Its been a while since i last posted, and thats because i’ve been doing two things, the most important of which was shifting to a new house, so the time it took to prepare for that on top of work and the actual process of shifting meant i didnt have much time on my hands to attend to my blogs. But during this process i decided that i wanted to build a new authority blog in a competitive niche. And i chose one of the most competitive niches of all - fat loss.
Fat Loss School
I am a fitness enthusiast and so i this very competitive niche mainly because its something i have been interested in for years (who doesn’t want flat abs right?) and to show that not only is it possible, but there is plenty of traffic out there and if the correct foundation is laid, over the long term it could be very succesful.
I want to state from the outset that my goal is more to build traffic and a visitor base and making money from it is something i will only think about later on.
Choosing the name
I selected the name Fat Loss School, for two reasons, one is that it has my primary keywords and secondly because the word school implies that it will be a place of learning and will stand out on any search engine results pages. Luckily for me i managed to get fatlossschoolc.om and didnt have to go the route of fat-loss-school. The name might seem a little silly to some but after sometime it grows on you 
Initial Structure
If you go to the site now, you will find yourself not at the blog but at a landing page which has a link to the blog itself, so the url looks like http://fatlossschool.com/blog. I did this for two reasons, eventually people will link to the domain and not my direct URL so search engine juice and PR will flow to the main page and not to the blog directly, this will enable me to create things such as a forum and a store which be branches of the main site which will get some of that search engine love. The second reason is that if a surfer was to see the url in a search engine result page then the url will less spammy and will attract more attention (this is just my opinion).
The Plan
My initial plan was to put the blog up and then over a period of about 3-4 months, saturate it with content. I have identified 25 keyword clusters that are part of the niche and sub-niches, so the plan was to write 10 or more posts/articles per keyword cluster and then when i launch the blog, there would be enough content for users to see. Because of this the site has a very basic structue and doesnt have any prominent introductory boxes on the main page.
After about a month i had written about 18 of the posts, completing one clusters, then two, at this point google had picked up all the posts and they started appearing the serps. Not that i’m complaining but now i was getting traffic to a site which wasnt meant to be visited yet. The average in the first two weeks was 5-7 visitors a day from google. A week later it has climbed to 11-15, as of now i have written a total of 34 of my 250 posts and im getting 41+ visitors a day from google, even my rss feed is hovering around 68 readers without much promotion.
Here is an example of a keyword cluster and the posts and pages that come along with it:
The Traffic Plan
Search Engines > The most important thing about having an authority blog chock full of content is to get it some traffic. I get 41 visitors a day at present via the search engines and that is with only a potion of my pages indexed and a lot more content to come. Since i am getting traffic i have started to write normal posts that are not targeting a keyword cluster in order to give visitors something else to read.
Sub Blogs > While this might seem like a lot of work, i will be making smaller mini blogs which will act as feeders both in terms of links and traffic which will be targeted in and around each keyword cluster. They will be small blogs that will be keyword rich within the domain and will be linked very intelligently to the main blog. They will also be targeting the same keywords so i hope to get the main blog and the sub blog in the results pages of the search engines for the same keywords. To keep the workload down i will only have around 5 pages per feeder.
Social Media > I will be taking full advantage of the power of social media in promoting the site when its done. As an initial test i created a Flickr group where people can submit their before and after photos or anything related to weight loss. In the few days that it has been active and with only one day of actually promoting it, i get 3-4 visitors a day and have a total of 15 or so pictures in the group.
Facebook is another medium which i experimented with, there are a massive amount of groups for every niche you can think of, since it was a little premature to start a new group for the site, i visited ONE group, answered a few questions and posted a few links and even from that im getting about 3-4 visitors a day.
While this might not seem like a lot of traffic, i was just experimenting and if the promotion was done properly, over several social websits, the results could be very good. I have a very good strategy for social media which i will share in the near future.
Social Websites > These are things like hubpages, squidoo lenses etc. Given time, just like the mini feeders, i plan on making proper sites that point to my main site. Since the rules are quite strict, the tactic is to point a single link to a feeder blog and pull rss feed of the main site.
So here is a breakdown of some of the basic elements of traffic and link generation:
There are more facets to my tactics on traffic generation such as link exchanges, directory submission, article writing etc but right now everything is secondary to me finishing at least 10 of the 25 keyword clusters. The important thing here is that im not in a hurry and as more and more of my pages get ranked the traffic will grow. I have started the process of building links to it so that by December i will have a decent amout of inbound links and if im correct, a pagerank of at least 4 at the next update. Fingers crossed.
I will be writing a lot about my experiences and results as we go along and i will also try to explain in detail each of the tactics that i am using. This is basically my plan and what im doing with it right now, there are a lot of things i will be doing in the future like writing an ebook to give away for subscriptions, mailing lists etc but for the moment this is the outline of my strategy. Right now im using a theme that everyone will probably recognize but in the next month it will evolve into something a lot more. Stay tuned.
Please tell me what you think (of the site and the plan) or let me know of any questions if you have any..
Here’s link to the site if you want to go have a look: Fat Loss School
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