How To Make A Profitable Minisite

Minisites are all the rage at the moment. Go find a script that makes a quick site, load it up with some keywords, then wait for the money to roll in ;) LOL

I'll give you some pointers I use when making a profitable minisite and then hopefully you can add some ideas in the comments and make a real good post here.

What Does It Take To Be Profitable?

A .com domain only costs $7 at most registrars. I highly recommend you go with a .com.

(if you are a sucker for the dirt cheap .infos (like I am sometimes) well, just remember you are going to be paying the same as a .com to renew the thing forever except you are stuck with a stinky .info)

Hosting is almost irrelevant, you can pay less than $10 per month to host thousands of domains so we won't even count this cost.

So you need a site to make more than $7 PER YEAR and you have a winner.

Here's how I would do it.

Keyword RICH Domain

I love a keyword rich domain. I think this creates an asset for you from day one.

I'm not talking about keywordfunny.com or keyword101.com. I'm talking exactkeyword.com.

I already wrote about how you can find keywords WITH traffic as your EXACT domain name (I know I never give specifics on how to do this stuff, LOL): How To Find A Domain Name That Contains Keywords With Existing Traffic

Basically you dump your keyword lists into the godaddy bulk transfer tool and BAMMO you get a list of domains with exact keywords and already have traffic.

Building The Site

DO NOT use Build a Niche store (BANS) or Associomatic (amazon store) or any script that anybody else can download and build the exact same thing.

Think about it. You make a page/site on elliptical trainers. It takes me 2 seconds to duplicate your site. In fact many people are probably duplicating your sites and don't even know it just by picking random keywords.

Unique Product Mashups The ONLY way to fly in my book is to do some creative mashing up of the data to make unique pages.

Of course I've already talked about this here: Their Content - Your Money - An Intro To Mashups For Seo

Tracking

Now that you've got your keyword rich .com domain with some almost unique content it's time to do some tracking.

Traffic is important to track but vary's by trends, holidays, seasons, etc.

Pages in google's index on the other hand is the lifeblood of a site (assuming we are building a minisite for good old fashioned google seo).

If the pages aren't in google's index it won't matter what season it is, the traffic won't come (from seo).

I developed an in house script that grabs the pages indexed for every one of my domains. I can easily see if there is a problem or if something isn't getting indexed enough.

If you want to make a script yourself you can easily do it by modifying the script in the post: Find Keywords With Traffic But Little Competition

Only Start From Scratch Once

Another homegrown "thing" i've made is a keyword tracker. Every time there is a search query it is put in a database that is central to all of my sites.

People PAY for keyword data and most people get it free but never look at it.

You will find exactly why people are coming to your site, what keywords they use, long tail keywords, misspellings, etc.

And if they made it to your minisite through seo the terms are probably easy to rank for.

Honestly I find it fun starting a new niche blindly based on keyword research and finding valuable domains, however if you track your keywords you should find enough opportunity there to always have ideas to either

1. start another, similar, minisite

2. add more pages that are related to the rest of the site based on the keywords

Monetization

Always use affilaite content to mix up to get affiliate sales and adsense works in addition to this.

That's It

I have about 150 sites but my new goal is to get to 1000. I'm also working on systems to do this and automate as much as possible. Bunches of this will be done with minisites.

I'm not spamming or even greyhat, I just think I can make a minisite and get some pages indexed instead of putting a parking page there that can make more than $7 per year ;) I'll find out.

That's it for me. That's the basics of my minisite.

1. Find a keyword rich domain. That's an asset on day 1 ;)

2. Build a "unique" site, not something out of a box

3. Monitor your sites pages indexed to know when something is good or bad

4. Track your keywords to improve the site or make new sites

One Last Thing

I wouldn't recommend going out and busting out 100 sites tomorrow. I would find something that worked, then try it again, maybe 5 times. If it still works pretty well, THEN I would go gangbusters ;)

But what do I know, I'm only sitting on like 150 domains, I'm a newbie for sure.

Your turn, drop some tips, leave a comment, followup with a blog post, share the knowledge :-)

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