I know I’ve previously written in at length about using social voting sites like sphinn and digg for driving traffic and networking, but in the vast majority of niches there is either no social voting site or it is too small to bother with. There are 3 reasons social voting sites don’t cover every niche:

1. The niche isn’t suited to the web and it doesn’t have passionate “users” e.g. Household Furniture.
2. The niche is too small.
3. The Website just hasn’t been built yet (becoming increasingly rare)

Unless your blog is in a niche that is commonly discussed by geeks online, the chances are you wont find a social voting site to promote on. I believe Stumbleupon is the only voting site that can drive traffic for every single niche and that is only because it is so different from other social voting sites. Note that by driving traffic I mean getting traffic from being vote to page 1, not from spamming.

Is This A Problem?

Social voting sites can often be more of a time waster than a useful tool. If you are anything like me you have spend countless hours reading blogs about social media and going out and “contributing” to these social sites like a good little marketer should. I’ve been doing less and less of both recently, and as a result found myself making much more money than before. Not having a social voting site in your niche is probably a good thing.

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It is now extremely easy to create a forum on a subdomain of your blog or put up a ning.com network for your readers to network in, but does that mean every blogger should?

There are already a fair few blogging forums, but the fact is that if your blog is popular enough the forums would end up growing anyway and increase the overall monetary value of your blog.

Most bloggers are also capable of making a pligg site (a digg clone using free pligg software) and adding that to their blog. Another alternative is to allow bloggers to write there own blog posts that are moved to the front page if they are good enough, like Performancing.

If you try adding one of these social communities to your blog too soon, they will not take off and will just get filled with spammers. You would end up having to constantly delete their spam or delete the site altogethor. If your blog is very popular is seems like a no-brainier, why not add these communities? Imagine Problogger with a ning.com network and a pligg voting site, it would get popular incredibly fast.

When do you think the crossover point is? How many RSS subscribers do you need to “have the authority” to launch something like this?

If you haven’t read it already, John Cow and Garry Conn are having a competition to see who can start a new blog from scratch and sell it on SitePoint for the highest amount after 30 days. Both sides are asking you sign up to find out what they will be doing to beat their opponent. Garry has organized a make money online classroom which you can sign up to for free. Blogging Fingers is an official sponsor of his classroom.

Who Will Win?

I’ve known Garry for well over a year now and I’ve seen him try just about every possible way there is to make money online, until he found the winning formula with his extremely numerous niche adsense blogs. He knows his stuff. As for John Cow I’ve seen him rise the fastest with some very creative marketing ideas and he is donating all the money (if he wins) to charity.

Questions About The Rules

Is it allowed for the competitors to use their other current blogs/Websites to promote their new niche blog? If so what is allowed? Presumably promotion from their main blogs is allowed. If anything is allowed, then Garry could pretty much get any site to the top of Google for any keyword phrase by using the power of his other blogs.

Another big question is what about spending money on the new niche blog? Is the winner whoever ends up with the most profit after selling or simply revenue from the sale?

Another issue is that is very easy to infiltrate the opponents classroom to read the tactics they share with their readers by making a new innocent looking email address. Also if Garry or John Cow find out what the URL is of each others competing blog they could make an effort to attack it and bring it down. I trust neither of them will do this as it is a friendly competition. What ever happens both Garry and John Cow will gain lots of free promotion with this contest.

I’m exited about seeing who wins, best of luck to both of you!

You can enroll in Garry Conn’s make money online classroom for free here.

Here are 5 scenarios. I guarantee you will fit into one of them

1. You already make stacks of money and have no real need to make an effort.
2. You are very busy working on lots of different blogs, things are going ok, but you don’t have time to set up new ones.
3. You have a make money online blog and thats about it. You don’t want to spend more money without being certain you will get a return.
4. You have plans to set up a network of blogs but haven’t chosen a topic yet and are still “researching”.
5. You are lazy.

If none of those are you, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog (although not everyone who reads BloggingFingers is lazy). Every single one of those scenarios presents good reasons to buy domains.

The fact is domains are a great investment simply because they go up in value all on their own. You only have to have to try and buy aged domains yourself to see that they sell for a premium. This is because search engines trust aged domains more than new ones and so you can gain higher SERPS positions more quickly with an aged domain.

Back In September I wrote 4 Blogging Laws I DoFollow where one of the rules was to always sleep on an idea before spending money. I created this rule because I registered some domains in a moment of excitement only to wake up the next day thinking the ideas for what was going to go on those domains sucked. Looking back however the domains I registered then were pretty solid and are growing to be worth more than I paid for them.

Quick Tips For Registering Domains

I am by no means a professional domainer, but these are some things I have learned:

• Web 2.0 domains with crazy made up words won’t stay in fashion long and won’t be considered “brandable”. Better to play it safe there.
• SEO domains with keywords in are always a good choice.
• Domains with too many words in are spammy
• After buying the domain, quickly knock together a post and install Wordpress, then get a link to the Homepage of your new site from anywhere and submit it to Google Webmaster tools to get it indexed. Having it indexed for a year makes it worth much more than just having been registered for a year.

I’ve registered 5 new domains today with plans to set up a new mini blog network. If you are hesitating I urge you to take action!

If you’ve spent a lot of time running a flagship blog it is easy to forget about the issues bloggers that use a niche blogging approach face. There are lots of theories about the Google sandbox and the way Google handles young blogs with freshly registered domains.

From my experience Google gives sites a ‘trial run’ where upon first indexing the blog is given unnaturally high rankings for a few weeks and if it doesn’t gain enough links/content during that trial period it is de-indexed (sandboxed). Or if it gains some links/content it is given given lower rankings which have to be built up from scratch the old fashioned way.

I’ve found this out from starting several niche blogs some of which have kept the good initial rankings, some have been sandboxed and some have had their rankings lowered after the ‘trial period’. I have experienced every scenario and want to share what I believe the reasons Google treated my niche blogs differently.

Race Analogy For Google Ranking New Blogs

It is like you are running a race with a head start but also a heavy weight is tied to your ankle for being a newcomer. You have to run extra hard to stay ahead. If you cannot stay ahead of the other runners for x amount of time you are disqualified for the rest of that season but if you can stay ahead for long enough your weight is removed and you become one of the other normal runners.

How To Stay Ahead

• Churn out much more content. I’m not saying you should compromise quality for quantity but as a new site you have to teach the Googlebot who is boss by training it to visit your blog often. I would actually say this is more important than large scale link building because Google are more strict about gaining links to fast, but they lap up all the content gladly.
• Get a few quality links. You need this for Google to index you. Otherwise you could be waiting months if all you do is submit your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. Obviously relevancy helps but to get that initial indexing a link from an off-topic site will do the trick.
• Don’t go overboard on affiliate links. It is easy to ignore this because we want to, but I have experienced entire blogs being de-indexed after adding to many (un-cloaked) affiliate links. Google doesn’t trust your domain yet so take it slow.
• Spread the link building out. You want the Google bot to see an increase in links each time it arrives but you will have a limited number of ways to easily get links. It works well to build some links, wait for indexing, build some more, wait to be crawled again, build more links etc.

I know these are things you would be doing normally anyway, but with a new blog if you get lazy the consequences will be far worse.

Do you have any other tricks to avoid early de-indexing and getting a new blog off to the best start?