Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns

http://bestshoesfordiabetics.com

I’ve been ramping up my efforts lately on my Diabetic Shoes website. If you have any experience with sites like these you probably know that they are a bit easier to rank after they’ve aged a bit than when they are new right out of the gate. I started my site back on the 4th of November and filled out the framework of the site back in 2010 including my initial backlinks. You can read more about that process in my earlier updates but largely the months of January and the first half of February saw me really sit on the site just waiting for it to age while I worked on other projects. Sometimes this is worth doing and so far it looks like it’s done well for me thus far.

Since mid-Feb I began looking through the traffic the site was getting and decided to add some more pages of content based on both traffic I was already getting to the site from search engines and based on new keywords I wanted to target which I identified using Niche Refinery, the keyword selection tool provided to members of The Keyword Academy (TKA).

How I Make Money On My Diabetic Shoes Website

Before I go on to what has kept me busy on this site over the month of March I wanted to talk about monetization. I posted a couple weeks back an update showing that my site had starting earning more efficiently; well it has continued to do so.

I have implemented three forms of monetization thus far but only two have converted as of yet. Adsense was the first form, followed by Amazon Associates, and most recently I added a few links to ClickBank in both the sidebar and on a single targeted post. ClickBank has yet to convert but I wouldn’t expect it to so soon after implementation.

Adsense

Considering Adsense is the easiest form of monetization possible it was the first form I implemented on the site. It earned for me immediately back in November and has continued to earn a bit every month until March where it took off. I included an ad on top right of my posts, a wide sidebar on the left of posts below the fold and an inline middle of the post ad which is only included on long posts. Each ad is tracked separately and so I can see which one is performing best.

Overall I made $58.20 with Adsense in March. The bulk of that came from the top ad, followed by the inline post ad, trailing by the sidebar ad. In the long run I want this site to pull further away from Adsense so I will take this into account while I decide on how to switch these Adsense ads out for other kinds of affiliate programs, banners, or other networks. You may wonder why when the return has been so good but it’s because the affiliate sales potential is likely much better as you can see with my Amazon earnings.

Amazon Associates

Somewhere in the middle of the month, I’m going to say around the 15th I made the change on this site to start focusing more on Amazon affiliate sales. After reading the bulk of Dave’s Make Money On The Internet Blog and more specifically his advice on Amazon I began to implement some of his techniques into this site.

Dave makes gobs of money online – he is an authority and he supposedly knows what he is talking about so having given some of his advice a try I can see why he does so well. I thank him immensely for the info he provides. If you haven’t read his blog then make sure to head over and start pouring through his archives. I read everything and it took me the better part of a month doing it a few posts a day. It will take a while but it’s better than any ebook you’ll ever read that’s for sure.

Enough about Dave – He advises you to be overt about your affiliate links if you are building a product oriented website. Y diabetic shoes website has a lot of good information on the importance of practicing better diabetic foot care and wearing diabetic shoes and any readers of the site will be interested in the products and most likely looking to buy them. If that is the case why would you ever want to beat around the bush. If they search for “good shoes for diabetics” why would I ever give them a landing page that didn’t link out overtly to a good pair of shoes for diabetics to buy?

As such I added prominent links in the sidebar pointing directly to footwear appropriate for diabetics filtered by brand and price and then in many of the posts I took Adsense off completely and included a front and center link to the most applicable product the search visitor is looking for. As a result my Amazon earnings jumped up dramatically.

The first half of the month my Amazon earnings were $13.53 on 5 shipped items and the second half of the month my Amazon earnings were $30.85 on 9 shipped items. Overall I hit $44.38 on 14 shipped items which seems quite good to me. I think this is even better than Adsense so I’ll continue to make a slow transition away from Adsense and more to Amazon as a result.

ClickBank & Other Affiliate Programs

As previously mentioned I want this site to veer away from Adsense and into more of a free information site monetized by affiliate sales. Amazon is obviously part of this but there are many other companies with good applicable products for sale which have affiliate programs. Considering this is such a topical site I imagine these programs will pay well and convert well so I plan on pushing more into this arena. I’ve started off by offering a program from ClickBank which is something I can’t offer from Amazon and I intend on finding some other programs and companies to promote which offer better returns than Amazon sales. This will be an ongoing project for me.

