(Entrepreneur Ridealong) Addressing Unexpected Challenges While Building a Niche Site
March 29, 2024
Hello, everyone. This is Umar. Welcome to month seven of the Entrepreneur Ride Along series by Empire Flippers.
In this video, I will be sharing: what my site performance looks like, the challenges that we’re facing, and my plans to overcome those challenges. Lastly, I’ll explain my goals for the future of the website.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
Site Performance
The first thing we will look at is the site’s performance.
It’s been around three and a half months since we started publishing and we have published around 64 articles. All of them are human-written.
From a link-building point of view, we recently started building links and we’ve acquired almost 10 links in the last one and a half months and 14 of our articles are ranking on page one!
One interesting thing that I wanted to share is that we are getting brand impressions and clicks as well. So people are searching for our brand name, which is surprising considering the website is fairly new.
Unexpected challenges
An unexpected challenge that we are facing is that Reddit is ranking for almost every single keyword. Especially the commercial ones. This puts us at a disadvantage.
The second thing is that parasite articles are ranking for general and broad keywords. So, for example, if we are targeting a keyword like ‘best headphones under $300’, big sites like Forbes will be ranking for best headphone articles. They will likely be ranking in the top three positions.
So it’s really frustrating.
To overcome these challenges, we will be covering commercial topics where Reddit is not ranking on page one. So, with this site, I am keeping the ratio of commercial versus informational articles as, 20% commercial and 8% informational articles.
Then as a test, I will be using Reddit as a parasite. It’s kind of spamming, but there’s no harm in testing it out how it goes, right?
Improving the site
To improve the website moving forward, we will be covering all the possible informational topics around the subcategories that we’re targeting.
From a link-building point of view, I will be doing regular press releases as well as using niche editors. Previously we were doing a lot of guest posting, but now we will be focusing on using specialty niche editors as well.
With this website, we are publishing content and acquiring links at the same time. It’s not like we will publish the content and only then we will start building links.
We will also be trying out new content formats. The first one that we are trying is YouTube videos. I think our YouTube videos are the reason why we are getting brand impressions as well as clicks on our brand name.
I have already hired three to four influencers, and we will be hiring more influencers in the future. They all have access to the products that we are promoting or reviewing on our blog.
The influencers create 4 – 5 minute reviews and send them to us. Then we publish those videos on YouTube with all of those keywords, tags, and bells and whistles.
Secondly, we are planning to try programmatic SEO pages to meet several intents.
So if certain products are being used by influencers in that niche, we can create programmatic pages for that. There’s a lot of room for opportunity when it comes to these kinds of pages as there are not a lot of high-authority websites ranking for these kinds of keywords.
The third thing is adding test samples of the product that we’re promoting to our blog to showcase authenticity.
Goals for the future of the site
The first goal I have set with this website is basically maximizing brand impressions.
I’m seeing very positive results on my client’s websites, as well as my own websites because of this. With the recent Google updates, I’ve noticed that websites that had good brand impressions or brand clicks are not being hit as hard by Google.
The second goal is to become a direct brand affiliate. Right now we are mostly relying on Amazon as an affiliate since we are promoting their products.
However, since the website is new, we don’t have any stats to show to brands to prove that we can get them X sales or that we have X traffic. So that’s why we are not reaching out to brands right now.
The third goal is I plan to publish 120 articles, all human-written, and then we will see how it goes.
Lastly, I plan on acquiring 100 links, including guest posts, natural links, press releases, and so on.
So I think that’s it for this update. See you soon for the next one!
