Website Promotion - Keyword Research

The building blocks of successful link gaining.

In this article on faster link gaining I discussed the different ways in which you can gain links to your site and established that clearly the two best ways were submitting your site to directories and submitting articles for distribution.

I've come to the conclusion that submitting your site to hundreds and hundreds of directory sites is not worth the time invested and that submitting articles is the way to go, here's why:

First of all it comes down to your marketing approach and the market that you are trying to dominate.

It's so important that when you start out you choose a small niche in your market that you can totally dominate. There are several very, very good reasons for this that are not apparent on the surface of it and only become clear once you've started to establish the site.

The first good reason is that by choosing a very tightly focused niche in your market you are going to get serious people searching out your site. They may find the information they want on an all encompassing website but the search for information means that they will always want to narrow down the subject matter.

Let's give you a concrete example with which to draw a comparison to.

I've often remarked that the gaming industry is a suberb industry for hard working affiliates. But for those that reach the top of the pile the rewards are outrageous.

It's simply a case of

"Are you going to do this or not?"

And if you are it begs the question:

"Are you going to be in the top five percent or in the underperforming 95% ?"

You have to look at this as a long term investment of your time, like building any normal business.

Now, in the poker industry there are a small amount of established sites that have been around for four or more years. These sites dominate the rankings and are large sites with a powerful workforce keeping them up to date. As an individual you are not going to be able to compete with them for the whole pie, but you can compete for a small piece of the crust and that small piece can make you a very nice living indeed.

The way to approach this is to dominate a small niche in the market. Once you have that foothold then you can start climbing the mountain. Without a basecamp you are going to find it difficult to get anywhere at all.

So with Poker Tournament Player I start to build a site that can dominate the tournament poker player market. But even that is too big a market to crack in twelve months so I break it down into "Freezeout tournaments" which is just a small subsection of the genre.

What I now have is a site building on the groundwork from another site Sit and Go Strategy which dominates the six handed poker playing terms. It's a small market but once you start getting small successes you can build on them.

If you start out thinking you are going to dominate a major term for any big business then you are going to fail not just because of the amount of effort required to get anywhere but also because it's going to be so long before you see any results that you'll give up.

Now that we've built our niche site and we keep adding the content things start to happen.

We start to get people who are genuinely interested in the subject matter asking questions that haven't been covered so far.

These questions give you an opportunity to reply and add more content and also ideas for new areas to move into. If they found your site and are asking you the question then the chances are they couldn't find the answer anywhere else. You have to have a lot of good content for someone to have the inclination to pick up the pen and email you.

And that's why I consider submitting to directories to be a drain on your time.

Instead of submitting your site to directories, invest the time in writing new content. Become the top 5%. Make a site that will stand out from the crowd and people will willingly link to it.

If it's your first site, decide on your niche and dominate it. Don't let anyone else even come close to getting anywhere near you.

Sticking up a five page site and then spending all of your time linking to it will only get you so far.

Whilst you will get returns in the short term - in the long term you will get many more benefits, offers of collaboration, offers of advertising, people asking questions and much more from building a solid site that actually serves your surfer.

It takes work. But as we've said before being lazy just isn't going to cut it.