Mini Sites don’t always make mini money

mini.jpgI love mini sites!

Definition: A mini site is a small website with a very narrow subject focus and have their own identity often on their own domain name.

Mini sites offer several functions and can be used for PPC Adsense adverts or affiliate sales or product promotion, they tackle one narrow subject with an article and can be a single page or a few pages in size.

While some sit back and hope for that one big killer idea that will launch you into internet wealth and stardom there are people building mini sites by the bucket load and earning a great income from them. The joy of an adsense based mini site is that once it’s complete you can often walk away and have a small regular income from it to add to your portfolio, product and affiliate mini sites can often be promoted using Adwords & Pay Per Click to produce a profit.

A mini site could be a page in HTML with no fancy navigation or flash, it is designed for a purpose of attracting highly targeted traffic, the tighter the targeting the better.

So taking adsense as an easy example and the fact that a very quick mini site put together could easily make $1 per day($30 per month) just with rankings from MSN/Yahoo you could do a quick calculation and work out how many mini sites you may need.

Say $2000 per month would be a good initial target, $2000/$30 = 66 mini sites.
Does that sound a lot? Mini Sites are very easy to put together, I build 7 of them during a spare hour today, during that hour they were all created, uploaded and live.

5 Things you will need for a unique mini site
1/ Domain name
Domain names are cheap and there often deals posted on forums. Host Chilli are selling .info domains for around  $0.30!

2/ Hosting account
You will want a reseller hosting account if you don’t already have one, this means you pay a set monthly fee and can add unlimited new domains and websites. I have always used Fasthosts out of habit more than anything however there are much much cheaper reseller accounts around starting from around $5 per month.

3/ Basic template or layout
You may be able to do this yourself, or if like me you don’t code or do design then there are plenty of free website templates available online like OSWD

4/ Content
The subject of your mini site will be related to the domain and content, content is king so you must ensure that this new one page website has unique content, how do you get that? Well you could write it yourself or buy an article from an article writer. The problem with both those methods is that you usually end up with general low quality information, a better way would be to buy old essays from students, these articles have often had many hours spent on them with valuable research and are available electronically and are unique. You can therefore pay say $15 for a very well research & unique article that deals with one specific subject in depth.

So sometimes you need to find the article/essay before you know your topic and can then register a domain name that’s specific to the mini site topic.

5/ You will need a monetising method like an Adsense account to generate income from pay per click adverts. You could instead register with Commission Junction and use affiliate links in your mini site if you feel the topic relates more to products & services rather than information.

Once you have access to content, your hosting reseller account setup and a domain registrar to register domains with you can see how it could be very quick to build unique mini sites, having 100 mini sites could give you a handsome income.

Does this mean that mini sites are just another Made for Adsense scourge and generally another scar on internet. Not at all, using good sourced content means that rather than regurgitating articles already freely available you are adding content and information to the internet from which you can profit.

Note you will have to get some links to these new sites either by adding them to your signature in forums or submititng them to some directories so that the sites get spidered and indexed in the search engines.

You can also look back through your mini sites and look for one’s to develop further to add services or features that make it more useful to grow the traffic. One page websites can rank well and be very profitable so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. A mini site can be built just to supply a single purpose/function for example I own Tattoo Fonts which is a one page mini site which allows users to see text in a variety of fonts. The php code for this site was supplied to me for free and was run as a competion/task in a PHP forum, I gave a free domain name to the winning coder as a prize.

That single page mini site has earned:
$129.44 last month (February 2007)
$189 so far his month (26th March 2007) 

It gets around 900 unique visitors per day, 66 of those sites would be nice eh?

That is an example of a more valuable service based mini site that does more than just offer information thus making it the type of site that gets added to people’s favourites and recommended on forums etc.

Mini sites that offer a service need to have an angle, if your sticking to information mini sites then the content sourced must be of good quality and checked using tools such as copyscape to make sure it does not already appear on the internet.

When you have a large amount of information based sites then its quite common to get high paying clicks of $1+ from adsense so if you have some spare time and motivation you may not have to wait for that one big killer idea to start making money online.

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. I now have my first minisite running!
    it´s only a first try, so it´s not near perfect, but anyways i´m happy with it.
    Thanks for giving me a new perspective of all the possibilities…

  2. Very very very interesting post! I always think about that but I’ve never found the “energy” to do that before today!

    Thanks 😀

  3. hi! I have a question:

    Why do I have to make many mini-sites? Could I make sigle static pages into a unique site?

    This idea to make 1$ from same site could I to apply it to single pages?

    Maybe… in this way I can take advange by differet urls? Isnt’ it?

    Thanks in advance :) - I love your blog! :)

  4. Thanks for the post. It looks like I may not be the only one interested in obtaining essays. Do you think you can do a post on that subject soon?

    Thanks.

  5. Marty Ackerman says:

    Great post. Where do you look for unique essays? I’m not sure where to begin looking for quality ones.

  6. Very nice and informative article as always, congratulations.

    I like the idea of having many mini-sites and also your idea of a mini-site. Can you email me some more ideas of a mini-site like Tattoo Fonts (not forcing you to, though). Damn you guys are very creative. :)

  7. Hi,

    This is a great article Scott and I have some questions:

    Does Google like this king of sites? Won’t we get banned from adsense?
    What do you think of using .info versus .com domains?

    Thanks

    Nuno

  8. That’s a great post. I must admit I too am a fan of minisites when it comes to deciding between domain parking and minisite-ing.

    I would like to add to your thought about reseller hosting. You might as well use a normal hosting account that allows you to add multiple websites to a single account. That way you can sometimes get separate IPs. For example Ixwebhosting is giving this kind of accounts and I think one can find more by googling for multiple domains hosting.

  9. I have several mini sites and and as soon as they are live, I load them into http://www.3way-links.net this helps me get 250 inbound links. So spidered quickly and I have a limit of 50 sites I can add. It does cost $47 a month but 1 of my sites pays for that with adsense.

  10. i have been meaning to try this for some time, but this has got me fired up again, great article. I’m always impressed how open and helpful this site is.

  11. Grrreat Post. I may have to go on a “trial” run with one of my parked domains.

  12. Thanks for the vast info on niche mini-sites. I’d just like to add that every single site, mini or maxi, needs a touchup for updating some time with fresh content, or RSS news feeding through it, so bots will keep hanging around. :) Geoff.

  13. This is really true. There are some small sites that produce a big amount of money. it still depends on proper handling and caring of the site.

  14. This is by far the most useful information on mini sites that I’ve come across! Thank you… I just may have to give this a try.

  15. Useful info - thanks.

    And the tattoo fonts website is great. I’ve used it to become aware of fonts I didn’t even know existed.

    I’d add to the comments about the value in freshening up each minisite from time to time.

    Something as simple as tweaking the Description tag is helpful (and quick).

  16. 20 sites here and still building .. not hit the big time yet but here’s hoping :)

Trackbacks

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    Wrong. It…

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  12. Abbán says:

    Abbán…

    I do think you right on the spot with this post, i could use a lot a struff for my new study thank you very much.
    Greets …

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