Doing More Of What Works If You Are Going Forward With Your Micro-Niche

Today's lesson covers some of your options if you find yourself in a micro-niche that you have decided to move forward with. Now that you have that micro-niche, you need to be proactive in continually putting in the effort to give your WPD micro-niche blog the best chance it has to succeed.

One of the things you can do straight away is to start posting on your WPD micro-niche blog for a wider variety of related keywords in your micro-niche. In one of today's lessons, GuruBob demonstrates how to use Market Samurai and your Google Analytics account to find those additional keywords.

When you originally researched your theme and category keywords earlier in The Challenge using Market Samurai, you used the traffic criteria set out in The Challenge. When finding additional keywords, this criteria is revised to allow more keywords to be returned in your research. These keyword still need to have sufficient enough traffic to justify writing a post or creating some content. These additional keywords are known as long tail keywords, or if you prefer, low hanging fruit for you micro-niche. Now that you have a site that is ranking in the search engines, writing and posting content for the low competition additional keywords should allow you to rank for them fairly quickly.

By using an example niche market, GuruBob outlines the process in Market Samurai to identify these additional keywords. In your keyword research module of Market Samurai you reduce the SEO traffic (SEOT) to lower number like 10 or 20. This will return keywords that less traffic per day but also less competition.

Another method for identifying these additional keywords is by using your Google Analytics account. GuruBob shows you how to look at the traffic sources for your site to find keywords. You simple navigate to Traffic Sources, and on the bottom right is a keywords column. Click "view full report" on the bottom of that column and you are presented with a list of keywords that the search engines have deemed relevant and has resulted in traffic to your site. This means that if the search engines are already sending traffic to your site for those keywords, then it makes sense to post some keyword optimized content on your site for those keywords. The likely outcome of this is to rank higher for those additional keywords and receive more traffic. This is a very clever way to slowly increase your traffic.

In the second lesson for today, Dan Raine from the Immediate Edge outlines a backlinking strategy to follow after The Challenge. This backlink building process can used if you are moving forward with your WPD micro-niche blog, or you can use it to increase the number of backlinks to your site to make it worth more when selling it on Flippa.

Backlinks are ultimately about two things, ranking and visitors. It's important to be diverse when creating backlinks. Backlinks that are spread out on a variety of sites and services, will result in your site looking a lot more natural to Google. Dan also explains the relevance of page rank and no-follow links.

Relevancy is the key to building effective backlinks. When building your backlinks, it's important for those links to be niche or market relevant. This looks natural, is natural, and is the best way to build quality, relevant links to your site. Also, when you are building these backlinks you should be using anchor text links where possible. Whatever your target keyword is should always be in the anchor text. Again, it also builds the relevancy.

Dan outlines via a diagram how your linking strategy could look over time. So far in The Challenge you have created your main WPD micro-niche site, created some third party sites that link to your main site, and have been using Posterous to keep those sites updated frequently. As Dan shows in his diagram, you can extend that network of incoming links via creating links on forums and blogs etc, remembering our earlier lessons in The Challenge about best practice when commenting on other people's sites.

The most important aspect of building your backlinks is to be natural about it. Be part of the conversation, add some value, offer suggestions or your own input. The key is to be a real person with real input. Your rule of thumb is that if you received that comment, would you think it's okay?

Actions For The Day - 1. Research additional keywords relevant to your micro-niche using Market Samurai and Google Analytics. 2. Prepare some keyword optimized content for those new keywords.