Diary of a Niche Site Duel Pt. 4

It’s been a month since my last update to the Niche Site Duel and I’m happy to report that both Tyrone and Pat Flynn have hit their goals of hitting the front page of Google and making some money from their niche sites. In his last post on the subject Pat himself announced he had landed on the #6 spot on Google after steadily climbing the ranks for 2 months. His content and link building strategy proved to be sound as he kept a steady pace of generating new content for his security guard site and a consistent linkbuilding process of building high quality backlinks to his niche site.

I wish I could say I’ve had the same level of success. I’m sure a lot of that can be attributed to the lack of consistency and somewhat wavering of interest in the site. When something doesn’t produce the results I want I tend to scale down my efforts somewhat. Although my 21 Traffic Blueprint is more or less complete, I have continued my article submissions every 2 days but I’ve stopped blog commenting and forum commenting for the time being, although I may give it one more push.

I also attribute the lack of progress with my experimenting with a more traditional layout instead of my original one-page opt-in landing page that was the largest source of opt-ins I’d had. The reason for the switch was that I wanted to try the Popup Domination WordPress plugin, which I bought on a pretty good price. I’d heard a lot about the tool and how it significantly increase you mailing list opt-ins, but the results we’re not so stellar. Since adding Popup Domination 3 weeks ago I only received two opt-ins into my eCourse (where the bulk of my selling occurs). I’m thinking now that I’ll revert back to my original one-page design for one last push.

As far as ranking is concerned, llthough Market Samurai would indicate differently my Google results indicate at #17 broad position and #11 phrase position which isn’t bad given that my link building has been scaled down. I would have liked to have seen more movement in the rankings but it seems fairly reasonable given the fact that I have concentrated my efforts mostly on offpage article marketing and linkbuilding instead of adding content to the site, which may have something to do with my lack of movement in the rankings. Also, some advice I received recently might indicate that I might have entered into this niche too late, which may be true given the beta of Starcraft 2 has been out for over a year.

That being said I’m not ready to completely write off this site. Starcraft 2 is still a very new game. There’s already talks of an expansion pack being released next year, and the game is still listed on top seller lists everywhere. My plan is to revert back to the one-page design, continue with article submissions, update the on-page content more frequently, and consider outsourcing the linkbuilding (the task I dislike most in this entire process).

My parting question is – when do you know enough is enough? How long do you go with a particular site before you know its time to move on? Leave your responses in the comment section below.

Photo by Pat Dalton