Mini Site Alternative
If like me you have many domains and not enough time, especially for the smaller domains then you may be interested in a service I have been testing out recently. aeiou.com offer a complete mini site package for $250. As always you can do most things cheaper yourself but if your time is better served elsewhere then it’s certainly something to consider rather than let a good domain sit with nothing on it.
Just to be clear I am not affiliated with aeiou or have anything to do with them, I tested out their service for 3 of my domains, mobile phone tariffs, credit insurance and comprehensive insurance. All good domains and too good to leave until I got round to doing somthing with them.
aeiou take the domain, a note of your adsense ID and work on their own initiative which is appealing, you can see they stick to the same basic layout which is to be expected but it’s pretty clean and not bad looking, they create a few articles of information and put the site together in a zip file and send it to you usually withing a couple of days, they can also host the site for you if you wish.
One other thing which adds a lot of value is that they get it indexed with a few links
The marketing portion of our development process is really the driving force behind why Rapid Site Development works. Not only do we build a custom site focused on your target keywords, but we also go out and set the foundation for a lifetime of additional traffic for your site.
They could do with a few tips on seo and I know it can be done cheaper but I feel it’s pretty good value for money and certainly better than leaving some good domains on the development list for a later date so a thumbs up from me, I expect to see more services like this being offered in the coming months as it’s an area in the market that has huge potential but is relatively untapped at present.
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This sounds like an excellent service for me, Al. I have a couple of domain names which are completely unused and lying there doing nothing – literally nothing.
Following your advice, I suppose this may be a good way to monetise the mini-site into something that turns into income. Definitely very useful indeed.
Before I really jump into the wagon, Al is there any other advices that you could possibly give me, as what is the turnover, considering the amount you paid for the service, hosting and domain name?
I’d probably say
1/ Stop calling me Al
2/ These are brand new so I will post after a while to see how quickly I can get a R.O.I. they do say they are designed to get your money back within 12 months.
@Scott, I beg your pardon! Sorry about the name mix-up.
Money back in 12 months? I hope that they are right about it. One year is a pretty long time to wait just to break even.
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One to break even isnt too bad – thats what most business aim for. Of course a breakeven in months or weeks is even better!
I like the idea of a service like this but as you mention I find that $250 is a bit to much to pay for a website template with (a gestimate would be) 800 words in total.
If they have a just small system in place this should not take them much more than 2 hours at the most… which would be a fair hourly rate.
But I agree that if you simply do not have the time then it might be worth it.
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Remember they also do some link building, which I have yet to quantify but could be worth half of the $250 Mikael.
Do they give any sort of preview in advance of the type of link building that they do? The content and layout look OK
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If the linkbuilding is any good then I agree.
However “linkbuilding” as in “get the site indexed” doesn’t require more than a simple link on a indexed scraper blog (not that I’m saying that it is what they do).
I’ll look forward to your update on this.
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The service definitely sounds interesting. What kind of linkbuilding do they do for the site?
I have yet to establish that in any detail so can’t say for sure just now Lenen, I’ll comment later on when I know.
I don’t think they do any special link building at this price.
I also have numurous domains laying around collecting dust. But $250 for this is imho too steep.
I’d rather pay for 6 articles at $5-$10 each. Use a free template and pimp it with a $1 – $2 headerphoto from istockphoto. Insert 5 articles and use 1 article that I spin manualy in ArticleMarketingAutomation to get the backlinks. Use a few social bookmarking sites to get even more linking and indexing done. Maybe even throw in some Linkvana links.
Total outsourcing cost $75 max. Time spent myself about 1 hour
An other backholder for me is the fact that even they take such a high price they also want to leave their footprint on your site.
Using that footprint I did a google search for “Domain Development by AEIOU.COM” and found a lot of sites done by them and all look the same. The backlinks according to yahoo site explorer are a few social bookmarking sites (a lot of mister wong’s, mixx and folkd) and directories with an occasional ezinearticle. Checked about 30 of them and none have more then 50 links while most even have no more then 20 incomming external links.
