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4. AdSense Army – Why The Phalanx Approach Works For Niche Marketing

AdSense Army – Why The Phalanx Approach Works For Niche Marketing

Hi there!  I’m Joe Magnotti, the other half of this business.  Justin handles most of the marketing and customer communication, while I handle more of the technical aspects.  However, I decided it was time to finally do a post of my own!

I’m a bit of a history buff, so the thought occurred to me of a great analogy for niche marketing.  Both the ancient Greeks and Romans built huge empires that dominated the world.  They did this mainly through use of large, well organized armies.  The primary tactic, invented by the Greeks, was the phalanx formation.  For those of you who don’t know, the phalanx formation allowed armies to easily replace fallen front line troops and maneuver units quickly to outflank opposing armies.

Now some of you may be asking, what the heck does this have to do with internet marketing?  Well most of you visiting this blog are looking to generate passive income, through building an empire of AdSense sites.  But before you get an empire you need an army!  You can build it yourself or buy it, but make no mistake you will need one.

Your AdSense army in phalanx formation allows you to do two things just like the ancient Greeks and Romans: be defensive when losing a niche and be offensive when a niche is working.

If you a have created AdSense sites before you know the feeling — you research a niche, find a keyword with an exact match domain (EMD) available and an easy to beat front page.  You build a nice site with original content, get ranked, only to see the site drop or be completely removed from the search results.   Sometimes temporarily and sometimes, unfortunately, permanently.  This is where your mirco niche site army can really become an asset — just because you have lost the one site, you still have others perhaps even in the same niche (although using different keywords) to step up and replace your fallen site.

Perhaps you’ve built a few sites in one niche, but your army is still diverse.   If that niche become particularly competitive requiring too much time and energy (which both cost money) to rank well in, you can focus on your other sites to effectively make up lost ground.  I really believe diversification is the power of micro niche marketing, something that can be used wisely.

For example motorcyclebootsforwomen.com (we do not own this site and are not affiliated with it in anyway) , ranks number one for it’s primary keyword “motorcycle for boots women”.  It’s a good site, has a strong number of inlinks, a page rank of 2 for the primary page, and a large amount of pages.  However, the site owner would be smart to create other niche sites in completely different categories.  Subjects like food, medical, and electronics come to mind.  In this way he is not so reliant on one site for the success of his network and other sites can step up in the phalanx formation if this site loses ranking ro the niche changes.  This can happen in a few ways:

1. If there is a large spike in the number of pages for that particular keyword.   Think what would happen if Sarah Palin started a line of motorcycle boots for women.
2. If the niche suddenly becomes more competitive because of added retailers or publishers with high quality optimized content.
3. If there is a large drop in search traffic.  In the future women might not wear motorcycle boots or drive motorcycles as much (maybe they have moved on to flying cars!).  Unlikely, but you get my point.

Offensively, you can expand on niches where sites seem to be working well for you.  You may find some niches more interesting to you than others or simple that a particular niche has many keywords with EMDs available and low competition first pages where it is easy to out maneuver the competition.   Just by adding content to these sites, you will rank for other keywords and, hopefully, come to dominate the niche.  Besides the added revenue bonus, these “super niche” sites can become elite unites in your army.  Something you can use to boost your SEO efforts as well.

As an example, the site moderndiningchairs.info (again not a site we own or are affiliated with), ranks number one for “modern dining chairs”.   The first entry was made way back in October of 2009, but the owner has since decided to update the site with several new articles this month.   Smart move.  Looks like the owner also has monetized the site using Amazon affiliate links along with AdSense.  Not something I would recommend, but hopefully it has been tested to generate more revenue then just using one or the other.

With almost 1,200 back links (using Yahoo! Site Explorer) the site is a behemoth in it’s very specific niche, but  the owner could expand to many more topics in the modern furniture or dining chairs categories and have a good chance to rank.  A good internal linking structure combined with strong on page SEO should make this fairly easy.

So let’s get out there and raise an army.  Use the phalanx formation for defense and to outflank the competition.  Let me know how your empire building is going.