You often hear webmasters wanted to get into a specific niche, then someone else saying “oh, don’t do that… it’s too saturated.” There are plenty of niches out there that have tons of competition (make money online blogs, myspace resource sites, online dating, xbox sites, etc.). The trick is to provide someone unique that the other websites don’t offer. That’s the best way to succeed in a niche that some will say is “too saturated.”

Plentyoffish was able to climb to the top of the online dating niche by providing the visitors something different. Youtube wasn’t the first video site on the web, but it let users easily upload their own created content. John Chow wasn’t the first “make money online” blog out there, but he was able to creatively take advantage of sites like Digg to drive traffic by the thousands.

Remember, some of the most “saturated” niches are the most popular searched niches. So if you can find something to separate yourself from the competition, you will be able to get traffic coming back to your site. There is always a way to attract new visitors to your website, you just have to be creative. And once you get good rankings in a “saturated” niche, you’ll be reaping the benefits of thousands of unique visitors every day.

I’m sure you’ve heard a hundred times that content is King or that you must have unique content if you want to rank high in Google. I’ve probably even said it before on this blog. But today I’m telling you that it’s all a lie. Sites with zero unique content can still rank high in Google.

Take a look at this Brady Quinn fan site (not one of my sites). The entire front page of information is composed of reworded content from Quinn’s wiki page. The owner of this site just changed a few words here or there. But read through it… it’s the exact same content and nothing unique at all.

Then 90% of the rest of the content on this site is syndicated news from sites like Yahoo Sports or Cleveland.com. None of those syndicated articles are unique either.

This site ranks #2 in Google for “Brady Quinn”. He probably gets 500-700 uniques/day during the offseason and 1,500 or more uniques/day during football season. So how does he rank so high for a competitive keyword with zero unique content? LINKS! The site has a lot of links pointing back to it.. and these are links from unique IPs (I checked).

So there you have it. It’s not ground-breaking news. Links are more important then content. Next time you’re stuck and your site won’t rank any higher… stop adding content to it and start adding links.

It’s been 5 months since two of my website were murdered by Google. Can you believe after all this time, I still don’t have my rankings back? I’m starting to think that they will never come back. Perhaps the domains were blacklisted and won’t ever be the same. This would mean that I need to scratch the websites and rebuild the same content just on to a different domain.

For those of you not in the loop, my then two biggest websites were penalized by Google. They weren’t completed banned, but they were penalized big time. I lost all my big keywords and went from getting a ton of Google traffic to now very little. I never found out the exact reasons for the penalty. I speculated it could have been using TLA on the websites, or even linking to ba neighborhood sites.

I took the necessary steps for reinclusion many months ago and have just been patiently waiting. I’m getting tired of waiting though.

I remember those days before the penalty was put on me. I was on my way to making $xxx a day easy. I was excited, motivated and have a lot of fun doing this. Since the penalty, my earnings have slowly dropped every month and I feel completely helpless. I’ve lost motivation and it’s not always fun for me.

I’ll keep working at it though. Keep staying patient in hopes some day soon Google will restore my rankings.

A great way to market niche sites is through Yahoo Groups. Yahoo defines Groups as:

It’s where people with a shared interest meet, get to know each other, and stay informed. Your group gives you instant access to:

• Shared message archives
• Photos and photo albums
• Group event calendars
• Member polls and shared links

Best of all, Yahoo Groups are free.  So how can Yahoo Groups be beneficial for your websites? Two ways: Traffic and Links.

Most Yahoo Groups will have a place for members to add their links. Adding your link to the Groups directory is free. It may not drive a lot of traffic, but it will give you an important relevant backlink to your site.

You can drive traffic to your website by posting messages in the Yahoo Group. Every time you post a message it will send out an email to all the members in the group. If you have an attractive sales pitch in the email, people will click your link and visit your website. Some Yahoo Groups have thousands of members, so you can imagine how much traffic a quality email can drive.

I’ve used this method to promote proxies sites in the past. I don’t own proxies anymore, but at one time I did, and was making a couple bucks a day with them. What I did was joined the top 10 biggest proxy Yahoo Groups and then submitted my link to them all and posted daily messages on the message board. People in these groups wanted access to working proxies, so by constructing an email targeted to them and their needs (fast, anonymous proxies), I was able to drive traffic to my site daily. If the group is big enough, you can post messages several times a day.

Yahoo Groups can be used for all types of sites. Automotive, financial, blogs, forums and more. Be creative and you will benefit from them.

A lot of webmasters run affiliate links on their websites. I use Azoogle a lot, and when I put up their offers on my sites I just hate seeing their URLs. They often look something like this: http://x.azjmp.com/15StUb34FgCVtdsY?sub=lithman

How ugly!

And not only is it unappealing on the eye… seeing all those random numbers and letters in a URL… but visitors to your website will be turned off by it. Before they click a link that says “Free Razr Phone” or something, they will probably hover over it to see where the URL destination is. If you leave the original affiliate URL in there, some visitors won’t click it because it looks scammy.

You will notice on my blog, I have changed all the affiliate links to be more personalized. Now if you hover over that $1.99 Godaddy offer in my sidebar, instead of seeing the long ass affiliate link, you will see http://www.lithman.net/go/godaddy.php. Much more appealing isn’t it!

It is very simple to do this. First, create a directory in your root called “go” or “links”. You will then create new php files in that directory for every offer you have. So for the godaddy offer above, I created a new blank file in notepad and named it godaddy.php. The next step is to place a simple line of code in that php file.

<meta HTTP-EQUIV=”REFRESH” content=”0; http://www.youraffiliateurlgoeshere.com”>

That is it! Just enter that one line of code and be sure to add your affiliate link in it and click save. The new link will take the person to the php page you created and the code will automatically forward them to the affiliate link you entered. I encourage everyone to do this to their affiliate links.It makes your site look more professional and it makes your outbound links look more trustworthy.

If you still have problems getting this to work, shoot me an email or a comment and I’d be glad to help.

This post was written by Anja Glauch.

As competitive as the online world becomes, it also is crucial that a website is noticed online.

As repetitive as this might be, Search Engine Optimization ensures that your web content appears when a user is searching for it. It is essential that search engines can read the content from a website therefore optimizing PDF files as well as normal HTML/ XHTML web content would be an excellent step to take.

Search Engines rate websites based on their relevancy to content and keywords, but also on many quality links the sites has - outgoing and incoming. The same way Search Engine Optimization specialists can optimize websites, PDF documents can be optimized too.

How to optimize a PDF file:

• Make all PDF’s in text format, so that the search engine can read it;
• Complete the document’s properties, (especially the title) - what usually happens is that people forget to set a title, that way the search engine will pick content from the PDF file and it might not be exactly what you would want.
• Optimize text, by making sure that selected keywords are there and can easily be identified;
• Add links to PDF files, so that readers can always be redirected to your website;
• Save files at the lowest possible Acrobat version, so that readers can easily open it, and search engines can find it;
• Sizes should be kept as small as possible, if files take too long to download users will abandon the site;
• Place links to your files on your web page where it can easily be found, i.e. closer to the root level of the site’s file structure.
• Specify reading order, in terms of text and headlines;
• Publish articles in different directories that directly link to your PDF documents

In order to achieve a higher ranking, it is important to use a set of well chosen keywords and relevant content, by optimizing PDF files. They can achieve a higher number of links and the opportunity to have more content associated with your website and your business, which would ultimately affect one’s ranking on the most popular search engines.