You Ever Bit Off More Than You Could Chew?

Have you guys ever just flat out gotten too cocky and underestimated what it would take to take down a niche?

For instance, once upon a time I was working heavily in a certain vertical full of gov's and edu's. I beat them with this one MFA that became a mini-authority by accident. This was well before Penguin and I had the EMD... This was micro-niche really. But it boosted my confidence.

So later, I'm still in this vertical but it's now a post-Penguin world and I'm thinking... I'm going to take down a macro-niche... there's only one true authority site on the topic. So I got to work. 100's of scholarly articles later I had a fairly big site. I was guest blogging everywhere. Scored edu links, a gov link, communities around this topic were giving me organic links like mad, but I simply could not bust through except for one term that kept me afloat. Later on I added a directory that made it worthwhile.

But at this was when Google had shifted a lot of weight towards domain-wide metrics to block out spammers, before they got a good hold on relevancy. I could get 100's of links to a page, out-do them with on-page, and still not pop on page one, which was full of pages that had zero or 1 link and 100 words of content.

I mean, I boosted this site up to PR 6, DA 50+, and all those metrics. It was up there, and it was making pennies compared to what it should have been making. Ended up wasting a lot of time, effort, and money on this one. Later sold it and moved on.

Of course now the tides have turned again. It was bad timing on my part. I wasn't aware that this was going to be a giant fail because I kept assuming I just didn't have the juice yet, but I definitely did. I wish I could have failed sooner.

What about you guys?

Almost every project I've done fits this bill, but it's not been more than I could chew, but more than I was willing to chew for long enough to swallow.

It takes a lot of patience to watch your snowflake hit the ground and start rolling and gain enough momentum that it starts rolling on its own, and then to keep pushing it yourself anyways until it's making a lot of money.

Any project is possible within reason. It's really a game of who's left standing.

you're not trying hard enough if you're not pushing yourself

Think about the 10x rule ( Grant Cardone ).

In a way, biting off more than you can chew fits under this somewhat

I'm currently in a niche that was easy to work but has become much harder and now my business goals have had to be pushed back by years to get to domination. Frustrating but that is the way it goes.

I'm in a niche where the majority of it is easy, low-hanging fruit opportunities.

Examples: Competitor websites are awful, competitors ignoring all or most social media sites which have thriving communities, general information on topics being searched for is sub-standard and not solving the searchers problems.

However...

There are areas that have been trickier than I expected...

For example, the main reason there's a bunch of shitty sites with crap (lets just call it lazy) information is because the big, established webmasters are running sites that were started in the early 00s or even late 90s.

Any competitors they've had over the years have crashed and burned because they absolutely refuse to link out to anyone outside of their pre-existing 'network'.

This is a HUGE blow for me being that I'm trying to conduct my SEO campaigns as white hat as possible. Getting those truly relevant links is pretty much impossible at this point.

There's a few smaller issues I've come across with this niche, but it's probably true of most niches... Call it 80/20 or whatever.

All I had to do was re-adjust my thinking though and I think that's true of most problem niches, or specific problems within a niche, there's usually somewhere or something that you're missing that's halting your progress.

Look at the failures and assess what they did wrong as much as figuring out what the leaders did right.

As I said a lot of sites had crashed and burned in this niche, and they were actually better than the established 'authority' sites... They clearly hit the same wall as me, except they probably didn't adapt their approach or learn from failures of others who had come before.

They had no idea how to operate outside of the 'SEO Mindset', whereas I do...

So I doubled down on my efforts on the places everyone else had/has ignored, and now I have perhaps the most active and loyal following on Instagram for this niche... I started interacting on forums, doing traffic leaks wherever I could see them. I'm reaching out to related brands that aren't an 'information' website, such as charities, eCommerce sites (for competitions) and I'm creating strategic partnerships wherever I can...

Now that I've set in place a few slow burners, a few instant gratification traffic leaks and built an audience on Instagram I'm able to start tackling other opportunities.

One example is what @CCarter says about buying auction domains with traffic, not for the SEO benefit, just for the traffic... Plenty of failures in this niche that have small amounts of traffic still.

Hitting up content sites like BuzzFeed, building boring as hell (to make) quizzes or list posts and leaving credit to my site, then hitting Facebook and Reddit to get their shit-detectors down. And guess what, it fucking works and I don't even care how little traffic I get. I just want the awareness and the links from 'related content' since I can't get 'related sites' right now.

Day by day I'm building up my assets in this niche, block by block, building an untouchable brand... I'm making sure that they can't simply starve me out, I'm making sure that nobody can ignore us because I know what I have is better than anyone else...

Eventually the competitors are either going to catch criticism for not linking out to us, since they link to each other... Then they'll eventually be begging me for my traffic, my links... And I'm not having it. Because they're the ones who made this hard for me, and harder for themselves in the long run.

I could have laid down and died and said I bit off more than I can chew, but unless you're literally going up against some kind of monster with the scale and resources of say @Tavin then you probably haven't, and even then a decent marketer can still give their wealthier competitors a run for their money... There's always an angle, an edge or a competitive advantage to be had.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I don't think so... No matter how slow it is to get started, if you're doing it right then "from small seeds grow mighty oaks".

RomesFall said:

Getting those truly relevant links is pretty much impossible at this point.

Click to expand...

Yeah... if they have an in-group nobody can penetrate, but they are being real lazy and depending on that web ring to stay on top....

Just like you're doing, you can be out there creating tons of relevant links on thousands of sites. By the time you slide up in there, they'll be so far behind your curve they'll never catch up.

If they have zero social presence, I'd think that using social PPC to get likes, shares, retweets, pins, on and on, you could stack so many of those that show a current relevancy while they are getting none.

Slow crawl but a sure fire win, as you're saying.

My original post about my scenario lacked me doing any social. That could have been the one thing I needed for domination. I'm more than a late adopter with social, but I'm definitely mixing that into my new projects now. I've seen how much of a difference it makes. Anyone saying social signals don't help with SEO haven't ever received real ones.