Recent Site Promotion

In addition to the monetization strategies I’ve taken on this site I’ve begun to increase the velocity of promotion I’ve done on the site. In early Niche Site Duel updates I mentioned how I like to build up fewer high quality backlinks rather than blasting them with tons of low quality links. I started with a handful of backlink articles which I wanted to be authority links:

• Best Shoes For Diabetics – on InfoBarrel
• Diabetic Walking Shoes – on my longevity blog
• Diabetic Shoes For Men – on HubPages
• Best Socks for Diabetics – on Snipsly
• Good Diabetic Shoes – on Buzzle
• Good Diabetic Shoe – on Health For World

Each of these articles have been independently promoted and they all should be giving me good authoritative backlinks by now. Aside from Snipsly (which hasn’t been showing much promise lately) they all are doing well.

In addition to these main backlink articles I’ve also started promoting each and every post on the site. I’ve backlinked them all (all 18 of them) from SheToldMe, InfoPirate, Folkd, Posturown, and at least twice from InfoBarrel – all of these sites earn me money so my promotion of my niche site has also netted me a fair sum of earnings. Many of my 18 posts also have backlinks from other blogs as a result of my guestposting with PostRunner. As a result all my posts on my Diabetic Shoes website are starting to do very well in the search results and the main index page is being lifted with the tide.

Right now I rank:

• best shoes for diabetics – 3rd
• shoes for diabetics – 15th
• best diabetic shoes – 7th
• diabetic shoes – 17th

Obviously I also rank very well for a large laundry list of long tails because of my depth of content on site and my growing list of backlinks pointing at all of my pages.

Promotion for April

This month I should continue to increase my backlinking of the site with revenue sharing sources and will begin to ramp up my backlinking with guestposting on blogs, primarily through via PostRunner. I will probably add a few more pages to the blog as well based on current traffic trends. In case you don’t know you can almost always get a surge in new search traffic by posting a new post using a keyword or keyword derivative which is already sending traffic your way to an already existing post. This helps dramatically especially in the beginning when traffic is slow to begin with.

March saw search traffic increase to this site from 256 total visits in Feb to 653 total visits in March, an increase of 155 percent month over month. I’d like April to see another increase of over 100 percent as that could increase my earnings by over 100 percent. That would be nice.

I’ll cut this post here but leave you with my earnings history:

Total Income By Month

• Nov 2010 - $5.57 on 3 posts
• Dec 2010 - $15.86 on 5 posts
• Jan 2011 - $17.05 on 6 posts
• Feb 2011 - $15.48 on 15 posts
• Mar 2011 - $102.58 on 18 posts

Total Earnings to date: $156.54


Good luck on your own niche sites – work hard at them and make them helpful to your readers and you’ll be much better off in the long run. Feel free to leave any comments or questions in the comment section 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


For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.

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Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites

In early November I started a niche site when I joined many other bloggers in the Niche Site Duel. I have since posted five updates on my niche site: http://bestshoesfordiabetics.com. You can catch up on those posts here, here, here, here, and here.

Recently I’ve also been publishing a series on making a living online and a recent update on that series I noted the importance of building your initial backlinks to your niche sites on revenue sharing websites because they are relatively strong backlinks and they are capable of absorbing a bunch of backlinks right off the bat due to their being published on an established domain.

Today I wanted to drive this point home by showing you the results of my initial five backlinks to my diabetic shoes website. As I noted back in my second niche site update I posted five main backlinks to the niche site from InfoBarrel, HubPages, Snipsly, Posturown, and my own Longevity Blog. That is five sites which earn me money for my publications.

After publishing those five articles I went on to publish others and I also went on to backlink those articles to ensure they get indexed, stay indexed, gained some authority, and passed the best link juice possible to my new website. I published those five articles a little over 4 months ago in mid-November 2010. In that time my entire niche site has made a little over $100 but these five articles alone have made an additional $65.54. That doesn’t even include any of the other backlinks I’ve built on revenue sharing sites so adding those in would increase the numbers even more.

