. You still need solid onsite SEO to rank well but backlinks take time to build, so I deem them to be the most important. You can fix your keywords, meta tags, H(x) tags overnight, but backlinks take weeks and even months to build.

How To Build Backlinks

How to build backlinks is the part that most people stumble on. Even when they finally do realize how important backlinks are, they will stop at this point. They might comment on a few blogs here or there or even submit to a Directory or two but that’s about it.

Depending on the niche, I can tell you a few PR0 blog comments and a few directory listings will not gain you anything, especially if you are in a competitive niche. Your competitors that do understand link building will own the front page of Google and your site will be buried.

This topic is one that has a number of different methods and techniques and would really require several different blog posts to cover it thoroughly. Some people reading this site might be interested in niche sites while others could care less. Rather than boring those who aren’t interested, I decided to start a newsletter to cover the stuff that I do when building niche sites.

So if you want to find out how I build back links, you can wait around until I write another post about it or you can subscribe to my newsletter and we’ll get started. You can subscribe at the top of the blog under the logo where it says Free Newsletter.  This newsletter will focus almost entirely on niche site creation using both Wordpress and the BANS software. I will still blog about these topics from time to time but if you want to see it all then subscribe to my newsletter today.

To thank you for signing up I am going to give you a free copy of Brad Callen’s “Google Adwords Made Easy” for your review. Adwords might not be your thing but this book is an absolute WEALTH of information when it comes to keyword selection and marketing principles in general. If you aren’t familiar with Brad’s work, then he puts out some of the absolute best stuff on the internet. Bar none.

That’s it for now…sign up for my newsletter, get a free copy of an awesome e-book and we’ll start climbing the SERP rankings together. You will make far more money at the top of the Google index than you will buried on page 10.

The choice is yours.

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If you frequent the MMO blogs then you have no doubt run across a hundred articles that discuss how to select niches. Articles everywhere, lots of comments and questions and its obvious that people are confused as to how to select a niche or even what a niche is. I see a LOT of these questions on the BANS forums so I thought I would share my thoughts.

Common Mistakes

It would seem that newbies fall into one of two categories when they “select” a niche. They either tackle a very broad category that they have little hope of ranking well in OR they pick such an obscure and small little niche that even if they took position 1 in Google, they still won’t get any traffic.

The advice I read in the articles encourages readers to target a small niche. It gives you a feeling of accomplishment when you are able to rank 1st page on Google results but disappointment quickly settles in once you see what kind of traffic it’s worth.

On the other end of the scale you have people targeting far too large of a niche with a little bitty BANS or adsense mini-site. If you’re buried on page 45 for Ipods, what good does it do you? Very little I would suspect.

I favor something in the middle, but honestly and I can’t say this loud enough, there is NO MAGIC formula for selecting a niche, it’s far more important to select the right keywords. You can profit in ANY niche if you have the right keywords.

Starting Point

I have abandoned the whole micro niche concept, simply because it doesn’t bring the results that make me happy. I have instead chosen to target large niches but with really good keywords and some decent SEO strategies. A large niche like the former “Ipods” example already draws over 5k searches every single day.

There are some microniches that I have seen people target that don’t draw that search count in a year. If that works for you then great, but me personally I would rather try to slice a small piece of that 5k per day search traffic using some longtail keywords. If I meet with immediate success, then I will build on that site and build on that site.

If you want a bare minimum idea, I personally want to see 2-300 searches a day for my main keywords before tackling a niche.

Digging for Keywords

The real trick to niche site success is your keyword selection, not your niche selection. You could even carve out a piece of that IPOD pie if you target the right keywords. IPODS have to be one of the most competitive markets ever made, so let’s see what we can find.

I run a quick search using the free SEOTool keyword tool first, simply for no other reason than it is super fast and gives me an idea of where we stand right from the gate. If it looks promising then I will put the keyword into my keyword tool, Keyword Elite.

I love Keyword Elite for a lot of reasons, it’s the best keyword tool I have ever used AND it has no monthly fee. Wordtracker and Wordze are great tools but if you stick with this marketing gig for very long, that monthly fee will quickly grow to be far more than what you would pay for Keyword Elite.

What Kind of Site

It’s also important to consider what kind of traffic you are after. You have “buying” keywords and you have “information” keywords. IPODs is a hugely competitive arena, and as such it has a HUGE base of users who might want to know how to load songs on it or other stuff.

I am leaning towards an Adsense site for this example, so let’s see what we have for keywords. First we’ll load up the old Keyword Elite and run Ipods through it. Keyword Elite pulls data from Google, Yahoo and WordTracker. This is waaay better than most tools that only target one data source.

For the interest of time I am only going to select a few keywords to make the example work but with most larger niches, you will have hundreds and hundreds of potential longtail keywords to target so time spent here can pay off for years to come. I’ve narrowed my keyword choices for this example down to just a handful.

Now let’s take a look at the search counts. One of these jumps out at me considering we are building an Adsense site and targeting “information” seekers. Look at “how do Ipods work.” This longtail has good search counts, low competition on Google and is an “Information Seeking” keyword.

Keyword Elite has a great feature that allows you to find out who your competition is for the top x number of spots that you select. When we check our “How do Ipods Work” keyword you can see that Howstuffworks.com holds the top 2 positions in Google, even over Apple. Interesting.

Well we know who we are competing with now, so let’s take a look at how good they are. This is where your jaw should start to drop. SEO Elite is just crazy good when it comes to inspecting your competition. Let’s fire it up and take a look at how good they are.

