Internet Marketing Techniques with Micro-Niches
Quick Post this week, as I am one of the “lucky” few in my town to have been sequestered to jury duty for the week which cuts into my free time (and this site is nothing more than something I do to run my mouth). Anyway, quick lesson for those of you on what NOT to do when you are developing an internet marketing campaign…..
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So, I was looking at a certain niche to start to develop a game plan for. It is a micro niche loaded with buyers and fits all the criteria that I would look when it comes to choosing a niche (cliff note’s version- definite need…desperate buyers….can’t be easily found offline). That said, I ran into a treasure trove of information. In fact, it was the mother lode and it came courtesy of one marketer that happens to own the niche (I will get into how he is doing it later).
This particular marketer, whether he did it out of laziness or ignorance, linked all of his properties together in a way that I could follow and build an entire mind map of his little empire. No Joke…here is what I found:
- 51 hubpages on this particular niche
- 43 Squidoo Lens
- 2 Wordpress blogs
- 1 Blogspot blog (with around 70 pages of content…obviously, he was using the blog to index his other funnels)
- Primarily 4 different affiliate products that he was promoting…all winners (I did some more research via adwords and keyword spy)
Not only this, I know he is doing well with this. How? Because his first hubpage was 14 months ago. Since then, he has continuously added other similar (yet different) pages for the niche. I can also spot his losers as well. How? Once again, because this particular marketer was stupid enough to group all of his marketing campaigns together….and the couple alias accounts he has, he freely links to them which makes following him way too easy.
How was he so easy to follow?
- His main account at hubpages and squidoo list his entire portfolio…(he has 143 hubpages).
- His username (handle) can be traced to propellor, folk’d and about a dozen other web 2.0 platforms which enables me to find other properties I may have missed.
- His name comes up with even more stuff including ezine articles and forums, ect.
- His link profile for all of his sites is a joke. He has very few links and this is despite the fact that he ranks for a wide range of long tail buy keywords. Of course this will change once I get involved.
In short, I was able to grab everything this particular marketer has been doing for the past year and a half.
So what is my point?
My point is that you need to use aliases. You need to mask your work and build personas to hide what you are doing. You need to think about hiding your links by funneling from the second tier of sites linking to your money sites. There is nothing that sucks more than to give your competition the keys to you empire.
How other marketers can find your money sites:
- Your username- most people have a very consistent username pattern. If you want to hide your tracks, use different usernames for you accounts.
- Your email address- If you do place your email on websites, use a different email address for each persona.
- Don’t link your money sites together….unless you are using the sites to leverage a keyword.
- If you must link your sites, obfuscate the links with other links pointing to irrelevant sites- One of the things I will sometimes do is have an in-your-face sales link above the fold and down somewhere in the middle, the real link I am trying to build up.
- IP block- I have several hosting accounts. $8 a month per niche profile is worth keeping your network safe from prying eyes.
If you think I am being mean by attacking this guy’s niche, understand it is business. Nothing more, nothing less. And I was going to go after this niche anyway. But this guy gave me the best direction.
Now, internet marketing strategy time….what would I do?
Since I think this guy is a part time marketer (since he has only built a little over 100 pages over the past 14 months for this niche), I feel like a marketing blitzkrieg would be in order.
- I have spent the last week rewriting his articles. I do this because I want to know everything about the niche. This particular niche is in the health field and to be real honest, I now know way more about it than I will probably ever want to know. I used to just outsource this work but have found that the more you personally know, the better off you are. Just like anyone who sells a product, the more you know your product, the easier the sale…I will leave it at that.
- Spend $300 for 20 high quality articles. These articles will be submitted to ezine articles.
- Rewrite these articles myself for a new website that will help get my pages indexed.
- Spend $300 for 75 low quality articles. These I will get from one of the outsource websites. They won’t be great but they will pass copyscape so no biggie.
- Use PLR snippets for my link profile funnels and low quality links.
- Low Quality Links on my 3rd to 4th tier (automated) on domains with established trustrank.
- Use a straight arrow linking profile in which I beef up my second tier links to mask where my link power is truly coming from (somewhat black hat but effective).
- Build 3-5 personas and start building pages with content to keep other affiliate marketers from seeing the big picture.
- Oh, and of course, start to either build an authority site with high quality articles OR make it a silo on a website that I already own that has trustrank.
Finally, for those of you who don’t understand the straight arrow strategy, it is also known as laundering links…here is a very general example of how this works….