What is interesting is that I haven’t even gone gangbusters on backlinking these five articles. I have only sent 6 links at my longevity blog post and it’s indexed at PR0. I’ve sent 9 backlinks at my IB post and it’s indexed at PR0. My hub has gotten 10 backlinks and it’s indexed at PR0, Snipsly has 5 backlinks and it’s indexed at PR N/A. Lastly my Posturown article has 11 backlinks pointing at it and it too is indexed at PR0. All in all my backlinks have given most of these articles enough authority to get them past PR N/A and I haven’t even hit them hard with backlinks.

What is all of this to say? If you are building a niche site do not underestimate the power of building your main backlinks first from rev share sites. They are a great way to build your first backlinks because of their earning power and their ability to grow in authority quickly. In the last 30 days these five articles have made me almost $10 in Adsense income which is a drop in the bucket but quite significant considering my entire niche site only made $56 during the same time period.

If you are building a niche site make sure to not overlook this income source.  Write good articles to build these backlinks and then promote them with backlinks of their own through article marketing or through guestposting on blogs.  PostRunner is the best system around for this in my opinion.  Once your niche blog starts ranking better and pulling in revenue then your income will start growing exponentially.

All Other NSD Posts
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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A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update (#5)

It’s been some time since I talked about my diabetic shoes website that I started as a part of Pat and Tyrone’s Niche Site Duel. In previous posts (1, 2, 3, 4) I discussed (among other things) my feelings about using spun content or mass auto generated article submissions. I know they work and all but I’ve never felt they were something I would feel comfortable doing… so I haven’t.

Instead I’ve built my site (and backlinks) up slowly with unique content I’ve written myself. I have also focused on building my backlinks by focusing on building up only a few backlinks from the major revenue sharing sites and a few strong article directories and then backlinking those URLs to make them strong pages on their own passing a lot of link juice.

What I’ve Been Publishing Lately
Lately I’ve been adding more content to the main diabetic shoes site and some of it I have been publishing based on long tails of things already drawing trickle traffic as well as on other keywords which will actually help the site be a better resource to real diabetics with real foot problems. Basically I do want this site to have a wealth of information on it that is helpful to anyone needing these products and this kind of information.

Some of the keywords I’ve gone after have also been carefully selected based on their difficulty level as defined by Niche Refinery (see my Niche Refinery Review for more), the proprietary keyword selection tool available to members of The Keyword Academy.

Site Indexing
As a result I have built a site of roughly 16 pages plus tags, categories, and administrative pages. The whole site is basically indexed just fine (107 results for the site found in Google as of today’s writing) and many of the pages are ranking well for many long-tail keywords and moderately well for some shorter keywords. One suggestion I may have in this area for you is to get each of your category feeds setup under Feedage as well as your main blog feed. I wrote this article on submitting your InfoBarrel RSS Feed to Feedage a while back which may not exactly be focused on blogs but should help you understand the process nonetheless.

At this pace it will be a while before I take any 1st place rankings for any major traffic keywords but in my book slow and steady, calculated and intelligent design of content publication and backlink promotion will always win in the long run.

Site Design

http://bestshoesfordiabetics.com

It took me a while but back in January I finally worked on the aesthetics of the site a bit by adding a (bit) more “attractive” header. I also set up an appropriate contact page complete with working email form. I should have done this from the get-go but simply didn’t. I have some trouble with building aesthetics when I know there is no search traffic coming in.

I still plan on working more on site design in the coming month but only a little at a time. As I build more content and work on better monetization the site design and aesthetics should slowly change for the better. In the end I want this to look professional but not flashy at all and I do want the site to remain largely text based. My idea is to make many of the pages on the site feel a bit like a store to stay in line with Dave’s Amazon layout for blogs.

Traffic And Monetization Methods
Today the site is roughly 3 ½ months old. I went live on November 4, 2010 and as of today’s writing is starting to make some decent gains in search traffic. I’m slowly adding backlinks to the site in general from the revenue sharing websites as well as the revenue sharing bookmark sites and will be starting to increase my backlinking effort from PostRunner guest blogging submissions (see my post explaining what PostRunner is). I expect in not too much time I’ll continue to see good improvement in the way the site responds to search traffic.

