whydowork.com

Making money with mini sites is a way of earning your income online, but I’ll say it from the beginning, it shouldn’t be your only source of income. They rely solely on search engine traffic most of the time, and the algorithms can change at any time. I wouldn’t quit my day job yet if my income would be made only from search engine traffic. Still, they can be nice additions if you choose your niche right.

Mini sites usually have just a few articles, centered around one or more keywords that have low competition and they’re easy to rank for most of the time. They’re the fire and forget type, meaning that you set them up, write the articles, do a bit of promotion and then forget about them. If you choose your keywords right, they can make anywhere from a few cents a day to $10 or more. It all depends on how much work you put in finding the right keywords for them.

If you find some good related keywords with very low competition and you’re interested in the subject, I’d suggest building a blog on top of them and convert those search engine visitors into subscribers. If you have no interest in the subject, muster enough strength to write a few articles and make a mini site out of it. Building a blog requires much more time, but in the long run you get those repeat visitors, and you also have access to Text Link Ads and paid reviews if you promote it. With mini sites you usually have just Adsense and affiliate programs. Another option would be building a community if the term is searched enough. A bit more work again if you want a forum, but it’s an option.

A bit more before we start. I decided to write here the real keywords that I’m going to use for this tutorial, because this is more of a guide, and less of a case study. The fact that I’m saying which they are from the beginning and the address of the mini-site, will mess with the results of the experiment, but at least you get to see everything so you can apply them and make your own mini sites.

Keyword Research

This is the most annoying part for me and a major time drain. It may take a while to find a few keywords that have a sufficient volume of traffic and they’re also easy to rank for. Don’t overdo the study of the competition though. You’re not putting 2 years of work into this, just couple of hours, so the risk is ok.

1. Put some ideas on paper

I usually just look around and write on paper random things that I see or just words that I think of randomly. For this experiment I’ve started with:

how to create, motivation, family, household, warriors

2. Keyword Research

Open up the SeoBook Keyword Tool and WordTracker GTrends and check those keywords in both of them. I usually ran with the SeoBook tool and the free WordTracker tool before GTrends was launched for the guys at the 30 Day Challenge.

Now, GTrends does a very neat thing. First it tells you how much WordTracker thinks the term gets on a daily bases, and you’ll also see a small icon to the right of each keyword. Click on it, and it opens up a pop-up window where you can see the number of results in Google when you search the keyword with quotes, and an estimated number of searches/day from Google Trends. It does this by comparing the graph of a known quantity (how much traffic a certain keyword gets for the 1st place, a number that they know for sure) with the graph of the keyword you’re researching. It sees how many times smaller is one compared to the other and gives you an estimated number of daily searches on Google, which should be pretty accurate.

I usually just use GTrends for mini sites, and once I decide on a keyword I run another check in SeoBook to make sure the Overture numbers say the same thing.

Now, run the keywords you wrote down on paper and check the GTrends tool for everything that looks interesting from the list of related keywords that show up. Don’t forget to click that Stats icon to see what Google Trends thinks of it.

What I wrote down from those results

motivation techniques 100  100,000
weight loss motivation  80  98,000
motivation theory  300  181,000
motivation quotes  425  55,000
motivation in the workplace   60   31,000
definition of motivation    70   1000
theories of motivation   140   85,000
motivation posters   80   12,600
motivation letter   275   144,000

household mold    160   52,000
household insects   135   30,000
household remedies   70   30,000
household cleaning tips   65   13,000

ancient warriors    65    92,000
terracotta warriors    315    200,000
aztec warriors    75    20,700

First the keywords, then the number of daily searches, then the number of results in Google when searching with quotes, like “household mold”.

I usually write in a text file or excel the keywords that have at least 50 searches a day and less then 100,000 results with quotes attached, but it’s a judgement call really. I’ll write down a keyword that gets 20-30 searches/day if the competition is extremely low, and I’ll ignore one with 50/day if there are 50,000 results for it or more.

Ok, now that you have a list of keywords, open up Google and using the SeoQuake Firefox Plugin, check out the competition for each phrase. They might have a low number of results, but the competition might be made of strong websites.

I usually check for PR of the page and the number of backlinks in Yahoo for that page and for the entire site, all of these provided by the SeoQuake Plugin.

Now, after looking at those keywords I decided to go with the warrior related ones for this experiment. They’re not perfect, and not because of high number of competitors, but because on the first pages th
ere are older sites, 5 years old or more. However, to teach you how to make a mini-site, they’re ok.

So, the main page I’ll make it about ancient warriors, and two more articles on terracotta and aztec warriors. This is just for the exercise, so feel free to use more then just 3 related keywords for your mini-site. For this one I could also add roman, greek, spartan, indian, zulu, viking warriors. They all have a number of searches according to GTrends.

Creating The Mini-Site And Writing Some Articles

You can use domains or you can use sub-domains for them. Obviously sub-domains are the cheaper way, but domains are easier to promote. I’ll use a sub-domain for this exercise, ancient-warriors.shylockblogging.com.

Now, unzip the 19 Pages CMS that I reviewed here, and copy the files to your domain. Access the sub-domain and login for the first time with user admin, password admin. Change the password (!) and then start writing your articles.

Use the Google search and document yourself on those keywords. See what Wikipedia has to say, see what the competitors said and look for pictures that you can use. Then compile that information and write your own articles on the subject. Don’t forget to set meta descriptions and keywords for each article. You can do that from the page where you write the article.

You can see the end result here: Ancient Warriors, Terracotta Warriors and Aztec Warriors, the three articles of the mini-site.

Mini-Site Promotion

Now, for the promotion part of the mini-site, I tend to do less when using sub-domains, and a bit more when I use domains. That’s because I spend 2-3 hours to have a mini-site up and running, but I also spend $8 if I go the domain route, and I want to make sure I’m not throwing money away.

I’ve talked about promotion before in this article: Niche Link Building. Take a look at it and use those methods to promote every article on the mini-site with the proper keywords as title. Spend a few hours at once or spread it across a week or two (20-30 minutes a day). Don’t forget to set up Google Analytics on it and then forget about them.

The best way to promote them remains link-baiting. Learn how to master that and you’re set. 

Monetization

You don’t have that many options with mini-sites. No text link ads, no paid reviews, no Kontera, no CPM ads. Just Adsense and affiliates.

Adsense - you have to edit the 19Pages template and paste the code there. You can’t put ads inside the posts with this CMS, but you can put them in the sidebar, at the top and at the bottom of the articles.

Affiliates - for this mini-site on ancient warriors, some books from Amazon dealing with ancient warfare or civilizations would probably work. However you’d have to write the content in a way that recommends and promotes those books. Maybe a review of them, telling people what kind of information they can find. I didn’t write the articles for affiliates, I did it for Adsense, so the copy doesn’t really fit, but you can do that. Don’t do just books though. See what kind of offers would fit for those niche keywords that you use.

Final Words

They’re easy to do (couple of hours) and to promote (another couple of hours). They provide residual income but you can’t rely on them ranking forever (if they do rank). All in all they can prove to be a nice addition to your income, but I would never recommend to rely solely on mini-sites to make a living. Create blogs, create communities, learn how to promote affiliate offers or learn domaining. Just make sure you don’t depend 100% on the search engines.

In the next period I’ll continue to update on the progress of this mini-site and on the promotion that I’ll do.

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