The Death of Niche Marketing – aka The Mayday Disaster

dustin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 02:53:09 +0000

Internet marketing is a game! If you cannot accept losing every now and again, then you really should not play. That does not mean that it can’t piss you off to lose, it just means that it will happen.

I have held my comments on the effects of G’s latest algo change until now. I wanted to wait a few weeks to see the full impact to my little empire before posting any results. Like many newer niche site builders my sites were absolutely freakin’ crushed! And boy does it hurt.

A Little Background for New Readers

This blog, at one time, was updated rather regularly. I posted my little experiments with internet marketing and was rather satisfied making a few hundred bucks a month in extra money. That was until I met Brian Johnson!

I say met, but in reality, it was more of a stumble. I found one of his affiliate pages for a product he was pumping up called Commission Ritual. The strange thing was that he let you ‘try’ it out for 7 days for only $4.95. It was perfect timing because my wife was heading out of town for a few days and I had nothing truly pressing to do; so I bought it.

That damn program literally changed my life. It took what I thought about internet marketing, turned it upside down, and basically had me starting over (two years into my online marketing education began).

I bought the course in late October and quickly put up four sites centered around Christmas product. I did ALL of the work for these sites in 2 days (about 10 hours total) and did not touch them again! The results $500+ in sales and counting. Hell YEAH!

Niche Site Empire?

Seeing these results, and understanding my own personality, I went ALL IN! I immediately quit blogging (no money to be made in blogging right?) and started building niche sites. Over the next 5 months, I built 75 sites. Of these sites, here are how my ranking stood (numbers rounded for ease of use):

50% on page one – 6 number ones
40% on pages two or three
10% somewhere past page three

Out of these 75 sites, all of them were indexed, ranking, and getting at least a trickle of traffic! In fact, most were making sales within a few weeks; and to let you in on a little secret – they are all Halloween related sites. Imagine that! I was making decent bucks and Halloween is still four or five months away! I began dreaming about paying off my house and getting out from under that damn mortgage!

Then Mayday Hit

When I say my sites got crushed, that is a freaking understatement. Now, only about 20 sites rank for their keywords. Of those, some of the rankings are for the privacy page (WTF G – how is that more relevant than 600 words of original content that is perfectly geared to exactly what the searcher was looking for).

Seriously, my content answered the damn question! Isn’t that what G wants. They want content that answers what the searcher is looking for. If you were looking for a stupid fairy costume, then my site was the bees knees!

What I have Discovered

But I did not panic!

Nope, I started researching. You can search in G even now and find sites exactly like mine (and no they are NOT x-factor style crap – but they are built around Brian’s teaching; which is easy to see once you learn it).

So what do these sites have (besides MY rankings)? What did these websites have that mine do not?

Time

This is pretty much a common theme around sites that still ranks well. If your site was less than 9 months old when the algo hit, you are almost guaranteed to be affected. My oldest site (my baby) was sitting at number one for 5 months. It has produced costumes sales each and every month since I launched it. Once Mayday hit, it immediately fell to number 28!

Seriously…….for months you thought my site was the BEST option for satisfying the searchers question and then overnight, I am not even in the top 10. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Links

Besides time, this is the most common factor about sites that remain ranked. G quickly figured out that just because you have the exact keyword in your domain, doesn’t mean your site is worth crap!

If people are not linking to it, G figures it must not be worth squat. (Which sucks if you are trying to sell hairy midget thongs; since no one is likely to be linking to anything about that). Additionally, contrary to what many people are reporting forum links and crappy spam tactics like that are not working (at least in my niche). And why would they? Every person and their mother is dropping links on forum sites that are simply not relevant, not important, and undesirable!

Pictures

If X-Factor failed at one thing, it was the fact that he should have instructed his drones to add pictures to their posts! Besides having the ugliest sites ever made (which I know is the point) these sites do nothing to help the user find what he is looking for!

The worst thing that could happen to your site is if someone lands there, sees way to much crappy spun content and either hits the back button or clicks on one of your ads! Some people think this is the goal, but it is not! Give your reader something of value.

ANYTHING OF VALUE.

Your opinion has value, a picture of the product (or keyword) you are promoting has value. WORDS have value.

SPUN CONTENT HAS NO VALUE

Let me rephrase that. Crappy spun content has no value what-so-ever. Leveraging your time does you no good if it completely disappears from G after a few weeks because it sucks so much donkey arse!

So Where Do I Stand Now

Today, I stand with 75, near worthless, domains. Since every one that I purchased was either a dot com, dot net, or dot org, I am in the hole for around $800; not to mention that $300 I spent paying my outsourcer (from the Philippines). I have around 25 domains that I have not even installed wordpress on yet, and I may never get around to them.

What I am doing is building content. Screw G; if they want authority sites then that is what I will give them. Instead of having 75 mini-sites by THIS Halloween, my new goal is to have 75 authority sites by NEXT Halloween. My goal is to dominate the whole first page for every one of my keywords. If that means I need to published 50 pages on every site and hit them all with 25 to 100 links, then so be it!

I refuse to give up. I refuse to have G take money out of my pocket (which they didn’t since it is their site do to as they please). I refuse to think that so many mush-brain marketers can make a living at this stuff and I cannot!

I simply refuse to acknowledge Mayday from here on out!

In the long run, it may work out better for us all since so many people will simply quit instead of actually doing some work! Heck, I sure hope they ALL quit! That would make my day!

Following Dave’s lead, if you read anything that helps you or made you laugh, please feel free to send me a buck via the button below. After all, I have to pay to renew those domains in December!

I am out!

DMace