For months now I’ve had Adsense on the site in addition to Amazon affiliate links but as I get more and more involved with Amazon’s affiliate program every day I am starting to lean in the direction of Amazon.

I have also been reading Dave’s excellent material on Making Money On Amazon which I HIGHLY recommend you read (I’ve linked to it twice now already!) and have been slowly implementing some of his advice into my site in the way of side bar links to Amazon product categories and building some posts up as an Amazon store on top followed by an informational blog post on the bottom.

This is new for the site so I haven’t really been able to measure the results of these changes quite yet but I can see how they will help. On my next report I’ll have to add to this topic with my observations on the monetization layout.

In the future I’d like to build in some integration with some specific medical supply stores (diabetic supply affiliate programs I’m thinking) but as always I like to see some traffic first before trying to satisfy their needs with ads and products.

Results so Far
So how has the site been doing so far? Not bad but there’s a lot of room for improvement. Over the last 30 days the site has seen 489 unique visitors with 76 percent coming from search engines. My main low volume keyword: “best shoes for diabetics” brought 18 unique visitors to the site over that time period and I currently rank #3 for it according to Scroogle. Some other long tail keywords worth mention include “best diabetic shoes” and “shoes for diabetics” ranking 7 & 92 respectively. With my upcoming PostRunner submissions those numbers should improve notably.

Always do your searches in Scroogle as your personalization is stripped out of the search results and you get a more accurate picture of where you rank.

As far as earnings on those visitors goes, over the last 30 days I have made $30.60 in Adsense and $25.63 in Amazon earnings for a total of $56.23. Since inception the site has made $48.51 on Amazon and $53.57 with Adsense totaling $102.08 in its first 3 ½ months. Again, not bad but I really should have spent more time on this project considering my last month saw revenue of over fifty dollars on less than 500 unique visitors. That’s a rate of more than $100 for every 1000 visitors which is pretty darned good.

In the coming weeks and months I expect to do some heavy backlinking to the site from PostRunner submissions. That will start inching my search rankings higher and I’ll start seeing some really good traffic and earnings if this earnings pace continues. Obviously I will continue to edit my pages and tweak the placement of monetization links to maximize my revenue per visitor.

One Side Note
I have been busy publishing my 28 days to start making a living online series and much of what I have done for my Diabetic Shoes site has followed what I’ve been discussing over the last couple weeks. I haven’t followed it to the letter or anything but only because I am slowly building the site and because I have access to PostRunner for my backlinks. For a beginner with no cash flow, many people prefer to stick to the free methods before investing in any programs.

Are you participating in the Niche Site Duel, let me know in the comments because Pat’s list is too long for me to follow along with them all. Good luck and good work guys.

All Other NSD Posts
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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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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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!

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NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results In 4 Days

A few days ago I published my introduction to the Niche Site Duel which was originally started by Pat and Tyrone. See the footer of this article for the hub of all niche site duel participants.

In my intro post I discussed how my main keyword is a low traffic low competition keyword and that it should be a springboard to a better keyword if I play my cards right and work hard enough and long enough at it. The main keyword I’m targeting is 4 words long and it has low competition on page one of Google but it also doesn’t really have a lot of searchers for it according to Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool. Additionally the tool also shows that the CPC for the keyword isn’t all that high although it is around $2 which isn’t that bad.

What I’m going to be relying on to make money on this niche site at first is the long tails. When I get to number one for my main keyword that will be nice but the long tails are generally where the money is at when it comes to having a better CTR and better conversion rates.

To get all the long tails I can I decided to write one insanely long post which was just shy of 3,000 words. In this one article I have pretty much covered everything relating to my keyword and have included as many variations and synonyms to my keyword as possible. This should help a lot in bringing long-tail keywords out of the wood-works once this article gets ranking.

Initially I plan on getting this new site to rank by throwing some backlinks at it but unlike some others my plan is to build backlinks to this article slowly and only from higher quality sites and sources. I will not be using automatic mass article creation software but instead will do everything manually. It is my opinion (I’m still to new at this game to be positive) that higher quality links from more relevant sources are the best way to rank a website and get it performing well. This is not to say that other techniques don’t work but for now these are my values.

