I haven’t really done a lot with my Diabetic shoes website that I started a month and a half ago as part of the Niche Site Duel (NSD) but as I mentioned in my last posts NSD posts, this site is supposed to be a relatively passive endeavor and it has performed quite well despite my fairly low level o work put into this site.
My last NSD post I said I would increase the content on the site and I have done a little of that - just a little. I now have a total of five long and helpful posts on the topic on the site as well as a number of extra framework pages like tag pages, post pages, and category pages. I know five isn’t all that much but as long as I slowly grow the content out I’ll be happy. They are all long posts so I've got that going for me. I am after all mostly promoting the main page for now so in time the site will gain more authority.
Keeping in tune with my plan of only using unique content that is high quality in my backlinking plan, I first setup a ring of many making articles (my main backlinks) around the web on various rev sharing sites with each sending links back to my home page. I haven’t really haven’t done any article marketing directly but indirectly I have done some.
On Ezine articles I posted the following six articles which I have used to send backlinks to my main supporting articles - mostly revenue sharing sites. These Ezines rank well right off the bat and are very likely to be indexed on their own and the juice they pass on to my main supporting articles should ensure that they get indexed, stay indexed, draw organic traffic on their own, make money on their own while slowly building the authority of my main website. The Ezines I’ve posted so far are:
• Why Diabetic Shoes Are So Important
• Why Diabetic Socks Are So Important
• What Makes A Good Pair Of Diabetic Socks?
• Why Extra Wide Socks Are Great For Diabetic Feet
• What Are The Characteristics Of Diabetic Shoes?
• What Are The Characteristics Of Diabetic Socks?
Earnings So Far
Note that each is unique and each of these Ezines are useful but none are as comprehensive as the main backlinks they support. Because I wrote these six eZine articles my main backlinks on Snipsly, How To Live A Longer Life (my other blog), HubPages, InfoBarrel, Posturown, and Buzzle (non-rev sharing) have made a combined total of $9.69 with Adsense. This isn’t a lot but considering they are only five money making articles and are only about 4-6 weeks old a piece it’s not bad… especially considering their main purpose is to build up the authority of the main diabetic shoes website.
My main website - bestshoesofordiabetics.com, which only had three significant pages published on it until a week ago, and five significant posts as of today’s writing, has made $10.48 with Adsense since the site went live on November 4 and it has also started generating some affiliate sales through Amazon.
Amazon contextual links within the main page of the website have already generated 4 sales and netted me a total of $17.23 with Amazon. I have considered switching many of my Amazon links over to Endless.com affiliate links because of the higher commission percentage but for now will stick with Amazon because people are more familiar with buying through them. When my site is getting more traffic via search engines I will of course do some split testing to see if conversions from Endless are high enough to actually make more revenue on sales but for now my traffic is small so I won’t worry about it too much.
Down the road I will probably continue to diversify and decrease the Adsense presence on the site by switching over to a lead generation model or another more focused affiliate program. So far my Ad clicks are worth about $0.42 each on average which is not bad but one sale of a $200 diabetic shoe through an Endless affiliate link could net me $30 – that’s much more lucrative to me and the links are less intrusive to the reader of the site in my opinion.
Next Steps
Yesterday I posted my next major backlink giving me seven significant backlinks to this site. I posted a whopper of a good guest post which sends a backlink to my main blog on an established health blog using the PostRunner system (my review) available to members of The Keyword Academy (aff). You can see that article here. It is titled: What Makes A Good Diabetic Shoe?
Instead of article marketing to directories this gives me an authority post on an established blog backlinking my main page. The pst just went live this morning and now represents my seventh major backlink to my site and my second major backlink that doesn’t make me money.
I will post an eighth backlink – another mega guest post on a similar blog tomorrow or on Friday – giving me a total of 8 major backlinks and then will throw a couple more Ezines at those two blog posts. The Ezines won’t go live for a week at least however with the holidays hitting us this weekend. -Merry Christmas Y’all-
Near Term Goals
My other goals for the next couple days are to create bookmarking backlinks to all of my main backlinks, all of my published Ezines, and all of my website pages from revenue sharing dofollow bookmarking backlinks sources. I will post bookmark backlinks to each article on InfoPirate and SheToldMe as these two sites are revenue sharing. Each bookmark will be unique content pointing to each page and each will be roughly 100 words a piece. InfoPirate especially has a knack for generating good revenue on your backlinks so I expect to see some decent results in the revenue department as I do this.