Note: This is behind the curtain kind of stuff. The lower the tier, the lower quality of links you build. You build them on trusted sites to enhance their power use that power to rank your higher tier pages. The idea is to push rank to your money pages.
Next Article: Time to push the “easy” button on Niche Marketing
18 Responses to “Internet Marketing Techniques with Micro-Niches”
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You've said it in many previous articles already, but good research really is the foundation of all marketing activities.
So now you know how this other person has constructed their niche strategy, but they own it with a 14 month head start.
You're entering this niche with a similar strategy to theirs, other than making it less vulnerable to poaching from other marketers.
My question is, other than increasing your number of pages/articles above the competition, do you have any other strategy to rank higher/funnel more traffic than this current niche leader?
Cheers
Patrick
Hey Patrick, yeah, I actually do and was going to go into it but was kind of pushed for time. While it is true that this guy/gal has a 14 month head start, they haven\'t really "attacked" the niche….they have simply built content….most of their 100+ pages isn\'t really linked although they do seem to keep it "in house" on Squidoo with internal links and also do the same with hubpages. In other words, their link strategy sucks and it is very likely that I could push them out of the way in weeks, not months just by doing a little link laundering with parasitic hosts that have already built trustrank. The trustrank is absolutely crucial for a marketer to actually get ranked and stay ranked. Plus, if you are using a site that is trusted, you can literally hurl hundreds of links at the page a day and the worst thing that could happen is Google would ignore the page. It happens occasionally but not near enough for me to abandon the strategy.
Make no bones about it….there is a reason why some of these parasitic hosts do well in the SERPS. There is a reason why EZA dominates micro niches with long tail keywords. And this particular marketer found out that out by using squidoo to push his product. He did it without external links. Now, that said, what do you think would happen if someone like me, doubled his efforts (200+ articles, quality and spun) and started a link campaign? Two things could happen….
1. He catches on and we wind up in a link campaign war where the marketer with the most capital and resources wins…
2. He scratches his head as to what is happening and simply writes off the niche as a nice run while it lasted….
On a separate note, this marketer is likely not utilizing "ad space" on the page correctly as the way he is promoting his products is at the end of the ad. While testing would be necessary since markets are inherently different, what I have found is that you want your offer to be above the fold…not buried deep within the page…since most people are likely to never go below that. And most marketers forget that people naturally will follow links for answers.
Great information Leo,
I would assume that for each money site the secondary and tertiary sites should never cross link so we are really building a completely separate farm for each site. Then within a site's structure we never cross link secondary sites so actually each of our secondary sites has it's own seperate farm. Is that correct?
Remind me to stay away from any niches you are interested in.
That's correct. I don't cross link promotions but then again that is so a savvy marketer can't discover all the niches I am in. They may be able to find one or two but that should be about it…and that is okay with me.
I found your website through Ben’s make money online site, and I must say that your website is INCREDIBLE. I’ve read most of your articles, and now my eyes are bloodshot with joy.
One thing doesn’t add up for me though. I realize you like to mask your identity as much as possible to hide your niches. How many separate hubpages/ezine/squidoo accounts do you end up creating for one money niche? And do you only use hubpages/squidoo pages as your money sites?
Thanks again for such a great site! I’ll be sure to check back!
@ Anthony Thanks. Man, I have opened a can of worms with the aliases, haven’t I? Typically, I have one persona per market but will sometimes cross over to another market if it is a good vertical. As far as accounts, I currently have 20+ accounts on hubpages using 3 adsense accounts. I will use the same persona on squidoo, infobarrel, EZA, ect. As far as money sites go, I will use whatever property that google is liking (ranked the highest). You see, I don’t start connecting the dots until I see that one site is clearly the winner. After all, my ultimate goal is to be #1 for the keyword….why do more work than I have to, right?
I was up til 2am reading your blog and taking notes (and damning your navigation)
Just want to make sure I’m reading you correctly: you have 1 – 4 personas per market (per product? or if there are several products in a particular niche market, a persona for that specific niche? Or several personas for several products in a niche? Or does it matter?)
Each persona will create a crapload of pages. So one persona has articles in the directories, and a few 2.0 properties (ie: Hubpages, blogger).
You do not link properties between personas, but the personas themselves link to their other properties (article linked to Hub, linked to blog/site etc)
Sorry…to understand things I often need to write them out in my own words (I’m a writer as well, B2B web copy mainly)
I currently have a persona writing & posting articles that redirect to a merchant sales page (I just started IM a little over a month ago), focused on promoting one product (that I have read, and really like, and have made one sale with). My next steps then should be:
Persona: articles–>Hubpages–>blog (insert various 2.0 properties here) with the eventual goal of creating an authority site which everything would then link to, directly or indirectly?
