How To Dominate A Niche Category

By Author: John Tang
Total Articles: 512
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This quick tutorial is an overview of the most common way Internet marketers have been able to control a niche category online. When entering a new niche/industry online, the path most website owners take is create only 1 site and build upon that site over time. Most gurus know this creates some common problems. The biggest problem is competition: 1 versus thousands/millions of other sites in the industry.

Note: This is not for the faint of heart; this will not be quick, and this will not be painless. But if you follow these guidelines, you will join the few who say, they own a niche.

Here is the method that pros use to overcome this dilemma:

1. Create several sites, each focused on different aspects of the industry. For example, if you are in the mortgage industry:

a. Create a forum website where people in the industry can communicate with each other and share ideas and basically network.
b. Create a website that focuses on industry key terms and phrases which will allow people to go to the site and look up definitions with a simplified example.
c. Create a News website ...
... that gathers information from news sources, RSS feeds, and blogs and updates the site daily with new information with what is happening in the industry.
d. Create a Blog of your site where you (ghostwritten if necessary) talk about the industry, and comment on the latest news, and gossip.
e. Create a site that gathers nothing but articles about the industry and archives them daily.
f. Create a site that talks specifically on a certain type of "mortgage" like the refinancing mortgage. (Do the same thing for the major sub-categories in your industry)
g. When appropriate, be sure to have the sites linking to other major industry players, and each other.

Additional Strategies

2. Increase the links to all the sites. I would attempt to send build links to each, one day at a time. For example, the first day I would concentrate on only one site, building links, asking for reciprocal links, etc., whatever is appropriate in getting free traffic (link to free traffic article). Move on to the next site the next day, don't spend too much time analyzing every metric; instead focus on gaining more overall traffic and moving one. (A watched pot doesn't boil).

3. Make sure you add your keywords to each site somewhere in the content, and make sure you can gain as many long-tailed keywords into the site.

The Effect

What you have just done is created several mini-sites that will start ranking for their particular focus. Decide which site would be considered your main site; what you want to do is eventually interlink the mini-sites to the main site.

You have now created a new relative authority network for the mortgage industry, since all the sites that are linking together and are each talking about the same industry. What this will in fact do is allow you to start showing up in more than one place on search engine result pages for terms. Done with consistency and overtime, you will be able to see, for example, that you control 5 out of 10 of the top 10 for the long-tailed keywords, and will start slowly raising your whole network up the results page till you have sites that are competing with each other for the top slots you win in either case!

This is one of the best-kept secrets that most gurus don't want the average site owner to know. The more sites you have the bigger net you can cast to get traffic, and dominate any niche. The reason you might notice this is that when you are searching for a term, and get sites that appear to look the site, it is someone dominating that niche (poorly, if you can tell the sites are created by the same person).

As I already alluded to, this will take serious time and commitment. It is not unheard of to spend 60 to 80 hours a week working on an authority network for 6 months or more; in the end you will see the benefits for all that hard work. Hard and intensive work is not an option here. Once you truly master this you will be able to go into any industry and dominate the category.

I didn't say it was going to be easy! But it works!