Another weekend and another Forever Affiliate update from me. I’m still working on Phase 2 of the program with my first two sites. Like I said in my last post, this part requires a lot of patience while the sites get their first links and first trickles of traffic coming in. Basically you’re gradually getting on the search engine radar and becoming a part of the community… which makes perfect sense. But being patient is hard.
One thing I’ve noticed over the past year or two is that some niches are easier to get backlinks for than others, and working in two very different niches with Site A and Site B that has become even more evident.
- Site A is in the “gardening” niche and I’m whizzing through getting backlinks.
- Site B is in the “technology” niche and getting backlinks is giving me a major headache.
I don’t know if it’s just because the URL has the word reviews in it and people see that and think “spam” or if it’s the particular topic that makes people think “spam” – either way, it’s frustrating. I outsourced a bit of the work for Site B and doubled my effort there because I wasn’t getting as many links approved per day as recommended. The comments still weren’t getting approved and indexed even though they were relevant comments and not at all spammy so I think it’s the URL and site name that is getting us thrown into spam. Several comments were even approved initially and removed later. So this week I have to decide if I want to start over with a new URL or if I want to keep going and try a different link building method instead.
Site A is starting to pick up rankings in the search engines and traffic is coming in a few per day and slowly increasing, so that is really encouraging. Getting links for this topic has been a breeze compared to every other niche project I’ve ever worked on. And the community around the niche is awesome – friendly, fun, interesting, and helpful. That is also very encouraging, because nothing is more annoying than working on a project that bores you to bits and attracts mean cranky people. I’m definitely happy with my niche selection for this one and I am determined to bring it to profit and this is on my shortlist to build out into an authority site over time instead of just a mini-site.
That’s what’s happening with my niche projects. Not a lot of excitement right now.
Transcriptionist, passionate cross stitcher, writer at heart, wife, mom, and finder of lost shoes… Loretta Oliver, married to the comic book geek of her dreams and mother of four amazing young men, has been working from home full time since 2001. With a busy transcription service business, a few niche sites, and a handful of other internet marketing projects on the go, the computer is always fired up and the ideas are always flowing.