How to Promote Your Niche Website for Better, Targeted Traffic
Congratulations! If you’ve read this far, hopefully you’ve successfully created your first ever niche website – or you are on your way. Sit back, take a deep breath, and get ready for the next phase: promoting your site and bringing in traffic. While good, high quality content is the core of any good niche website, promoting it is the lifeblood, and this is how you’re going to get a steady stream of relevant traffic. There are several steps to promoting a niche website, so we’re going to take an in depth look at each one of them so that you can choose which route you want to take with your first niche site. The more ways you to choose your niche website, the better off you will be in the long run, and the better chance you have of receiving quality, targeted traffic.
Expand Your SEO
Optimizing your site for search engines should have been done along with the content, so this is going to be a short section. The keywords should already be in place, but what you should focus on is linking between the pages of your site. In every page, include at least one link on a major keyword that links back to the home page. This is a powerful technique that can give you a lot of points with Google or another search engine.
Updating your niche website periodically will do a lot for your search engine ranking too. Fresh content is like food to search engine crawlers, and they won’t come back often if there isn’t anything on the dinner table. Human visitors like unique content too.
Bookmark Your Site with a Vengeance
This is where the real promotion comes in. Social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit categorize links to websites. This will give you a backlink and put it out there for a lot of other people to see. There are literally hundreds of websites where you can submit a bookmark, and my advice is to take full advantage of them. If you can build up a reputation on a website like StumbleUpon, you’re tapping into a wealth of traffic resources. Here are a few other bookmarking sites:
- A1-Webmarks
- add.io
- AllMyFaves
- MisterWong
- BlinkList
- Blurpalicious
- Box.net
- BuddyMarks
- BookmarkingNet
Personally, I don’t do much social bookmarking anymore. Many of the bookmarking sites have become over run with spam, and that is basically what you are doing when you bookmark your sites. Still, some people still swear by the bookmarking sites. I’ve had much better success with article marketing and social networking sites.
Social networking is similar to bookmarking, but different in its own way. Facebook, Twitter, LinkdIN, and others provide valuable outlets for you to market your niche website and connect with like-minded users on a personal level. Always include a link to your website on every one of your profiles. It also helps to setup a Twitter account and Facebook page that match your niche website. For example, if you create a niche website about tires, then you may want to create a Twitter account to promote and tweet about monthly specials.
The Power of Article Marketing
Article marketing serves two purposes:
-It acts as sort of a ‘pre-sale’ for your viewers, evoking an initial interest in your product or website before they even head over there.
-It provides quality, do-follow backlinks that search engines will consider when they are ranking your niche website. Each backlink counts as a ‘point’ towards your PageRank. Not all backlinks are created equally though; links from a strong domain will have more gravity than links on a poorly ranked website. Most article directories, have a well-ranked domain and can be great resources for your article marketing effort – though with the recent changes to Google, the article directories do not pull quite as much rank as they have in the past. Despite that fact, many website owners still use the article sites to syndicate their content. This means that when they pull an article from an article site and place it on their website, you will receive a free backlink in return.
There are, again, hundreds of article directories, but here are a few that I like to use to get started with:
- EzineArticles
- ArticleSnatch
- ArticlesBase
- ArticleAlley
- ArticleBlast
- GoArticles
Simply putting a link to your niche website on each article works well, but there is a more effective way to rank both your website and the articles, which in turn will bring more traffic back to your website. I call it Crossfire Linking.
Crossfire Linking – A Magnetic Technique for Article Marketing
Article directories are great, but the one issue with them is that even though the domain is strong, that strength is spread out rather thinly over the thousands of articles on the site. As a result, your individual article may not be considered especially “strong” and it probably won’t get a lot of traffic.
So instead of linking directly back to your website with every article, do this:
Say you have two articles, Article A and Article B. Instead of linking to your website from Article A, create a link instead that points to Article B. In Article B, create a link that points to a specific page of your website. From that page, create your sniper link that points to your homepage, and then have another link embedded that points to Article A. Each link should be placed in a strong keyword as the anchor text, allowing all of your articles to gain rank for that keyword.
Continue this process with as many articles as you want, crisscrossing them like a giant ethereal spider web.
Comment on Related Blogs
Blogs hold a lot of power with search engines if they are ranked well. As such, any link of yours that appears on a high-traffic blog is going to do well. How do you get your link on a blog like that? By commenting, of course! The trick with this is to actually write a useful comment. Don’t put your link in the actual comment unless what you are saying relates directly to a specific page on your site. Most of the time your name above the comment will be a hyperlink back to your website.
If you can find a way to engage other readers in your comment this technique will work even better. Ask pointed, well thought out questions for the blog owner, or directly challenge anything that comes across as false or ambiguous. Other readers will take note and head over to your website to see where you are coming from.
Create a Squidoo Lens or Hub Page
Last but not least, Squidoo can be used for promotion to great effect. A Squidoo Lens is basically a micro-blog where you can post a small article, provide links (to your website of course), and do much, much more. In fact, some people have even started using Squidoo to make dozens of tiny niche blogs that actually generate an income. It’s easy to get started, and Squidoo offers a lot of marketing tips and reading material as well. Hug Pages is very similar to Squidoo and basically offers many of the same features.
As you can see, the process of building a niche website doesn’t actually stop with the website itself. If you can learn how to successfully promote your niche website, you can create an organic traffic stream that never stops bringing you money.
Related posts:
- How to You Can Find Quality Content for Your Niche Website
- How to Effectively Monetize Your Niche Website
- How to Start Researching Your First Niche Website
Did you like this article?
I would like to thank you for this information.
I just established my first niche site but I am still trying to get traffic to them.
I really thank you because your article hits upon somethings I slightly knew and others that I absolutely had no clue about.
mj recently posted..BOB Revolution 12″ Aluminum Wheel Duallie Stroller Review
Really very informative…will keep me busy for a while, however I’m having a problem with Crossfire Linking…cant figure out how to add the linking to the second site etc. But thanks for all the other stuff that I can and will do
Lea
Also thanks for your help with superpromostuff.com !