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The Niche Dilemma
March 22, 2005
I got sidelined a bit over the weekend with a couple of deadlines, but have another week free and clear (sort of) to work on my sites. So of course, something else pops up.
Last week, I finished my preliminary research over at Wordtracker. And as I'm getting ready to buckle down and get knee deep in more keyword research, something occurs to me.
Big niche or little niche?
I know everyone talks about the advantages of having a really tightly focused niche. Search engines like it. You can rank well because there's less competition. Stuff like that.
But it seems to me that a big niche with separate sections of more tightly focused niches might also work.
The thing is, I'm using the Martell method to build my sites, but I'm combining it with the ol' "target those less competitive keywords with only X searches a day" method.
And search engines index on a page by page basis, and rank you on a page by page basis.
I know the whole topic of themes is important, but I just can't see why a broad theme can't work just as well as a narrow theme, especially if you then ensure that your categories are all smaller, tighter niches.
Here's what I keep thinking might be the advantages. If you took several related niches and put them together in one big niche, that's only one site that needs to get indexed, rather than four or six or eight or ... you get my drift, right?
And while external links are important, backlinks coming internally also have some clout, too. So with several related, tight niches under one big niche, you'd have a bigger site with lots of content and lots of internal backlinks - and no worries about the dreaded cross-linking.
When that one site pops out of the sandbox - hey, all those smaller, tighter niches are out of the sandbox, too.
And since I'm writing pages based on less competitive words, I should still see some results.
So I'm going to test this. There's at least one big niche I can target, so out of the 15 sites I was planning to put up, I'll round these related ones together and see what happens. The rest of them I'll niche like crazy, like I've been told to do ...
I think both ways will work out well. Hey, I guess that means I'm testing and tracking!
(And there's a bit of a relief, seeing my to-do list shrink from putting up 15 sites to putting up eight or nine sites ...)
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Posted by BJ at 02:56 PM in Niche Marketing | Permalink
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