How I Plan On Getting My First Search Traffic

I’m after search traffic first and foremost. This is where the money is so I don’t care about social traffic. The only thing I will do is post articles online looking for high quality and relevant dofollow backlinks. To start off I have written a second fairly long post on the site on “The Best Socks for Diabetics” and used it to link to the main blog front page. Each article has its own category and each has approximately 6 tags. And every page links back to the main page.

This is a standard site structure but remember that the more pages on your site you have linking back to the home page the better the home page will perform. Internal linking is very important. Because it is important I will continue adding posts to this site just for the internal links even though initially I won’t be trying to rank the interior post pages.

3 Pillar Backlinks From Revenue Sharing Sites – Getting The Money Flowing

My first course of action after initially building this site is to get a few high quality backlinks to it from relevant pages. To do this I wrote a long and helpful post in InfoBarrel titled “The Best Shoes For Diabetics” which links out to the website once in the last paragraph of the article. I did the same thing over on HubPages with my article titled “The Best Cheap Diabetic Shoes For Men” and over on Snipsly with my article titled: “The Best Socks For Diabetics”.

The point here is that these are web 2.0 properties which have the potential of making some money right away which will help compensate me for my time while I wait for the new website to start ranking well. Each site makes money via Adsense and HubPages and InfoBarrel can make money for me via Amazon. In fact my IB article has already made me $0.49 already making this project already generating cash flow.

Internal Links To My Main Supporting Articles

Currently I have three good articles backlinking my new website and now I want to make sure these three articles are authority pages so I’m going to backlink them to make sure they are indexed and well crawled by the Google bots. For my IB article I went back to four previously published articles on diabetes and shoes topics which I wrote a long time ago and added internal links to the IB article. In another couple days I will do that again with four more articles and then again a few days later. Eventually I’d like to have a good 15 or so internal links to this IB article pushing good authority to this page. I will do the same for articles on Snipsly and on HubPages however this won’t be as effective for me over on those sites because I don’t have as much content published to pull internal links from.

Article Marketing & Social Bookmarking To Main Supporting Sites

After focusing on internal linking on my main supporting sites I want to continue building the authority of these three main supporting backlinks to my main site by doing a little article marketing on them. I will use a couple dofollow directories which I know are high quality. Ezine is one and it’s one everyone has heard about and the other is Posturown.com which is a quasi-revenue sharing site/group blog / article directory which I know from personal experience does really well at getting indexed and passing good juice onto pages it links out to. I have yet to take this step but that’s what the rest of the day and tomorrow is all about.

Once I get some good links to my IB article I will do the same for the HubPage article and for the Snipsly article. The goal is to get all three ranked decently and with minimal page rank so that I can be sure they are sending good authority on to my main site.

In addition to this plan I will be taking the easy way when it comes to social bookmarking (which I feel has limited value even when you take your time and bookmark manually) and will be relying on IMAutomator, a free automatic web-based social bookmarking program to send bookmarks to my main site page, my three supporting backlinks over on IB, HP, and Snipsly, and most importantly to my arsenal of article marketing articles which are used to build the page rank of the main supporting backlinks.

IMAutomator does the bookmarking in a drip system so that I don’t flood the sites with links all at once and should help out at least a little – in my opinion this may not be necessary but doing it automatically takes little to none of my time so I’ll give it a whirl.

The Marketing Plan For This Week

This week I plan on adding a page or two more of long and detailed content to the main site but mostly it will be devoted to building the authority of my three main supporting pages on IB, HP, and Snipsly. I believe that by next Sunday I should have made at least a few more dollars on this project just on those three sites… I haven’t even added monetization to the main niche site yet so that may come by next week as well.

Right now I’m planning on mixing Adsense and Amazon as my main ways to monetize the site but eventually I want to explore some more obscure affiliate programs with medical shoes and diabetic supply companies. I haven’t explored this route yet but plan to in the future when things are starting to hum along.

Results After 4 Days – Looks Like Diabetic Shoes Can Make Money After All

As of now my niche site has been live for about 3 ½ days – I have ten results indexed for the website – I’ve made $0.49 from this project via Adsense on InfoBarrel. Ohh yeah, and my main keyword is already showing up on page one of Google in the #7 spot. Crazy!

