Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - Niche Site Duel #4

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.

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InfoBarrel On Yahoo - News Release

Just a quick post for the night.  I've had a number of InfoBarrel related posts go live on this blog over the past few weeks and that hasn't really been my goal.  This isn't going to be an InfoBarrel only focused blog but right now it is currently the focus of my efforts.

I have been spending time on a number of different sites, adding monetization to sites I've been on for a while and experimenting with other sites but currently InfoBarrel has been my main focus so I thought it was particularly cool to see this news release published over on Yahoo regarding InfoBarrel's latest milestone.

Just a couple days ago IB had it's 50,000th post published and it is cracked through the Alexa 6,000 rank.  The site is growing and and this InfoBarrel article published on Yahoo is just a small demonstration of that growth.

Ryan the owner of InfoBarrel published this article and it highlights the perks of IB as well as the reasons why the site is such a great place to hang out and learn - the community.  It's what Phil said in his guest post a couple days ago.  Nowhere else is there a greater mix of people who are focused not only on themselves but also on the task of helping everyone else.

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Making More Money With InfoBarrel - Help Others And Help Yourself

The following is a brief guest-post from Philtrate over at InfoBarrel - like my previous guest-poster Phil is relatively new to InfoBarrel as he started writing there in June 2010.  He has been a prolific writer there at times and contributes a ton of material in their forums.  I'm happy to share with you his perspective on InfoBarrel at this stage in his time there.  You can also catch Phil over on his blog on SEO Article Writing.

I write a lot of articles for a website called InfoBarrel. I commend this site to you in the strongest possible terms. It has the best earnings proportion of any of article revenue share site I have come across.

I earn 90% of the ads on my 150 articles every month and it is easy for everyone to earn the same.

I have tried other platforms and they just seem unnecessarily complicated.

InfoBarrel gives me two contextual in-body links to whatever website I choose, including affiliate links. I get another two links in my signature file, and I can have an unlimited number of signature files, so effectively I have four links for every article I write.

When I started writing at Info Barrel in June I knew very little about writing articles. I joined the Info Barrel forum and I strongly suggest you do the same.

I introduced myself and read a lot, contributing where I did not feel too stupid.

In most forums the old hands deliberately make any newbies feel inferior. At Info Barrel every new forum user is welcomed.

There is a different philosophy at InfoBarrel than you will find at most article submission sites. The philosophy here is a cooperative one. Everyone wants to grow the website and to encourage good writers because they take the attitude that by helping others, they help Info Barrel grow, so in effect, they are helping themselves.

Help others and, incidentally, help yourself.

Compare that to the back-biting that you will find in every other article writing forum. New people sometimes ask “Why is everyone here so nice?”

The people who contribute in the forum are mostly top InfoBarrel writers. Maybe they are such prolific writers who earn a fair return for their articles, month after month, because of what they have learned in the forums.

These writers pass on every writing and promotional tip they know. Why do they do that? Help others and, incidentally, help yourself.

Nobody is ever above learning. New members are welcomed partly from self-interest, too. Every new person who posts in the forum has unique knowledge. We all benefit from that knowledge, so we all encourage new members to contribute and to share what they know.

Thanks to Phil for his InfoBarrel Review - If you haven't given the site a try I wholeheartedly recommend it.

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