Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game

As many people have been enthralled by Pat and Tyrone’s niche site duel over the last couple months I too have been a bit interested. For years many marketers discuss setting up niche sites but don’t actually show them off. Pat and Tyrone, and many others have started a duel for what appears to be nothing to actually show their site that they are working on and document their march to the top of the search engines.

I have been tempted to join in on the action for a while now but I have been busy increasing my income over on my longevity blog and over on InfoBarrel as of late (see my recent success interview on the InfoBarrel Blog) and I didn’t really want to drop those areas of my attention however I decided that I might as well jump in now otherwise I would end up letting let the ship sail by.

Today I got the bug and opted to jump into the niche site duel along with everyone else and see what I could accomplish. The rules are simple – you can do anything you want you just can’t pay for a PPC campaign. I also have noted that no one is linking out to their niche site from their main blogs so I suppose I won’t do that either… though I may be tempted to in the near future. I’ll see what others think about this practice.

Anyway, for this duel I’m going to be jumping into a niche that I haven’t really spent a lot of time in. Over on my longevity blog I have had a good amount of posts on insulin and diabetes but not really on physical care revolving around the subject so this niche will be a bit of a detour for me.

Unlike the way to typically do keyword research I went with “my gut” on this one and didn’t even research the keyword beyond taking a look at Adwords KWT to see if it has some traffic and then analyzing the top ten in Google to see their relative strength. Normally I do more in depth research but I just feel this is going to work out well.

Many others in this challenge go for strict rules regarding the strength of the top ten – many consult paid tools or methodologies such as comparing the keyword in quotes to the amount of results; I don’t do this. I like to look at the results on the first page and find the ranking pages that have my keyword in the title, URL, and the description and then look at the PR of those pages.

In this case my main keyword is only present in two of the top ten’s title, description, and URL. My niche site will of course have the keyword in all three places so these are my relative competition. Next I look to see what their page rank is and what they basic backlink profile looks like.

Using the FireFox plugin “SEO 4 Firefox “ I can see that the two pages I am concerned with are in position 9 and 10, they are PR 0 and PR N/A. The article in the #9 spot is on Livestrong’s website and has no external backlinks per Yahoo Site Explorer and the #10 spot is from Mademan and was published only two weeks ago and also has no external backlinks according to Yahoo Site Explorer. This leads me to believe that I can get to the bottom of page one of Google with almost no effort. The top spot will be a little tougher but won’t be too bad.

Regarding my keyword – I chose an easy keyword with low traffic potential but I intend on eventually making a run at the higher potential related keywords when I am close to the top for my main keyword. My main keyword is four words long and my eventual target is two words long. I will be initially shooting for “best shoes for diabetics” and eventually shooting for “diabetic shoes”.

Unlike some others in this challenge I will not be making a big site. I am really targeting everything I can on one page. This is different by far from my main health and longevity blog. Eventually I will add other pages to the site for internal links but mainly I’m just looking to monetize the main page and the main page only. And as this is my goal I ended up deciding to make the main page wildly long. It is roughly 3000 words and should be capable of ranking for just about everything in the niche with enough backlinks.

I made the entire site and published my 3000 word beast all this evening in the span of about 3 hours. I will of course go back to my theme and improve it and improve the site framework in the future. I will also do significant tweaking to my main 3000 word post but overall this is my first draft and it is published. I want to build traffic up before I make the site look good anyway.

The goal here is to get one page with tons of good and helpful content on it ranking for everything. That way I only have one page to market and blogroll link exchanges will be more beneficial to my individual page since they all point to the main page. I also made the front page as insanely helpful as I could… I do intend on going back and editing more to add more helpful content for a reader but I think 3000 words is pretty good for now.

In a future article here on ResInc I will go into more detail on how I plan on marketing my niche site. I look forward to getting this project rolling because I could use the extra money – I just found out my wife is having a baby! I’ve got responsibilities now! I’m also 2-months behind in starting this duel so I’ve got some catching up to do. Good luck to everyone else out there!

For All Other Posts In This Niche Site Duel series:
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011

For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.