Niche website promotion can be very time consuming, but equally there is no point building a niche website, either because it is your passion, or to make money, unless someone sees it.
I have already discussed promoting websites using article submission, but the benefits of article submission are fairly longterm. Despite lots of claims by people promoting article submission as the ultimate form of site promotion, it is just one activity you should undertake.
Now I am guilty of not doing enough on other promotion activities. Most of my sites are blogs, and blogs are ideal for cross promotion and sharing traffic with related websites.
If you post an interesting, thought provoking and relevant comment on a blog in a similar niche, you are going to get some visitors, mostly short term, but some might become subscribers.
Not long ago I made a single post regarding another bloggers 31days promotion, and also commented on his blog. He reciprocated the following day by mentioning my post and the comment I made. I gained over 150 visitor over 2 days from that, and over 100 downloads of a viral ebook that I include in my Essential Niche Marketing Library.
That is a completely "white hat" way of operating. It is encouraged by other Bloggers. It was however for this blog, I am not sure I could achieve the same results for a blog in a smaller niche which received far less visitors.
Even though you have a relevant blog, would the effort be worthwhile?
There are only so many hours in a day after all.
So how could you automate this?
Well first of all you could search for all the blogs within your niche. It wouldn't take too long, maybe spend a few hours.
Then produce a text file with various pre-prepared messages that might address the concerns of people who read the other blogs, and also be relevant to the page you are linking back to.
Once a week (more frequently when you first start your blog), you could visit all the blogs in your list, see if they have something interesting, and make a comment. A lot of the time you would be able to use your pre-prepared comments. Sometimes you might find something also worth writing about on your own blog. If you do, great, you can blog about their post, and include a trackback.
Up until very recently, I wasn't doing this.
Why you might ask, it is much easier to do this than ask people for backlinks from link exchanges, the links from this method are much more relevant, not on linkfarms.
Here is what I thought was the crunch. Not long ago the major search engines announced that they were introducing support for an HTML tag, NO FOLLOW. This would mean that blogs using this tag for links within their comments, would not pass on any linking benefit, just traffic.
Then a product was recently introduced
Blog Submitter Pro
The use of this program is controversial. Some claim it is "blackhat", meaning it is cheating the search engines, and using it could get you dropped in search engines.
The problem with this arguement is that the program isn't using "dirty tricks". All it is doing is automating the process I have already described, that of writing some pre-prepared comments, visiting a list of pre-selected blogs to participate in, and making a few comments.
It also can benefit the blog owners - you are adding content, and the blog is being "pinged" for them, meaning their entries are always kept fresh.
But Does It Work?
This is where things get tricky, and a little bit technical.
The answer is... yes and no
I have seen proven results from people I respect using this software.
The results are extremely significant on Yahoo. Some results can be obtained with MSN and Google, but it is not going to be quite as dramatic.
I am not going to go into the reasons why the results differ in too great a detail. I invested a lot of time in the research, and it benefits me whether I choose to use this software or not. It is something I will only release to my mailing list (yes there are benefits in signing up ;) )
So is this Splogging ?
No - splogging is a term made from the words "spam" and "blog"
SPAM+BLOG=Splogging
Splogging is much more to do with blog & ping, which is a technique of rapidly getting all of a new website indexed in the search engines. It can have some benefit for SEO too if done correctly. I am not going to go into Blog & Ping too much with this post, but using BSP is not splogging.
Is this the same as spamming via email?
This gets complicated
If you were posting comments to blogs manually, making relevant comments that were interesting and informative, and including a link back to your own website, it wouldn't be looked on as spamming.
In addition, Blogger provide the ability to limit who can post comments to your blog, and provide this information extremely clearly. It might slightly slow down manual posting, but not to any great extent. If you don't want automatic posting to your blog you can stop it. If you add custom features to your blog, it is not down to Blogger.
The creators of BSP have deliberately only supported Blogger blogs because of the choice they give their users to accept comments automatically if they want it.
So BSP can automate this process, but that doesn't mean that every post you could possibly make with it is spam. You could use this tool for spam, in fact there are already tools that true "black hat" SEO fans already use that not only spam Blogger blogs, they spam all blogs, plus many forums.
BSP isn't as automated as people first assume. It will frequently request you to click system requestors that appear, so it cannot just be left running 24 hours a day unattended, spamming every blog under the sun, with comments regarding casios and sex sites. It is not that kind of tool.
BSP is a tool - how you use it is important
Towards the start of this post I described a manual process that you could undertake, prepreparing a number of highly relevant comments before you go visiting another persons blog.
Let us take a highly topical subject at the moment, and how you could use BSP in a legitimate way.
That isn't a real comment, and it isn't a real website
Imagine the following comment:-
My heart goes out to the poor people in New Orleans, not to mention the
people in smaller towns up and down the coast who were hit extremely hard by the
Hurricane.
I have already made a large donation to the Red Cross, but am
unable to help in many other ways because I live in Europe.What I have decided to do is to create a dedicated blog listing all the
websites I find that are raising money to help Hurricane victims. This blog can
be found at http://hurricane-victims-help.notreal.com/If you know of any pages that are raising money, please visit the blog, check
to see if the page is listed, and if it is not, please use the easy method to
add a new site to the growing list.I wish I could help more
That isn't a real comment, and it isn't a real website
Now imagine how much work it would be finding websites that were helping such a powerful cause, and the amount of time it would take to comment to them all.
If on the other hand you used the power of a tool like BSP to find relevant blogs discussing raising funds for Hurricane victims, or even collecting money for hurricane victims, such a comment WOULD NOT BE SPAM.
I have taken an extreme example, but I felt that was needed. Nothing in using BSP is black or white. It is not even "grey".
Everything comes down to how the tool (and it is just a tool) is used. The effectivelness of this tool is in the hands of the user too.
Making it effective
How effective BSP will be is down to the user. If you spam blogs with casio adverts, sure some might stick on deserted blogs, but a lot will just get deleted, and you will give yourself a bad name, and create hostility to your own site. Be rest assured, bloggers can be very vocal if you upset them.
If however you make legitimate comments that are highly targetted, you are actually doing something good, providing worthwhile information, but in an automated way.
Blog Submitter Pro was created so that average users could increase the number of visitors to their websites, either through the search engines, or from people clicking on links in comments. It is for people who don't approve of "black hat" techniques, where you are not adding to the content, and often are fooling search engines. It is for people who do not have time to compete with "white hat" SEO experts, who live and breath search engine optimization.
Do not buy Blog Submitter Pro for spamming
If you buy Blog Submitter Pro to automate the commenting you might perform naturally in a non-automated way if you only had a little more time, I can certainly see the legitimacy and usefulness of the product.
P.S. This is a big PS
The price is going up on Blog Submitter Pro within a few days, and they are upgrading it with a mass of new features that will make it easier to use, and more effective. They have an insanely good guarantee with it, so if it doesn't work for you, for whatever reason, you can get a full refund.
If you have made a decision that you might take a look, DO NOT SIT ON THE FENCE
Technorati Keywords
niche website , seo , keyword optimization , Search Engine Optimization , keyword research tool blog submitter pro , splogging , blog spam , blogging , blogger
