Niche Domination - Solid Strategy or One Trick Pony?

Quite a while ago I wrote a post on building a lasting affiliate network, something that can potentially take 2-3 years to really achieve properly.

I was browsing through the serps recently for a new project that I’m about to launch here on Earners Blog which relates to the web hosting niche. This niche in particular really shits me, it’s as bad as the MMO (Make Money Online) niche - millions of idiots all promoting products because of their commissions rather than the value of the product to the client/shopper. But, everyone’s gotta make a buck…right?

So I stumbled across a networks of sites recently that has started dominating this niche quite well, it just so happens that it’s for all the shitty hosts that pay good commissions but provide a terrible service (how ironic?).

In this post I’m going to take apart his network & show you the things he’s done it & also the mistakes he’s made along the way (without directly linking to the sites).

The Network

Lets firstly look at one of his sites. It’s the #1 SERP for the term Bluehost Review.

Just by looking at it you can tell it’s Wordpress with the iTheme, lots of categories & using the site: operator we can see there’s around 172 pages indexed.

Now this particular affiliate is using three tactics that work incredibly well:

1. Calling the domain the exact SERP he wants to rank for. In my testing I have noticed that if you’re getting backlinks with an anchor text that matches the name of the domain name it’s less likely to trigger anchor text penalties (because that’s what your domain is called).
2. Hiring people to write content on every bluehost related search term there is. If you don’t use the Adwords Keyword Tool then you’re crazy.
3. Interlinking this bluehost review site with all the other sites in his network. Giving each site anywhere from 9k - 14k Yahoo! Backlinks.

The Layout & setup of Wordpress is pretty stock standard. Plenty of categories with optimised title tags & listing them all in the sidebar. I’d personally normally list the posts in the sidebar but if you can include some unique content on each category page using wordpress conditionals (or excerpts) then this method works well too.

Notice how the header of each single.php also has the same Bluehost offer right at the fold line. This is a great technique for grabbing the attention of the reader (after all with these types of sites the content is secondary, you want them to see the offer).

Mistakes

1. All of his sites are using the same template (iTheme for Wordpress), if anyone is manually reviewing these sites say goodbye.
2. I can easily find out who this guy is using this search & seeing that he calls himself charlesgan on forums. It appears he calls himself the same on all forums. It also appears that he spends a large amount of time buying & selling links on digitalpoint (& also hiring content writers for Web Hosting Articles). If I can find this sort of stuff out in about 2 minutes I’m sure Google can too.
3. Interlinking each & every site seems to be working in the SERPS but it’s also very easily spotted. If someone decides they need to take the whole network down for manipulating the SERPS it leaves Charles in a very unfortunate position & 2 years of hard work down the drain.
4. No mailing list, whilst this isn’t a big thing Charles could potentially build a large mailing list of subscribers (after all someone doesn’t stay with the same host forever), this could turn into quite a nice recurring revenue stream.

Things done well

1. Whilst I don’t endorse doing this Charles has provided fake whois info for the domains. Which could possibly be helping him in resisting any automatic interlinking penalties with Google. He hasn’t gone as far as setting anonymous nameservers with someone like easydns but that’d probably be the next step.
2. The layout & organisation of the content is done very well. Plenty of topics all covering all the questions someone might ask about Bluehost. Mysql, Wordpress, Server Speed all that stuff.
3. He has over 50 domains dominating this niche, quite a bit of work for one person. So I’m guessing most of the content is outsourced.
4. Charles also interlinks the sites well within the content of the posts. Using keyword rich anchor text. There’s a few plugins for Wordpress that you can set to do this automatically.

Conclusion

I’m guessing that this network is making some pretty decent money, if you consider some hosts pay up to $150 for a signup. This shows that sticking to your guns & focusing on a particular niche can really pay off in the long run. However it does also have its consequences, in that if the network is detected you risk losing everything.

My tip is to diversify, don’t rely on a single network to build your income, but at the same time don’t ignore the potential rewards for putting the hard work into building one. If you can outsource the creation & content you can still work on your other projects.