Inet Solutions

Micro Niche Sites Are Back – Will You Get Aboard The Train This Time?

Sterling King

Hopefully the title alone is enough to get you guys excited. Before we start let us briefly list what you’ll get from this article:

Now that I have your attention, let us begin.

The Problem with Internet Marketing Forums

There’s a couple of major blackhat and internet marketing forums and you probably know them pretty well by now. They can be a great source of information and advice if you know how to find it.

However let’s forget for a moment whether we are experienced or not, and look at them through the eyes of a newcomer. You visit these forums and the first threads you see are:

“SEO is dead.”

“Penguin 3.0 destroyed all my rankings. Brb suicide.”

“I can’t do shit in internet marketing, so nobody can. Let’s go back to our McDonalds jobs.”

Obviously this is a little exaggerated but these forums are nowhere close to welcoming. You go there looking for information and feel like you’re in the middle of a graveyard (if you happen to have caught them on a bad time).

Yet I still insist that I have learned most of what I know from them and the information is there. So what causes all this desperation?

Well, it’s the fact that people start using the exact strategies that died a couple of months ago and the new profitable ones are still unpublished. Nobody wants competition so until there is no money to be made, few would share valuable information.

Just a couple of years ago AdSense arbitrage was working. If you don’t know what that is, it basically consists of:

  1. You making a crappy site on an expensive topic (think solar panels, e-cigs, ship cruises, etc).
  2. You put AdSense on the site
  3. You ask someone to click on your ads and split your profits with them

Insane that it worked, huh? And it wasn’t even that long ago. When Google put an end to it people started doing the exact same threads as above. Yet in the last five years while these strategies weren’t working many people made millions from IM – using their own methods that no one will become aware of until they don’t work anymore. Well, maybe not no one, but most people.

You start wishing time machines were real. “If only I could go back in time and do adsense arbitrage again”. “If only I can just buy an exact match domain and get first place rankings”. “If only I could make 200 micro niche sites and make 100$ a month from each of them…”

Except you actually can do micro niche sites again – with a little twist.

And if you’re wondering why I’m sharing this, there’s a simple answer – it is not limited to a few people. Everyone can get their fair share of the money without getting in the way of others.

So let us power up the time machine and remind ourselves what the MNS (micro niche site) strategy was all about.

Micro Niche Websites

You see, once upon a time Google thought exact match domains (EMDs) were the shit. Big sites were already dominating big niches, but small searches were an easy target. And something as simple as buying “watchhimymonnline.com” would bring you targeted and potentially expensive traffic.

An EMD usually needed a couple of easy to get links to really get you that first place – and kaboom – you have 300 visitors per month, equaling 10 sales per month.

You wouldn’t drown in cash from one site, but creating a website like this would take no more than 2 hours. People would create 5 sites a day. In a couple of months they would have 200 websites bringing home 100$ on average. 20k $ per month is a pretty big deal, especially considering how simple the job is.

So what has changed? Well plenty of things make this exact strategy useless today:

So why am I even talking about this strategy? Well, the catch is we don’t need Google to catch this MNS train. So instead of teaching you things, I’ll mostly be helping you unlearn some stuff today. Because we are going to rank our sites in Bing.

What the Hell? Bing?

Yeah, I know what you’re going to say. Bing doesn’t bring any visitors, the 20% market share is bullshit, bla bla…

But you’re incorrect. You just haven’t put the effort in befriending the search engine and learning more about it. Here are a couple of things about Bing that might change your pre-defined opinion on it:

Hopefully this has been enough to convince you that Google is not the only option you have. Now, it is time for you to unlearn every inaccurate piece of information that you have learned from webmaster forums and SEO sites in the last five years. Because what I’m about to reveal is the exact strategy I used to rank my first few websites on Bing with a 100% efficiency.

Ranking Sites in Bing – the Easy Way

OK, we are going to rank a site in Bing! Where do we start?

First we need to select a few sexy niches. Even though I just preached that the most common Bing user is in their 50-s – many younger people go for this search engine, too. So while “old people’s niches” might be the best choice, you should never limit yourself to that.

Otherwise the rules are the same – there must be keywords with decent traffic and a good affiliate program or high CPC that goes along the keyword.

Keywords Research

So how do we calculate the keyword traffic? We see what the Google Keyword Planner / Market Samurai / Long Tail Pro / Traffic Travis software has to say about Google and then take 15-20% of it?

No! No! No! This is the exact reason why people never get enough traffic from Bing – they expect that all niches work the same as in Google. Keyword research tools are also at fault, since they only show data about Google Searches (most of them at least).

Bing gives you even more detailed data about every keyword you are interested in. Unlike Google, where apparently every keyword is searched by either 190, 320, 660, or 2300 people per month (you know where I’m getting at…), Bing gives you the exact numbers.

You just need to make a Bing ads account first.

After that, you will have access to all the necessary tools which will help you improvise. Start with something an old person might want. Not necessarily Viagra – be creative.

If you can’t think of anything immediately, go to Clickbank.

