Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site

I love projects like this – I love tracking them and sizing them up to see what kind of result I can attain based on inputs I can control. In this case I joined the Niche Site Duel nearly two weeks ago – about 13 days to be exact and I posted my first epic post on my new diabetic shoes website. If you missed my first post on the topic you can check it out here: Shoes For Diabetics - Niche Site Duel and my follow up post: Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results In 4 Days.

In my original post I discussed the topic I chose and I introduced the reasoning behind it. I also spelled out the fact that I purposefully didn’t do any significant keyword research on it – I did do some but only a very small amount. I mainly wanted to choose a topic that was really easy to rank and really easy to monetize and a topic that had tons of long tails and keyword variations. I felt the keywords “best shoes for diabetics” would be very easy to rank and I was right.

After just one week into this challenge my site has been sitting in the number one spot for my main keyword and as I expected I was getting some traffic to it from that term but hardly any. What I still like about it however is that there are so many variations of the root keyword: “diabetic shoes” that slowly picking off more and more long-tails should be quite easy. Also I noted that long-tails tend to convert much better than short keywords so having a topic that has tons on long-tail variants is very appealing.

How Much Money Have I Made

I didn’t even monetize my site until about 8 days ago and in those 8 days I’ve already made $1.48 in Adsense income on the site and gotten some click throughs to Amazon and Endless.com through some affiliate links I added about a week ago.  However, I haven’t made any money via the affiliate sales channel yet.

I also noted that my main link building strategy would be to slowly build authority links back to the main page of the site. Starting with revenue sharing web 2.0 properties I planned on building links back to make money in the short term while my links slowly got picked up and indexed.

As a result of this plan I have long and helpful posts on InfoBarrel (aff), HubPages (aff), and Snipsly (for the links to these articles see my last post NSD2) all pointing back to my main site... and since these original backlinks were published I’ve already made $1.10 on the IB post, $0.40 on the Snipsly post, and $0.31 on the HubPage post. When all is added together in the past 13 days since I started this project I’ve made $3.39. Not bad but there’s definitely room for improvement.

Update On My Backlinking

So to update you all on my backlinking plan I’ll first say that I did nothing at all from about Wednesday last week until Monday night this week due to a previously planned Vegas vacation so I haven’t really added much lately however I did make some progress aside from improving the visual appeal of the site.

I backlinked my main supporting links (IB, Hub, Snip) with two links each from three eZine articles. Last week before I took off for vacation I published three articles on eZine each sending out two links giving me 2 meaty backlinks for each web 2.0 site. This has helped dramatically in getting these three articles and baclinks indexed and it helps increase their authority thereby pushing a lot of that authority over to my main niche site.

I also submitted a Buzzle article, which has yet to go live (which just went live late in the evening 11/17), which also will send a good backlink to my main niche site. You can see it here: What To Look For In Good Diabetic Shoes. Similarly I published an article on Posturown.com titled: Extra Wide Diabetic Slippers for Men and Women, which is also backlinking my main site. Lastly I published a great article on diabetic walking shoes on my main health and longevity site which sends a link back to my main niche site. You can read that post here: Diabetic Walking Shoes Can Help You Live Longer With Diabetes.

In case you are missing what I’m doing, I’m also backlinking each of my main supporting articles with backlinks from this blog in addition to the eZines. Instead of linking from this blog straight to the main site I’m linking to each supporting article instead. Increasing the authority of the backlinks they are sending off.

Also note that each of the six sites that are linking directly to my main diabetic shoes site are all authority sites and they are all dofollow contextual links in posts.  I am building the authority of the articles themselves by backlinking them. Simply put, dofollow backlinks from authority pages residing on authority sites are much better backlinks than a bunch of low quality nofollow backlinks from low quality pages on low quality sites.

Once my Buzzle and Posturown articles go live I will have six major supporting backlinks and I will write three more eZine articles to backlink my longevity blog post, my Posturown post, and my Buzzle post as I want each of these to be powerful pages supporting the main site.

Additionally I will run each of my supporting pages and all six eZines through IMAutomator for just a little juice… although I don’t expect this to help much it is insanely easy to do and takes hardly any additional time to setup.

Thoughts And Notes

It’s hard to believe that only 4-6 significant backlinks has done so well so far for this project but that is the case that I’ve seen so far. My main keyword is in 1st position, and my second keyword “shoes for diabetics" just hit page 1 today. It is currently sitting in position 4 already and in the last day my search traffic to the site just doubled on a bunch of new long-tail traffic. Traffic on a daily basis is still small but it is growing and is now roughly in the 10 visitors a day range. Again, I think this is fabulous for a site that’s 13 days old with only 4 backlinks and 2 more pending publication.

As I said I need to get my supporting articles (#4-6) backlinked twice each from eZine and then all six supporting articles backlinked once or twice from other sources and then I’ll start working one building another 3 main supporting article backlinks… and for that I’m slowly going to start moving my efforts away from Web2.0 and major article directories and over to guest posts on authority blogs.

For that part of the process I’ll be using PostRunner, a service reserved for members of the Keyword Academy (aff), which is designed to bring blog owners together with bloggers and content writers who want to publish guest posts. This is where things will start getting interesting. If you haven’t hard about PostRunner or the Keyword Academy then head over to my post explaining the process of getting backlinks by guest posting with PostRunner.

My Next Goals

My next goals are simple. I have already attained a #1 ranking for my main keyword now I have to get #1 for my secondary keyword: “shoes for diabetics” followed by “best diabetic shoes” “good diabetic shoes” and all the variations of “diabetic shoes for ____” fill in the blank. The amount of long tails are quite high and grabbing one after another will incrementally be very lucrative as each step will bring tons more LTs than I can even think of.

Of course rankings will come with more backlinks but also with more content and along those lines I plan to add at least a couple more posts to the main site in the next week or so. As I’ve previously stated I plan on working the main page more than anything else at least in the beginning but the interior pages are important too.

I’ve used another service provided to members of The Keyword Academy called Niche Refinery which is designed to help you ferret out the easiest and most lucrative keywords in a niche. It’s an amazingly powerful tool and takes very little of your time.

I scraped about 550 keywords from Adwords Keyword tool in a CSV file (took about 5 min), uploaded it to Niche Refinery and set it to process the keywords. I could do this myself over the course of a few hours to a few days but letting the program do it for me allows me to drink beer and watch TV instead (or do my day job) while the keywords are sorted and analyzed for me by the computer. Nothinig beats this program in my opinion.

I will add a selection of the best keywords of the 550 to the niche site later this week as new articles. Eventually they will draw traffic on their own but for now this is just to add more pages to the site for the search engines to index.

But first things first - tonight I will have to see if I can pump out 3 more eZines and then in the next few days I’ll see about getting them published. Good luck to you all and please do leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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



See here for the Niche Site Duel Hub and all the participants in this challenge. Make sure to click through and visit their sites as there is a lot to be learned from everyone!