A ton of information on the picture below. This is the Offsite SEO information about their site. Offsite SEO is basically the number and quality of links and sites linking to you. Links are what drive Google’s search algorithm and they are CRITICAL to your success. Look over the picture below, quality sites linking to this website. Some high PR sites and some great links….but……..

As you can see they are pretty solid, good page rank, great Alexa, lots of links and at first looks pretty tough. SEO Elite allows you to even go one step further and that is to find the anchor text of the links coming in. Our keyword is How do Ipods work” and for that keyword, they have zero incoming links. This makes the keyword vulnerable. The site is ranking #1 for the site authority, not for that keyword authority.

Not a single link using our keyword as the anchor text. That’s great news, Google gives a LOT of weight towards anchor text. Can we take this for position one? Probably, nothing is guaranteed but that particular keyword is very vulnerable. Even if we only managed page 1 that would bring traffic and that is only 1 keyword. We can literally target 1000s of keywords with an adsense site.

Conclusion

SEO Elite will tell you a LOT more about a site but for this article we are focusing on keyword selection. I don’t know of any other tool combination that is as powerful as Keyword Elite and SEO Elite. They are just sick and will give you such a HUGE leg up over your competitors that it isn’t even funny.

If you are a sports fan, this is like having the other teams play book. You can find their links, their anchor text, the IP density, adwords information, you name it. You can check both their off site SEO (backlinks) and ONSITE SEO. You will literally know more about them than they know about themselves.

If you intend to make a serious go at this game then I cannot tell you enough how important it is to have these kinds of tools at your disposal. They require an upfront purchase, but they have no monthly fees and you quickly come out ahead versus a monthly fee plan.

Don’t fall into the trap of using ratios or free keyword searches. All a ratio should be good for is to get you in the ballpark, to weed out the junk and find the potential. EVERYONE is using the free tools, the real value lies in being able to find out what your competitors are doing.

How strong are they for the words you are targeting. If they are weak, then you know how to take them down. The same principles apply to BANS stores or Adsense sites. The only real difference is the kinds of keywords you target. Information seekers or those looking to buy, depending on the niche they can be the same thing.

The only thing holding you back at this point, is you.

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As many of you know, my main source of online income are Niche Sites. I love building these for a LOT of reasons but the biggest reason is that they produce a Passive Income. I am working my tail off now so that I can someday sit on the dock on the bay kind of thing.

Build a Niche Store

If you haven’t heard of Build a Niche Store then you probably are living under a rock. It would seem that everyone has heard of it, is using it, is pumping it or pushing it in one way or another. This is the script that I am using and I am very happy with it.

Build a Niche Store makes it extremely easy to have a niche store up and running in less than an hour the first time and once you are a pro, I can have a store set up in probably 10-15 minutes now. This would seem to be a PERFECT tool for beginners, but. Why is there always a But?

LIke any tool, it’s only as good as the person using it. I frequent the forums that the BANS community has created and I must say these forums offer some good advice and some very poor advice at the same time. Like any forum, many of the people answering your questions, don’t have the first clue what they are doing and can often give some very poor advice.

One of the most frequent subjects I see that contains very poor advice is regarding Niche site selection. I can’t count how many times I read someone telling a noob to check how hot an item is on Ebay. Checking the number of search counts on Ebay is a ridiculous waste of time.

Niche Research

The very first key to being successful with any niche site is to research and select the correct one. If you pick one with too much competition then it will be very hard to rank well in the SERPS and if you select one that is too narrow, you won’t have any traffic.

If a searcher goes to Ebay and then searches for their product then you are out of the game. A BANS store requires you to intercept the searcher BEFORE they make it to Ebay in order to be successful. The only search counts that matter are Google. That’s it, Ebay searches are as irrelevant.

The only thing you need to research on Ebay is that there actually is a market for your items. The more items for sale in the niche that you are targeting then the better your opportunity. A higher number of items will also give you more pages to index in Google, which in turn will increase your chances of drawing traffic as well.

Starting Point

A good starting point for niche analysis can be found reading “Hunting the Perfect Niche Site.” The goal is to find as large of a quantity of daily searches combined with the fewest amount of competitors. That will get you started.

I like to look for 100-200 searches per day and less than 1million Google results for the exact keyword match that I am targeting. If I can find that combination then it’s a good bet that I can rank pretty well for that keyword.

One thing to remember, is that just because one particular keyword match doesn’t fit these guidelines, doesn’t mean that it’s a poor niche. You need to look for all of your primary keywords and some of the more common longtail combinations as well. It isn’t as simple as just applying a quick ratio.

The next factor is how strong is your competition. Who else is after that keyword? I use SEO Elite so I can practically tell what my competitors ate for lunch that day. I will write more on that tool in the future, for people just starting out, you may not need it.

If you plan to do this professionally then SEO Elite is a must have tool and will simply allow you to kill your competition.

Conclusion

I touched on a lot of things, that we will expand on as this series progresses but let’s summarize. When you are researching your niche sites, compare Searches to Competitors for all of your best keyword matches first. If this ratio meets your goals then take a look at Ebay to make sure the marketplace actually exists there.

Ebay searches are irrelevant, it’s Google searches that matter. Your goal is to insert yourself into that search process, by ranking well for whatever they are searching to buy. Once you convince them to click onto your site, then you have the potential to make money.

And last but not least, the Internet is full of bad advice. Take most of what you read with a grain of salt, apply some common sense to it and see if it works for you.

Happy Hunting.

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