OK so where were we? Oh, yeah, we are picking keywords. So if you are out of ideas you might as well look for products with saucy commissions. Go through them and ask yourself – will a Bing user want this – which generally means “Will old people want this?”, but it wouldn’t hurt to experiment with different products.

And let’s say you’re impressed by a new product named “Ultrateeth – get even whiter fake tooth smile than the old fart across the street – fake teeth now for only $999”.

You first put in the search box “fake teeth”. You see it has 800 searches per month – that’s even more than what most Google MNS sites were aiming for. Now check the standard variations:

“Best fake teeth”

“Best fake teeth on the market”

“Fake teeth reviews”

“Best fake teeth 2015”

In this case it doesn’t make a lot of sense to go for singular keywords (a.k.a. “tooth”) but usually you should also try both singular and plural – sometimes results can be surprising.

Now let us check the first page of Bing for the right metrics – Trust flow, domain authority, domain age, keyword in header, how big the site is, you know the drill.

None of these matter too much in Bing. As weird as it sounds, PageRank and PA are more important – I told you that you need to unlearn a lot.

However the presence of an exact match domain is even more important. If your EMD is not taken and you don’t see a ton of sites with high pagerank or page authority in the SERPs, you’re good to go. Typically if the EMD is free, the rest has a 99% chance to not matter anyway.

In case the EMD is not available, there’s no need to worry, because all you actually need is for your main keywords to be in the domain name – and not necessarily be an exact match.

Another thing you can do is remove “common words” – a.k.a. words such as “the”, “of”, “and”, etc. But I have found that I get the best success rate if I leave them there and just add “2015” as a suffix – or even a random string of numbers – I know it looks ugly but as long as it works you are fine.

Link Building

OK, so now that you’re all set with the domain, let’s check some specifics about the links you need to blast.

The most important part is that Bing does not have manual reviewers checking big SERPs all the time – so PBNs and GSA Search Engine Ranker links work like a charm. A big issue with Google is that fellow webmasters do their due diligence and report you the moment you manage to rank with spam. From my experience, nobody seems to care about Bing.

That being said, going the extra mile to ensure quality is not necessarily a bad thing. I like spinning articles manually before running GSA SER – I know, boring stuff. In all honesty there has not been a quantifiable difference – I have succeeded in ranking with generic garbage. But even for churn and burn sites I would prefer the “burn” period to occur as late as possible. It is your call.

Other than that, a standard 2-tiered link pyramid is absolutely the most cost efficient way to boost rankings. PBNs work too, but $500 worth of PBN links do as much as $50 worth of GSA SER links in Bing – and after all, we are shooting for the highest possible ROI.

The links themselves should come mainly from blog posts and blog comments. Even with the highest quality indexing, I have found that Bing simply can’t find profile links and the likes quickly enough.

That leads us to the most important portion of this article.

Indexing – Bing vs Google

Do you know the reason everyone thinks ranking in Bing is not worth it?

Because it has always taken ages. For most people, ranking in Bing is as difficult as ranking in Google – if not even more difficult.

That cannot be further from the truth. As you saw in the previous section, Bing is not nearly as picky as Google when it comes to backlinks. So how come nobody took advantage of this fact until now?

The problem is that Google manages to index your backlinks, while Bing takes forever to do so – this is where indexing services such as BacklinksIndexer come in real handy. So, until you actually get your site ranked, Bing might have updated their ranking algorithm, basically making you look like this:

The secret sauce when it comes to ranking in Bing is…

It is the use of premium indexing services. There are some magicians on the web who know exactly how to make Bing take note of your brand new spammy links.

How do they do this? Well, it is a mixture of mass comment spam (old school tactics) combined with RSS submissions (again, old school) and most importantly – high PageRank private directories.

You see, PageRank is a metric of how often Google (or Bing) bots are redirected to a site. The more links you have, the more often you’re redirected to the site. The higher quality they are, the higher number of times they are visited by bots, meaning the higher number of times they redirect these bots to your website. Does this make sense?

So basically what these directories do has nothing to do with attracting visitors and advertising articles on your site. They are all about attracting search engines bots and sending them your way. There is some sorcery in how they manage to keep their out-bound links low, while spamming millions of links on a daily basis, but you get the idea.

Unfortunately, doing this yourself will cost you quite a bit. So there are only two sensible solutions:

  1. Use premium indexing services
  2. Or create your own premium indexing service and use it on your own sites while selling to others as well

The coolest part about this is the fact that if doing this once doesn’t work, doing more of the same can actually bring you the results you were looking for.

This is vastly different from the reality of Google, where if mass links don’t work you need to focus on other things – on-page optimization, social signals, etc.

Preparing for Perfection

Following the steps described above will help you rank sites in Bing 80+% of the time. That being said, there are a few tweaks, which might cost a bit of time but help out too. So if you want everything done perfectly you might want to consider them. Here is a short list:

So, now that you are aware of all this information which I stole from the CIA’s private database, I hope you don’t miss the train this time. The ticket is extremely cheap and the destination is pretty clear.

What the hell are you still doing here? Go make some money!