Niche Site Question: Social Media And Backlinks
This’ll be a quick one. I got a reader question from Adam H, who asks what to do about your niche site so far as linking and promoting is concerned.
Good question.
The answer: Different people do different things. Some people go heavy on promoting their niche site. Some don’t do anything.
Most of your SEO for niche sites will be on page SEO and so you do it when you’re creating the article. That’s stuff like:
- Keyword research
- Including images
- Keyword density
- Secondary keywords
- Lengthy articles with multiple parts
You then want to take care of on-site SEO, which involves making it quick and easy to get to your money articles as well as linking to your relevant pages from other pages.
So let’s say you review a golf club. You’ll want to link to the golf club category from your main page, and then from any pages where you mention the specific golf club, you’ll link to your review page.
It’s pretty straightforward and most of your results will come from this assuming you’re targeting low competition keywords (which you should be.)
But that’s not what Adam was asking, so let’s move on to the off site stuff.
Off Site SEO
People ask about backlinking to your niche site. Until recently, I didn’t do anything. Remember if you’re targeting low competition keywords, you don’t really have to.
Now, you can. Every so often, I’d stumble across somebody asking a question on a forum or reddit that I had the answer to in one of my articles, so I’d link them to it saying, “Hey… here’s the answer to your question.”
There’s no real issue with doing this – it’s as natural as linking can be, and won’t ever be penalised.
That said, if you have an authority niche site and you link to and from your niche site, then that’s fine. I saw this done by Kyle Trouble (with ThisIsTrouble.com and UkraineLiving.com.)
Now… conventional SEO wisdom would say, “You’ll be penalised for doing this” and I’m pretty sure conventional wisdom is wrong. Kyle’s told me that he’s never received any negative stuff from his growing site network and I’ve never experienced any negative results either.
I think generally if you are building links where the context is natural, you’ll be fine. Besides, if you have a big authority site, the traffic you get from the backlinks will make up for it.
Other than that, I don’t do anything.
Well, I sometimes post links to my articles on Reddit in the relevant subreddits. Again, as long as they’re relevant, it’s fine.
Off Site Social Media
People have asked me a few times what I do for social media as far as niche sites go.
The answer is not a lot.
By that… I automate it all so I don’t have to do anything.
I have WordPress send out a tweet when a new post is done.
This then goes through IFTTT and Buffer to post to Facebook and G+.
I rarely get any traffic from FB, I get a small but notable amount from Twitter and I think I might have had three people ever visit through G+ across all my sites.
Now… you can get more sophisticated than this and I’m currently trying out a program that creates evergreen campaigns for these platforms. I know people who use IG, YouTube and Pinterest as well now to drive traffic, and all of that could be used to great effectiveness.
However… I don’t do that because I’d rather the automation apocalypse worked in my favour so far as niche sites are concerned.
In any case… you don’t want to spend a ton of time on it because most of your traffic will come from SEO anyway.
Outro
That’s basically all I do for niche sites so far as backlinking and social media is concerned.
If I were to do more, here’s what I’d do:
- Set up some sort of social posting on a schedule (preferably repeating)
- Create videos from the posts (this = YouTube links, more content for site, more content for social profiles)
- Post more on Reddit
- Seek out people on social media asking the questions I’ve answered
- Build more niche sites and create a network over time (I am doing this slowly)
All of those things are pretty low-time investment but could be big wins.
Anyway, here’s your easy beginner blueprint… now go and do some experiments.