I have a problem that has prevented my passive income earnings from rising over the past year. This problem became so bad, that it almost caused me to completely give up on building niche websites. In fact, just last week I felt like selling off all of my domain names and throwing in the towel.
My problem can be summarized in a few words – link building. Or better yet, the lack of link building has caused my passive income earnings to suffer. I have ignored the simple fact that it takes lots and lots of backlinks to support a niche website, especially with the keywords that I am targeting. Instead of focusing on building links to any of my niche sites, I have spent my time jumping back and forth from project to project with no real focus.
After calming down a little and reading a few inspirational posts, I realized that giving up on building niche websites was not going to happen. I don’t plan on failing and am challenging myself to make this type of income stream work for me. I believe that putting in the time now (the correct way) is worth the sacrifice of eventually earning thousands of dollars every month in passive income down the road.
Here are the details of my new link building plan that I am implementing on one of my niche websites.
Niche Website #2
I have spent a ton of time and money building this niche website (referred to as niche website #2 in my 2010 SMART Goals). The only problem is that I haven’t dedicated the necessary resources to create links back to the site. As a result, I don’t rank in the top 50 for any keyword phrases on Google that I am targeting.
At first, my assumption was that the keywords I was focusing on were too competitive. However, after digging down deeper, I realized that I can compete and reach the top page on Google if I dedicate some resources to building links. Instead of giving up, I am going to pour more resources (mostly my time) into building this website the right way. I am confident I can make this site earn passive income for me if I can spend the time building links.
As part of my plan, I will be targeting one keyword phrase on this site initially. My details from the first week of my link building plan are detailed below.
Adding a Pillar Article
I spent my first week focusing on a new pillar article that I believe people will want to search on. This article will be the main focus of my link building project for the next couple of weeks.
Here are a few stats after week 1 from my new pillar article.
Pillar Article #1
- Days Old – 7
- Words – 729
- Keyword Density – 3%
- Scribe Content Score – 100%
- Search Engine Rank – Not in Top 100 of Google, Yahoo, or Bing search engine rankings.
I have been using the Scribe plug-in for on-site SEO for several of my sites. The Scribe Content Score provided above provides a percentage value to how well your content is optimized when published, with 100% being the highest score.
I am currently averaging $7.45 in monthly AdSense earnings from this niche site. I believe that if I can place this first article in the top search results on Google, my earnings will increase significantly.
Link Building to Pillar Article
I have started publishing many articles (mostly on HubPages) that either link back to my pillar article, or link to a linked article.
Hub 1 – My first Hub has a direct link back to my pillar article and has been published for 9 days. I actually added this Hub before writing my pillar article and went back and built the link. The Hub score for this post is currently 70.
My plan is to make this Hub rank very high so that it cascades down to my niche website. As a result, I created several additional articles linking only to Hub 1.
- Unique Article Database 1 – A quick 250 word post on one of the sites recommended in One Week Marketing to build free links.
- Writers Block Unblocked 1 – Same concept as the Unique Article Database post.
- Hub 1.1 – This Hub links back to the first HubPages article I wrote and has been published for 2 days. It currently has a Hub Score of 57.
- Hub 1.2 – Also links back to the first HubPages article and has been published for 2 days with a score of 60.
Hub 2 – Hub 2 links directly back to the pillar article, has been published for 6 days and has a Score of 67. I plan to build this Hub up higher this coming week.
Hub 3 – Hub 3 also links directly back to the pillar article. It has been published for 6 days and has a score of 69. I will also begin adding additional links to this Hub this week.
Info Barrel 1 – A 500+ word article that links directly to the pillar article that has been published for 7 days.
Next Steps
This week I plan to continue building links to my niche website. I spent most of the first week focusing on building up one of my direct Hubs to the site. Now I want to focus on adding some new Info Barrel articles as well as building a high ranking Squidoo Lens. Here are my specific tasks for the upcoming week.
- Hubs – Create 2 new Hubs that link directly to the pillar article for a total of 5.
- Info Barrel – Publish 4 additional iB articles with a link to the pillar article.
- EzineArticle – Publish 1 EzineArticle with a link back to the pillar article.
- Squidoo Lens – Create 1 Squidoo Lens that links back to the niche website.
Final Thoughts
My work will not stop after this week. Once I publish the additional articles I noted above, I will start to focus on building links to those articles. I would also like to experiment with cross linking between HubPages and Info Barrel to see what happens. I look forward to seeing the results next week from my latest work along with allowing the articles above to mature.
What other FREE websites do you recommend to build links to niche websites?
Related posts:
- Niche Website Link Building Project – Week 3
- How to Jump Start a Passive Income Stream
- Back Link Competition
- How to Calculate the True Potential of Passive Income Online Earnings
- 6 Ways to Earn Income from HubPages
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I’ve had similar thoughts about giving up – building links can be so hard especially since it’s hard to know exactly what works and what doesn’t. But anyway, I’ll give you some ways I build links for free: Answer related questions in yahoo answers and leave a link back, Blog commenting, Twitter (you can install a wordpress plugin that automatically tweets when you have a new post). Although the links in yahoo answers and twitter aren’t anchor text backlinks, it is good to vary the links you’re building and I do get direct visitors from them (mainly yahoo answers). Good luck in your efforts!
John,
Indeed the hardest part of this whole for me has been to create backlinks! I’m not talking about crappy backlinks in forums or spamming either. It takes effort to write decent articles and have them point back your niche site.
I will say that article marketing works (I’m seeing some results now). I need to keep pushing this, however, to get my site above the fold on page 1 of Google results. I’ll say that it sounds like you definitely need to create backlinks to your niche site as it could provide you with a decent part-time income (to say the least!)
Why not look into guest posting on that certain niche! Anyone that runs a blog that comes to me to guest post I always let them.
I agree, building quality backlinks is a real slog. I set myself targets for pushing out articles and I always fail to meet them!
Have you seen this list of article directories before? I find it most useful when I actually get around to doing the writing!
Hi John,
I think the link I posted was stripped out. Here’s the URL if you want to take a look:
http://www.masonworld.com/masonworld-article-directory-rank/
Thanks for article directory list
I definitely agree that link buidling can be a slow and often times tedious project but the results show that it is necessary. It sounds like you have a pretty good plan and that is key to succeeding in anything is to have a defnite plan.
I also agree with guest posting. There are several different products and websites that will allow you to post an article on another person’s site. You can also look at the websites that are on the first page for the niche you are targeting and send them an email. You may be suprised that a few of them will have no problem letting you do a guest post since they get free content. Good luck and will be interesting to see how you sites improve.
Please don’t give up! You and others are the ones who inspire me!
When you say pillar article, are you referring to the one on your main site that you are trying to rank in? I’ve also used E-Zines quite a bit.
Also, I am wondering what you think about commenting on do-follow high profile blogs in your niche or micro-niche, as well as forums?
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