I need to get Analytics installed on the site right away so that I can start understanding how to better market the site when I get to full blown article marketing. :)

Good luck to you all!

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!

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Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game

As many people have been enthralled by Pat and Tyrone’s niche site duel over the last couple months I too have been a bit interested. For years many marketers discuss setting up niche sites but don’t actually show them off. Pat and Tyrone, and many others have started a duel for what appears to be nothing to actually show their site that they are working on and document their march to the top of the search engines.

I have been tempted to join in on the action for a while now but I have been busy increasing my income over on my longevity blog and over on InfoBarrel as of late (see my recent success interview on the InfoBarrel Blog) and I didn’t really want to drop those areas of my attention however I decided that I might as well jump in now otherwise I would end up letting let the ship sail by.

Today I got the bug and opted to jump into the niche site duel along with everyone else and see what I could accomplish. The rules are simple – you can do anything you want you just can’t pay for a PPC campaign. I also have noted that no one is linking out to their niche site from their main blogs so I suppose I won’t do that either… though I may be tempted to in the near future. I’ll see what others think about this practice.

Anyway, for this duel I’m going to be jumping into a niche that I haven’t really spent a lot of time in. Over on my longevity blog I have had a good amount of posts on insulin and diabetes but not really on physical care revolving around the subject so this niche will be a bit of a detour for me.

Unlike the way to typically do keyword research I went with “my gut” on this one and didn’t even research the keyword beyond taking a look at Adwords KWT to see if it has some traffic and then analyzing the top ten in Google to see their relative strength. Normally I do more in depth research but I just feel this is going to work out well.

Many others in this challenge go for strict rules regarding the strength of the top ten – many consult paid tools or methodologies such as comparing the keyword in quotes to the amount of results; I don’t do this. I like to look at the results on the first page and find the ranking pages that have my keyword in the title, URL, and the description and then look at the PR of those pages.

In this case my main keyword is only present in two of the top ten’s title, description, and URL. My niche site will of course have the keyword in all three places so these are my relative competition. Next I look to see what their page rank is and what they basic backlink profile looks like.

Using the FireFox plugin “SEO 4 Firefox “ I can see that the two pages I am concerned with are in position 9 and 10, they are PR 0 and PR N/A. The article in the #9 spot is on Livestrong’s website and has no external backlinks per Yahoo Site Explorer and the #10 spot is from Mademan and was published only two weeks ago and also has no external backlinks according to Yahoo Site Explorer. This leads me to believe that I can get to the bottom of page one of Google with almost no effort. The top spot will be a little tougher but won’t be too bad.

Regarding my keyword – I chose an easy keyword with low traffic potential but I intend on eventually making a run at the higher potential related keywords when I am close to the top for my main keyword. My main keyword is four words long and my eventual target is two words long. I will be initially shooting for “best shoes for diabetics” and eventually shooting for “diabetic shoes”.

Unlike some others in this challenge I will not be making a big site. I am really targeting everything I can on one page. This is different by far from my main health and longevity blog. Eventually I will add other pages to the site for internal links but mainly I’m just looking to monetize the main page and the main page only. And as this is my goal I ended up deciding to make the main page wildly long. It is roughly 3000 words and should be capable of ranking for just about everything in the niche with enough backlinks.

I made the entire site and published my 3000 word beast all this evening in the span of about 3 hours. I will of course go back to my theme and improve it and improve the site framework in the future. I will also do significant tweaking to my main 3000 word post but overall this is my first draft and it is published. I want to build traffic up before I make the site look good anyway.

The goal here is to get one page with tons of good and helpful content on it ranking for everything. That way I only have one page to market and blogroll link exchanges will be more beneficial to my individual page since they all point to the main page. I also made the front page as insanely helpful as I could… I do intend on going back and editing more to add more helpful content for a reader but I think 3000 words is pretty good for now.

In a future article here on ResInc I will go into more detail on how I plan on marketing my niche site. I look forward to getting this project rolling because I could use the extra money – I just found out my wife is having a baby! I’ve got responsibilities now! I’m also 2-months behind in starting this duel so I’ve got some catching up to do. Good luck to everyone else out there!

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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