Building niche sites successfully is a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde affair when you get down to it. The Jekyll part is the actual site construction, which most of us find rather enjoyable, at least I do. I love finding a niche, developing my targets, building out the site and getting it looking, feeling and smelling just right.

The “Hyde” part of being successful at this game is the link building and site optimization piece. It’s just no fun for a lot of reasons but the main one for me is that it’s tedious, boring and takes place over months of time. I think I am pretty good at it, but I have to say that I do truly hate it.

Transparent Link Building

One of my many commitments to myself in 2010 is to revive this blog and start writing regularly here again. I’ve built a solid, passive income from niche sites and I enjoy blogging so we’ll see how it goes. I figure a great way to kick it off will be by tackling one of the subjects that seems to befuddle many aspiring niche site builders. This will be an interesting little project to kick off the new year.

I recently acquired a bike racks site from Mark over at The Niche Store Builder around the bicycle racks niche. I am not super enthused about a site around bike racks but I have a number of cycling sites already and figured it might be a decent opportunity to capitalize on my existing content and link base to make something of it. In any event, at the time of this writing, it is currently ranking #15 for the keyword “car bike racks” and is ranking nearly#200 for the singular keyword “car bike rack” which is not that good. It does rank pretty well for nearly exact matches on it’s post titles but that really isn’t saying much.

#193 to #1 in 30 Days?

My goal over the next 30 days is to see how far we can move the needle on this site targeting some of the major keywords in this niche with most of the attention centered around grabbing the URL keyword of car bike racks in both the singular and plural forms. These two keywords together have nearly 6k exact match searches per month in the US and nearly 18k worldwide. This certainly isn’t HUGE, but there are dozens and dozens of longtails that are available as well. If I can pop into the top 5 for these two keywords, then I will see a decent amount of traffic, which will be a welcome change from the ZERO visitors that these two keywords have sent me so far since owning it.

In the first step of getting this site to rank we are going to go for quantity of links as opposed to quality. Low competition keywords, like the two that I am targeting, are not typically that difficult to rank for so we are going to start with a nice round of article marketing to see how far we can go with moderate effort. I will share the results with you with a weekly update, although we may not see much for movement for a few weeks.

SEO Experiment Conclusion

So to recap, we are targeting just two keywords at this time, car bike racks and car bike rack and we are starting at #15 and #193 respectively. I am going to pound some article marketing to it and see where we can go inside of 30 days. I am NOT going to build links via any other method than this except for any links that will come naturally. I AM going to be adding to the existing content on the site, including rack reviews and buying guides.

Time will tell, the proof is in the pudding, the rubber meets the road, the buck stops here and any other cheesy saying that is applicable goes here but the bottom line is I have resolved to become one of the very best there is at monitoring my sites and putting in the effort to not only build them but to rank them extremely well.