If you don’t want to use paid marketing strategies to build an online business, learn how to build a niche website and get free traffic instead.
It’s a much slower method of building an online business than with using paid marketing. However there’s a few reasons to do this:
- Your products don’t support paid marketing strategies. That is, they are low cost products so you can’t actually make it viable to use paid marketing.
- You don’t have the money to use paid strategies but you have the time to build content. If you’re time rich, but cash poor, building a niche website might be the answer for you.
This is a niche website. I built this site as an experiment to see whether I could rank on Google for some of its main keywords. So far so good! I’ve managed to rank the site, and have started generating opt-ins to my email list – all without paying a penny in advertising. You can see the steps I’ve taken in my article Create Free Website And Earn Money.
How To Build A Niche Website And Get Free Traffic – From Where?
Free traffic from a blog is hard won! You have to create some useful content in order to get it ranking on the search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baldu, Ecosia, Yanex, DuckDuckgo etc.
Google is obviously the biggest used service for search. Ideally, you want your content to rank on Google. However, you can still pick up some free traffic from other search engines too. But you should aim to rank on Google.
Simple Trick – Buy A Domain Name With Keywords In It
Now in no way does this guarantee you a place on page 1 of Google. If you don’t also create some awesome content, you’re not going to get a ranking. But it can give you an advantage. If I had put this content on another site, it wouldn’t have ranked for several of the articles I have written around the main site keyword “Autopilot Money Making Software”. Plus it also depends on the relative competition. If you go looking for “money making online” and hope to rank it, you’re gonna fail. Why? Simply because this kind of keyword is far too competitive to rank a low authority site.
Simply put, a specific niche website will rank better for articles which double up on keyword phrases which match the domain. It’s recognised instantly as an ‘authority’ if the site is built specifically for the purpose of those keywords.
The Downside Of A Niche Website?
The problem is, there’s only a few keyword related articles you can build around specific keywords. And that gives you only a limited amount of traffic. Before building a niche website, you should do your homework. Find out how many searches your keyword/s get on a monthly basis before you start. You can always build more content on your site though, of course.
Use Google’s free keyword planner to research specific keywords. Then, use a phrase match search in Google’s normal search by putting your keywords in quotes “like this”. You should get a number (on a desk top computer) which comes up. This number corresponds with the number of competing pages for that specific keyword.
Take a look at this article for more detail on how to build a niche site.
What Next?
So let’s say you’ve built a niche website and written a few articles on it. See how here. Don’t expect to have immediate traffic. Google often takes a month or two before it will rank a new website.
You should also build links back to your content too. Ideally, make a habit of it. Over time, as more links are built, Google will see your site as more of an authority.
You can build links in a number of ways:
- Create videos for YouTube and link back to your content
- Use article marketing sites (hubpages.com and ezinearticles.com)
- Blog comment on blogs which are similar to yours and which allow backlinks.
- Post in forums and join discussion
- Use social media platforms to link back and share you content.
You can also use a social media plugin to help your visitors share your content too.
Building Content On Your Site
Building Content is pretty important for a niche website. This is the real key if you want to know how to build a niche website and get free traffic. Good content can far outrank clever ‘tricks’ like keywords in the domain name. Remember that you want your site to rank for a good, long time. Otherwise, you’ve done a lot of work for nothing.
Even great content will eventually drop off the search engines down the rankings. So make sure yours is awesome if you want the long term benefit.
Ideally write over 1000 words for each article. Use a plugin which helps you write content with the search engines in mind. Yoast SEO is a good one. It helps you balance the right number of keywords in your article, titles, image alt tags etc. Remember too that this is just a guide to help. These kinds of plugins don’t know exactly how Google ranks content and often change their settings accordingly.
With that in mind it’s important to write for your readers, rather than for the search ‘spiders’ which crawl your site. If your content gets read, and liked, and shared, you will gain greater authority than if people click away immediately. So write good content and that can stand as the cornerstone of your niche website.
Case Study – How I Built This Website
You can see how this website started from keyword selection to SEO plugins and link building.
Checkout my article which takes you through the process step by step: