This post is a summary of quotes from the ClickBump method thread on Warrior Forum.
My interest is in using the method for building sites which are tightly-focused on niche keywords having the biggest potential for having top rankings in Google. Monetization of these sites will primarily be via Adsense.
- My basic approach to niche site success revolves around five simple and proven fundamentals. Get these right and you are way ahead of 90% of those trying to make a way in this game…
1) Develop a passion for niche research – you really have to enjoy ferreting out the next niche and you have to be able to get yourself inspired to do this over and over again. This is the most important concept you can master. If you fail at this, no amount of expertise at the remaining steps will matter. You’ll be fighting against the wind.
2) Only work with exact match, top level domains – I value .com, .net and .org all EQUALLY and I’ve got sites ranked in the top 10 with all three extensions.
3) Seek niches that have a minimum of 2400 EXACT match local monthly searches for their keyword phrase (KWP) – use Google Adwords Keywords Tool (GAKT) for this.
4) Look for three PR- or PR-0 sites in the top ten results for the KWP that you can unseat – Once you’ve verified 2 and 3 above, type your search term (without quotes) into Google using the SEO4Firefox plug-in to determine if you can meet the 3 site min criteria
5) Launch a tightly focused, insanely optimized, SEO-savvy, CSS-based site that showcases your niche’s KWP with laser focus. One page of content with 350-1000 words and 3 site pages (about, contact and privacy) is all you need. Develop or adopt a system that allows you to repeat this rapidly.
- You’ll need to strike a well defined balance between a highly focused site which has content relevancy for the given search term, with the need to not make the site useless without the ads. You also need to consider the performance of the site. If it’s bloated with useless markup, it’s going to slow things down for the user and they will hop right back to where they came from. So quality of content and speed of delivery are the key things here.
In other words, if you launch with 1-3 product pages initially, along with the supportive pages (about, contact, privacy, etc), and you make the content on those pages highly useful to the reader, you will stand a much better chance to rank highly in the search engine results right out of the gate. So you’ve satisfied the viewer and the engine and that’s the key balance you are working with. And the speed at which your site performs, I believe, has an impact on Google’s opinion of it.
- Pictures are your best friend in this game. They instantly convey to the user that they’ve landed on the right spot. Then they glance your titles, excerpts, headers and overall content density. They make very quick judgement decisions at this point.
Its critical that you have some callouts and scannable paragraph headings so that they don’t linger too long and lose their instinct to act. You want to engage them to stay in purchase mode and quickly decide to take the blue pill as the preferred (and only) exit…
That’s why having scannable content is very important. Just to be clear, what I’m referring to by “scannable” is the ease with which the viewer’s eyes can quickly glance across your page and assimilate a positive response to their need.
Some good ways to do this is have compelling headlines and paragraph headers that are in boldface and/or italics to lead the eye down and back up to the heat zone.
- With respect to SEO, if you just cover the basics and don’t go “plugin happy” loading your site with every add-on app that promises to improve your SEO, then you will be fine.
Here are some tips for enhancing your “on-page” SEO…
1) The page needs to load fast. Google has so much as said, all things being equal, the faster page gets the nod.
2) The page needs to have a title that’s a match for the search term in which its optimized for. The Title IS the most critical factor for on-page SEO that you have control over.
3) The page needs to have a single H1 heading tag with keyword text that matches or complements the page’s Title tag. (don’t use more than one H1 per page)
4) The page needs to have valid, structurally sound and semantically correct html (or preferably XHTML) markup. It also helps here if the designer has taken time to offload ALL presentation details to a linked CSS (and the CSS is not a bloated mess which slows things down for the user).
5) As a bonus, especially for Google images traffic, the page needs to have at least a few images, whose title is a match for the search term.
6) If you want to get traffic from search providers other than Google, your page needs to have a description and a keyword meta tag which reflects its content without resorting to keyword stuffing.
- You can assign a single page as a “static page” in WordPress and this will always be your “Home” page. In your WordPress site Dashboard it’s Settings > Reading > Reading Settings.
There are other ways to do it as well. For example, in my templating system I use a sticky post for the home page, this is the main keyword phrase page. I prefer to use posts for product page content and pages for static, unchanging content such as “About”, “Contact”, “Privacy”, etc. Posts provide much more flexibility and offer post excerpts, tags, and category settings all accessible from the post editor.
- The key to success is proper niche research and selection.
- I write unique content for each site and I suggest you do the same. It doesn’t take long at all. If I start from an existing page, I will rewrite it with such a degree of uniqueness that there’s no reason to run it through a program like CopyScape.
- I personally don’t use article marketing for backlinks, though your mileage may vary.
- You need to at least have a privacy policy page link visible on all pages that promote Adsense.
- I set up most of my sites on Webmaster tools, but I no longer place analytics on new sites. I’ve got analytics on a few established sites that are generating enough traffic to warrant data analysis, but I don’t pay much attention to it honestly. I spend more time on rankchecker and Adsense dashboard than any other analytics tools.
Webmaster tools, for me is much more useful than analytics, since it shows me exactly what the G bot thinks of my site and which keywords its pimping for me. The diagnostics tools are also helpful.
I check SEObook’s rankchecker daily in order to see which of my sites have movement. I take a daily screenshot of the rankchecker results and save it as dd-mm-year.jpg in a dedicated “rankings” folder for historical tracking at a glance (I don’t turn on Adsense on a site until its on the first page, so this helps me track potential earners).
Finally, at the beginning and end of each day, I look to Adsense dashboard to track the impressions/clicks of all my sites and recalibrate my overall approach to my portfolio from there.