This is a guest post by Andrew Hansen.
I recently started a new “passion project” – a blog in the travel niche.
Like most projects, profit oriented or not, entering a new niche teaches many an interesting lesson.
Big Authority Sites Kickin Your Butt?
The travel niche is one where the search engine rankings are dominated by authority sites. In many instances, you can have keywords that are super low in organic search engine competition, but who’s Google front pages are dominated by 10 “review” type sub pages on big old domains that can take a lot of work to beat.
It can be the name of a tiny restaurant in some remote area with only 100 people searching it a month, and as long as someone’s been there and written a review, you’ll find a Tripadvisor.com page, an Igougo.com page, a Yahoo travel page, AOL travel page, and if you’re lucky a Wikipedia page too. It can make it tough when you’re writing on a keyword that has almost no competition, but the best 10 sites are almost unbeatable if you have a new blog.
Of course they got this way because, being so big, having so much content and such a strong root domain that’s aged and with so many backlinks, anything that gets published on them hits the search engines with force.
They’re Taking Over The Web!
And the thing is, it’s not just the travel search market. We all lament the annoyances of having to compete for rankings against the ubiquitous and inevitable Wikipedia pages, Amazon pages, eBay pages, big article directory pages, social network pages, and so many others.
It’s more annoying still when you think that with every passing day, more and more of these authority type sites are appearing in every market on the web. Do you ever think that there’ll come a time when any profitable market will have it’s organic and paid advertising results dominated by big unbeatable authoritative websites? Do you fear a time when it becomes impossible for us little guys to compete?
Of course, it won’t be the end of the world. There’ll be other ways to generate traffic. BUT, the point of this post is that we’re NOT at that point yet… it’s NOT too late!
Making YOUR Blog An Authority Site
Any of us can do what it takes to make our website an authority in our niche, provided we continually work at it, and invest for the long term.
In fact, this has been the positive element of the lesson taught by the travel niche.
It’s been interesting to watch the speed and ease with which our blog’s content can now attain rankings in the search engines the older it gets, the more links we build to it, and the more posts we add.
It’s taken, so far, 5 months of solid link building, and creating about 50 pieces of content on an ongoing basis. But sure enough, we’re starting to be viewed as “an authority”. How do we know?
Our new posts get indexed in the search engines within half an hour with no linking but internal links… Our search spider activity is high. For more and more keywords each day, we manage to beat out those big bad authority sites.
A recent post we made served as a great example. It was a post we wrote on a little restaurant in a town called Bucerias in Mexico. While the competition NUMBER is tiny, on the front page we’ve got authority sites like Tripadvisor, Chowhound, AOL Travel and a big portal site for the area. All except one of which our site was able to beat with a brand new piece of content and zero backlinks. Why? Because we’re slowly becoming an authority.
If you take the time and invest for the future, build your backlinks continually and grow your content as your domain ages, it’s not too late for YOUR site to become an authority regardless of what niche it’s in.
And once you’re at authority status, the benefits aren’t just easier search rankings. Your new popularity will see more people mysteriously finding you, more people wanting to partner with you, more people wanting to advertise with you, more people seeking you out on the social networks, and so on and so on.
New authority sites are blooming in your niche right now whether you see it or not. Make your site one of them and you will reap the rewards.
Andrew Hansen is an affiliate marketing strategist, CEO of Dreamlife Softwares and blogger at AndrewHansen.name. His free techniques and strategies at http://affiliateblogprofit.com/free show how to blog for easy affiliate revenue by dominating untapped, profitable search markets.
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