The earnings on the bookmarks are not the main goal for taking this step. The earnings are a nice bonus but generally the backlinks help everything to stay indexed and stay ranking well if not improve slightly. The backlink diversity is also good and a few high quality bookmarks can help out.
A 7-Week Summary
It’s been seven weeks since I joined this duel and although I have not devoted my life to this project I have still built a helpful website for diabetics looking for more information on how to care for their feet. For diabetics, proper foot care is very important and I believe my website adds a lot of value to the web and for the reader. I do plan on continuing to add content to the site and to edit and prune the posts I have already published to make them better. I will also continue to refine the monetization of the site but for not it’s already a steady earner.
It is encouraging to see earnings of his magnitude with my level of organic traffic (about 7 uniques a day) and it shows that with improved rankings this site could easily be an excellent stream of income for me down the line.
So far I’ve devoted a grand total 18 posts to this duel. This includes my 6 website posts, my 7 main backlinks, and my 6 Ezine articles. My website posts are all 1000-2000 words each and the main backlinks are all in the 800-1000 word count range. The Ezines are closer to 500 words a piece. This isn’t too much work and I would say it’s been worth it so far.
My diabetic shoes website has made me $27.71 and my supporting articles have made me $9.69. In total I purchased a domain for less than ten bucks loaded wordpress on it, installed a few plugins and wrote 18 articles and have earned a total of $37.40 in seven weeks. This is a success so far and I only expect improved results going forward.
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.
Hi Brian,
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting the detailed update about your Diabetic Shoe Site marketing strategy. (informative)
You mention generating backlinks from supporting articles on sites like HubPages and InfoBarrel.
Additionally, you mention generating dofollow backlinks from bookmark sites.
Embarrassed to ask, but what is the difference between a content site (ex InfoBarrel) and a bookmark site (ex SheToldMe)?
Please consider writing a blog post about the difference between article backlinking and bookmark backlinking. If you could include a couple hotlinks to examples, this would help for those of us interested in learning from your experience.
Thanks again for sharing your insights.
I've learned much from reading your post.
Very helpful!
-Jim
Sure thing Jim - In short the content site backlink is from a full article 400-1000 words published on a site that is designed for full articles like InfoBarrel.
ReplyDeleteYou write a long article - lets say it's 700 words - and somewhere in that article you link out to your site with the keywords you want that site to rank for.
On a bookmarking site like SheToldMe or any of the other similar sites the goal is not to create a full article but a short 50-150 word blurb about an article published elsewhere. Usually bookmarking sites give you a form to fill out askign for the location of the article you are boomarking, the title of the bookmark, the 50-150 word description, and a few tags for categorization. You don't include contextual links to your article on bookmarking sites though, the title of the bookmark typically becomes the link to your main article or site automatically.
Bookmarking is much faster because they are so short however the links are not as strong as article links because the bookmark is so short.
In general the tougher it is to get a link the better the link usually is. Bookmarkign links are easy to get so they aren't as strong but they do add diversity to your link profile so they are worth getting in a small degree at the very least.
Hi Brian,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the prompt response! (much appreciated)
Your response makes total sense to me and helps to frame the concept. I appreciate your clarifying the difference between article backlinking and bookmark backlinking, and your thought process behind your article marketing strategy.
In summary – you backlink to your primary article from secondary articles and you backlink to your secondary articles from bookmarks.
And so the river flows…
Taking this to the next logical step, do you backlink anything to your bookmarks? Or are bookmarks the outer branches of this river?
I like to look at the big picture before grabbing the shovel and digging in.
Have a great weekend…
-Jim
Generally speaking you've got it. I have my money website - I write hgih quality long articles on revenue sharing websites like IB, HubPages, Posturown, etc. and link each one to the money website. Then I build the authority of the revenue sharing articles by linking to them from article directories like Ezine and from Revenue sharing bookmarks like InfoPirate. I won't backlink the Bookmarks though because I need to stop somewhere.
ReplyDeleteThe way that I think about it I want a smaller number of backlinks pointing directly to my money website but I want each backlink that points at it to be a strong backlink. There are other ways to do it but for the purpose of this experiment that's how I'm doing it.
Wow, looks like you're making progress Brian!
ReplyDeleteAdmitting, I didn't work much on my niche site in the last month - I was too swamped with other projects! But I'm definitely going to pick it up this month. I'm aiming for 15 articles by the end of the month. :)
Christina
Yeah, I'm seeing some good progress considering the work I've put into it - you on the other hand really took on a lot by doing three sites! :) Good luck - I know it will pay off.
ReplyDelete