Marketing Niche Sites is hard. There is a never ending amount of information with a lot of contradictory theories and techniques. I ended up spending a great deal of time looking around at other people’s thoughts on the subject.

There is a lot of content out there in a variety of forms. I spent more time watching videos, listening to podcasts and reading articles then I really should have.

My new philosophy is just to pick one person to follow on this and stick with that.

I have decided to stick with the system Pat Flynn talks about in his the backlinking strategy that works article, but with some adjustments.

My back linking strategy is to create original articles; spin those articles; and submit the spin versions to article directories, Web 2.0 properties, and free blog sites with links back to my niche site.  Then I have to connect to these spun articles through article submission software and to use social bookmarking.

From Jason and Jeremy’s video on Internet Business Mastery

I tried to diversify the “words” that contain my link to my site.

They suggest:

33% Exact Keyword, Partial Keyword, Related Keywords
33% Using sites URL and URLs to specific posts/pages
33% Miscellaneous (such as “click here” or “More Information”)

The articles I submitted had the following anchor tags for the backlinks:

• 1 had my wife’s name as the author (Leah Love).
• 1 link was “Click Here” and was in the context of, “for more information click here.”
• 2 were URL links to the home page of the niche site.

Week #5 Results

Back links and Article Marketing

This week has been a rough one for a few reason.  The first being we had to buy more software to make the marketing strategy work (which Leah was not happy about since we had already spent$262.30), and we might need to buy more software.  The second being that I wasted too much time researching what strategy to use and then doing something different (I talk about this in the lesson learned section below).

Income: $0

No Income yet.

Costs: $84

For the best spinner, we spent $84.  This is the software that changes an article into multiple articles. It changes the articles enough to sneak past being flagged as duplicates.  These articles are used to put on other sites with links back to my niche site as mentioned in the strategy at the top of this post.

Time Breakdown: 14 Hours

Leah’s Time (4 hours):

• 4 hours writing new content for the site. These will be “spun” for the back linking strategy.

Jason’s Time (7 hours):

• 2.5 hour studying backlinking strategies and creating a plan
• 2.5 hour signing up for article directories
• 1 hour spinning articles
• 4 hour posting articles on article directories (this took way longer than it should, and I talk about it in the Lessons section below)

Plan

Here is an update list of our strategy.

• Week 6: Create articles, spin, and place on other sites with link backs. Sign up and plan to use mass article submitter/creator software and social bookmarking sites to point at web 2.0 sites, articles in directories, and articles in external blogs.
• Week 7: Comment on other sites with back links to mine, become active in forums, and build a basic social media presence.
• Week 8: Optimize the WordPress site, Google Adsense, and the marketing.

Lesson:  Don’t let paranoia get you off track!

It has been a weird lesson this week, and it sounds awkward saying it, but I let fear lose me about 4 hours of the 10 hours I put in this week.  That means I could have accomplished 40% more if I didn’t make this mistake.

Let me explain.

I have decided to use Pat Flynn’s niche site duel articles as my guiding star in creating this niche sites. I trust Pat because he is honest about his income, his strategies, and cares for his audience. All things that make me believe him, but while implementing his backlinking strategy, I started to question how it worked.

I started reading other websites on the subject, which was a good idea, but I spent 2.5 hours going over everything I could read or watch on the subject. In the end, I decided to go with Pat’s strategy. Reading what others said was not a waste of time, but I could have spent just 1 hour and I would know the same amount of information I do now.

The second thing and the biggest mistake I made was getting paranoid that I would be flagged for repeat content. So I took my spun articles and drastically changed them manually. This consisted of cutting out entire paragraphs from the article and switching the remaining ones around. The problem with this was that the article directories required 500 – 600 words minimum.  I had cut the article down to 300 words on two occasions. This required writing an extra 200 – 300 words to fill in the words I cut out.

This was a huge mistake for several reasons.

1. When Google looks at my articles next to each other, it looks for a specific percentage of similar word use in sentences.  It doesn’t matter if the paper is in similar order because it looks at similar sentences not similarly structures of articles.  The spin software breaks up the similarity in sentences to get passed as none duplicate articles.
2. Wasting my money.  I paid the money for using a program to spin articles and not using it correctly.
3. Wasting my time.  The articles were already different because of being spun.  Me changing them by hand had no purpose other than an attempt to overcome the paranoia of being flagged and not getting ranked.

My Niche Site Journal:

• Week 0: Explaining Niche Site Journal
• Week 1: Choosing a niche
• Week 2: Wordpress Site Theme and Launching the Blog
• Week 3: WordPress Site Editing & Content Creation
• Week 4: Add Plug-ins, Add Widgets, and Adjusting the Theme
• Week 5: Back links and Article Marketing
• Week 6: Getting Indexed, Writing Content, and Waiting for Google
• Week 7: Back linking Strategy
• Week 8: We Made Money!
• Jan 2013 Update