Approaching Webmasters in Your Niche

[Trevor Kuntz]

After reading a lot about post-Penguin SEO, it seems that the most effective links are in-text links to your site from other sites within your niche.

In my niche, there are a lot of charities, a few dozen info sites that were created in the early 2000s, and a handful of competing stores (not including Amazon and two national B&M chains).

I'm not really sure how to approach the webmasters of these sites, and since there are only a few sites that I can use, I don't want to screw up my initial approach. I know that when people send me spam emails saying "Dear Webmaster: Your site so good. Link exchange iwht my site for zero money? I would get you 2000 views traffic a day with my link..." I just delete them from my inbox immediately. There would have to be some really, really good reason why I wouldn't trash it, but would instead think "Hmmm, I would like to feature this guy on my charity/blog/store."

I'm just not sure how to do it at this point, but I'm sure that some of you have some experience in this area. Would you mind sharing your experiences or expertise?

 

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[kwerner]

I posted about this a year or so ago. You can probably find the thread by searching for "guest blogging" or something like that.

But you could also create your own niche authority blog networks and link back to your site (wink wink).

 

[Trevor Kuntz]

Excellent, I will look for it when I get home. Thanks.

I do have a 14 site blog network with 14 exact domain matches, but they're all hosted on one hosting plan, so they don't have the differing IP advantage, but it saves me like $700/year hosting them on the same plan. They're more for featuring products of mine, and I don't try to make them appear as unrelated to my main site. I tried doing that with my first store, but after reading some books about how much negative CGM can be generated when customers find out that actually they're all related to my main site, I decided to be entirely transparent.

 

[kwerner]

Web2.0's man. $0 cost.

 

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[bigtamale]

In my niche, there are a lot of charities

Here's the first place I'd look. See if they have a "donor page" or something similar. If not, contact and get them to create one .. guarantee they'll jump at any opportunity for donations.

If you don't mind being a bit shady, you can find a dropped domain that used to be some kind of club ... sapsc.org or whatever. Buy that domain and make your own play on the acronym. Say "students against public smoking - California". This would happen to coincide with what their charity focuses on and you'll have all kinds of luck opening negotiations. Once the link is pointed, wait a week or so then 301 all traffic that's not from their IP address (city, whatever) to your money site. This will pass 85% of the link juice + any residual authority that dropped domain carries.

You're going to have to get outside the box a bit and infiltrate these charities in some way, shape or form if you really want this.

but it saves me like $700/year hosting them on the same plan

New IPs cost $2/month at most hosts, a couple would go a long way for you although I'm not really against dropping a well placed link on the right page of these tier 2 network sites. Just don't be stupid about your anchor text.

 

[Trevor Kuntz]

Web2.0's man. $0 cost.

Yeah, but Web 2.0s seem like the kind of old way of doing things. I'm not sure if they're still effective anymore.

Here's the first place I'd look. See if they have a "donor page" or something similar. If not, contact and get them to create one .. guarantee they'll jump at any opportunity for donations.

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to become "partners" with some of the charities without coming off as only caring about money. I don't really want to take advantage of charities at all, but they would provide some pretty powerful links!

 

[Trevor Kuntz]

The other thing I'm trying to figure out is how to keep the satellite sites/blog network ranked well. I've gotten some of them up to page 1, position 2, but once I put all of the products up, I'm not really going to have anything to add to them, and they'll just drop again. I need to figure out a way to keep those steady without producing duplicate content.

 

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