If you are willing to pay $250 for this kind of work…. Can I do all your domains and charge you $225
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The footer link is pretty easy to change, I agree and stated it’s not cheap, I know of cheaper options and some in development, I can see more of these offerings on a larger scale coming through at the start of next year with better pricing.
For those with a lack of time then this is a great service – but in my opinion a little steep in terms of price.
I understand the importance of keeping a website live but have those sites generated any income for you whatsoever?
I’d recommend doing things this way – build the site content yourself (save £125) then put up some banners that pay you for displaying them on your site. Typically you’ll earn £20 per website / per month from banner ad networks such as the ad network and/or matched.
Add it up – Over the year you’ll have saved £125 for doing the 800 words of content AND earnt £240 for displaying the banner ads. Repeat times 10 and that’s over £3500 a year!
I agree, $250 is steep for these cookie cutter pages. I think that they should be able to build some decent links if they could leverage together all the sites that they are doing and create a link web.
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That’s kind of expensive. I’m sure you can find people doing this for around 100 bucks. On DP or stuff like that…
You can also find 100 people on DP that will take $100 and do nothing or try pass off dup content.
I’ve done good deals with people on DP, so I’ll have to argue with you there. If you’re careful and research their previous work, you can find great people
Anyway, as someone else said, i too am thinking of starting a similar offer for a better price. This might even be a good money making solution
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Just to add on to some of the comments above, I believe the main cost comes from the banner design and theme design. Getting people from DP might be cheaper, however, there could be cases of unreliable people soliciting on the net. How much are you willing to trust the person? Even trader rep can have you fooled.
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I haven’t seen anything in the design that makes me think it’s worth it. It’s a copy and past job
I am seriously considering creating an alternative to this as I get the feeling that there are ppl willing to pay this. Will do a better job tho because saying I will get backlinks and then just add it to mister wong , mixx and 1 ezinearticle is not my style
Edwin’s last blog post..ArticleMarketingAutomation – The New Way of Article Marketing?
If you want to offer a cheaper but better alternative I’d consider trying it out Edwin, I have 5 domains needing done so get in touch.
So how are those domains, which you gave to aeiou, doing?
They are brand new as stated so I’ll report back later as to how they are doing.
Hello there Scott,
Waiting eagerly for your report on the aeiou’s service.
Thanks for the pointer, Scott
I contacted them about a domain I just registered but don’t have time at the moment to develop. Will see what they come back with – though I’d hope to make my money back sooner than 12 months!
Cheers, Jon
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I was looking at mobilephonetariffs.co.uk and I have to say it looks good for that price. Definitely worth the money in my opinion.
I contacted them and didn’t hear anything back.
However, I hate writing content for these mini sites, so I’d prefer to contract the writing separately and work on the template design myself (which I enjoy more). So my saving is on time doing something I don’t usually enjoy.
Having RSI is a major limitation though, so I need to focus on more outsourcing where possible.
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In my limited experience with minisites, one of the harder things to make sure is that the content is unique, and Google doesn’t just de-index it after a short period.
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Justin, depending on how you’re planning on doing it you can actually create very unique content if you just use enough small bits from a lot of places. An example of this is when Scott purchases databases (2 or more) and create sites by combining the data.
When you know how to do things like that you can almost perfect to a push button solution (if you want to).
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I’ve used them too and think it’s a reasonable service for the price. If someone can reliably and professionally offer a better service for less then I’d give it a try too.
It’s easy to say that you should do it all yourself but that doesn’t scale if you want to get a site on a whole bunch of domains.
I too would be interest if someone can offer a similar service at a better price. Six months ago the rate would have been more acceptable but now the rate between the $ and £ has dropped it’s less appealing.
I may just stick Wordpress on some unused domains and try and outsource the content / link building parts elsewhere as an alternative for now.
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Can anyone recommend a good alternative for this service?
Or just a cheap link building service that could help to start building the traffic. I can work with the designs and content myself.
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[...] controversy with a huge rant here & reply by Rick here on his minisite service. I posted my thoughts before and promised an [...]
I have used them for a couple of domains and they’re very good at it. They were created and delived within a short timespan. Definitely a keeper!