Off to read some more! Thanks for your ‘rants’, they are more helpful than most of the ‘learn IM’ crap out there, which I am fully fed up with at this point.
Yeah, that is pretty much it. I am kind of regretting my alias or persona rant now as it seems like it has caused more confusion. The only point I was making was that you don’t want to show other marketers your entire hand….thanks for reading and sorry about my navigation.
i stumbled this page in my laptop.. (i saved around 10 pages of this blog in the past which i used to make reference in the future). this is the post that i like the most but no give it a try. i had used several other methods in link building campaign but never use straight arrow link profile. i always obfuscate my links profile with hamiltonian method which deemed as really good bcz no one can solve NP-problem yet even google just can guesstimate (it involves mathematics which is my main field of study). but it’s too much hassle, hell lot of work too to be done. even i sometime loss in my own plan. btw, i never give shit writing/articles for my properties used for give links. well, i like to win in seo game, but ethic is unquestionable in my work philosophy. it’s win-win situation. regarding to link laundering technique (which is the real point that you want to tell others) that you use here, i doubt that you only use one straight link profile for each money page.
Hey Leo. This is a great article. I will surely be reading your other posts as I am pretty new to internet marketing and this is one of the best resources i’ve found! I wish I found it earlier. I have 2 questions though, 1) at the lowest tier where you refer to low quality incoming links, what types of links are these/how do I get them? My second question is, do you link all your highest tier pages (in the diagram above: squid, hub, squid) to your website? (your authority site?)
Hey Mohammed….thanks and thank you. The lowest quality incoming links are links that you think may be suspect. The method is known as link laundering and yes, that is pretty much what you are doing as your tiers move further and further away from your authority site. As far as linking to my authority site, I do and the links don’t go to the home page but go internally to various pages. Sorry to take so long to answer. I rarely get on the internet to do anything other than business.
Back to different personas
– I am already lost among all my squidoo, hubpages etc…accounts and pages that I have so far. Is there an easy way to keep track, any tips 
? And one more – do you track what is happening to your lower tier sites/pages or do you just build them, link them and forget about them?
@ Ben
Typically, I create personas that will cover a market. For instance, my DrAlex persona (on hubpages) deals with herbal and home remedies. I have a persona that deals with women issues and if a particular thing takes off, I will create a separate persona for that. I have a csv file in which I keep up with them. It really isn’t that hard. Currently, I have about 20 personas that I am active with.
Interesting post.. and website. This is the first post I came across and there’s no doubt I’ll be spending a lot, and I mean a LOT more hours here trying to absorb as many tips as I can.
This post rang a bell with me.. I think I’ve seen the person you are talking about but it was a while back and I didn’t stalk him long enough to remember his username. I do remember it was a niche one wouldn’t expect to do well but it appeared to be working well for him.
Anyhow, thanks for this post. I wasn’t aware I’ve been a little careless with my linking recently so this served as a wake up call to start using more aliases.
I have a question — I use freelancer.com for articles but would like to have more options.. is there another one you can recommend? Thanks!
@ Andy
I have kind of softened my stance on personas since writing this. While you could “lose” by displaying everything you are doing, you can also intimidate another marketer if you have tons of content….after all, the barrier or dip becomes trying to compete with someone or a site with hundreds of thousands of pages.
I pretty much write my own content at the present moment but sometimes will outsource content if I need something really quick. The best advice I can give you on outsourcing writing is that once you find a writer you like, stick with them and let them have first dibs at any work you want to have done. Building relationships with people you do business with can go a super long way…
First off, this is an AMAZING blog, thank you for taking time to teach those of us who are new.
My question regards hosting strategies. You mention hiding behind multiple IPs. I’m currently in the market to upgrade my hosting and was looking into getting an entry level VPS that comes with 4 IP addresses- I’m going to venture a guess that these are likely not on separate IP blocks. I know I can add more IPs to my plan, but from what I understand there is no guarantee these will be on separate blocks either unless you wait between orders. So I guess my REAL question is: Is this sufficient protection, or is it better to just open multiple shared hosting accounts?
Thanks!!
-Mike
@ Mike…sorry about the lag time between your comment and my response (I don’t get here as much). You should be fine. I have lessened my stance on obfuscating identity since this post. One of the biggest barriers you can build is out content or out link your competitors. Works every time.