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.
I am something of a stats head and can easily spend hours going over traffic graphs, Adsense screens and referral logs. One of the great things about the web is the shear amount of stats available, you don’t need to employ mystery shoppers or send out surveys to your customers, you can simply install a script and find out more information about your visitors than you’ll ever need.
One thing you need to be cautious of is checking stats for the sake of checking stats. Like most webmasters when I first started out with Adsense I’d be checking income every hour or so to see if there’d been any clicks, a complete waste of time but difficult to resist. As income goes up it does get easier though I still find myself checking at least once per day, especially when approaching milestones.
There are plenty of income streams available on the Net with Adsense being the most popular and easiest to get started with. One of the things I’ve found that has really helped me grow my Adsense earnings is the setting of goals, I didn’t set goals at the start which is probably one of the reasons I got off to a somewhat slow one.
A chart clearly displaying your goals with dates is a great motivator. With my goal chart I have it clearly visible at home, this serves as an ongoing reminder and was a great motivator in the early days when friends snigger at the low earnings.
This is my chart so far.
One of the other revenue streams I looked at was Tribal Fusion. They are a CPM ad network meaning you get paid per impression rather than per click. I implemented them a couple of months ago and placed a 468×60 banner at the top of each page, a vertical banner on the left navigation bar and rectangle in between posts on index pages. These ad positions were previously not used for anything constructive so any income generated should just be an addition, thus reducing the Adsense percentage and increasing the income to boot.
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When I first started out blogging I used to write all the content myself, it didn’t take me long to realise that this is exceedingly time consuming and puts limits on how much you can produce in any given day. I’m also somewhat dyslexic so I have to triple check everything that I write (spelling and grammar checkers are my friends) . Investing in paid writers makes it a lot easier to maintain regular updates to a site or blog and help it grow, but finding good paid writers can be difficult, in this post I’ll share where all the writers for CG came from. (more…)
Many a website or blog are started with the sole purpose of making cash (and if you’re reading this blog I’m sure you know what I’m talking about), I know a lot of new and aspiring webmasters and questions I get asked a lot are:
I’m a pretty helpful guy (maybe a bit selfishly helpful due to my belief in karma) and the answer I almost always give is:
I’m a bit of a stat head and enjoy trawling through log files and looking at pretty graphs. One statistic that I’m particularly interested in is the number of subscribers different sites have in different niches.
FeedBurner offer a great service for managing your sites feed and provide all sorts of interesting stats. You can also put one of their chicklets on your site to boast share with the world how many subscribers your site has.
I thought it would be both interesting and fun to create a top 100 (or so) of the sites with the highest feeds, so spent Saturday morning doing a big trawl around. (more…)
When it comes to getting traffic to your blog (or most other sites to that matter), the most important thing you can get are plenty of inbound links. Inbound links will both send you traffic from the originating site and more importantly they serve as a vote for your site which will influence your site’s position in the search engines.
There are various ways to generate inbound links:
In the previous post we said how contests are a great way of encouraging interaction from your readers and gave a few samples. In this post I want to cover the basics, so to speak, of getting your readers to put fingers to keys.
Make it easy
Don’t make your readers jump through hoops to leave a comment as they probably won’t. Make it as simple as possible and clear, i.e. no mandatory registration and to a lesser extent captchas.
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Links
Relevant internal linking is both helpful to your readers and will provide an easy route back to the site for your readers to follow. As well as linking to individual posts also link to categories e.g. “I came across this really cool traffic building tips“, this is also a great way to create keyword rich internal links that the search engines love.
An automated way to add relevant links is to install a “Related Posts” plugin, this will create links to related posts at the end of new ones. Most plug-ins only seem to this on the site and not on the feed so you might need to do a bit of manual tweaking.
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I’ve just received an email from my friend Patrick telling me about a new tool he’s written (well knowing Pat he probably got somebody else to write it) and it’s so cool I’ve had to break our one post a day tradition and share it straight away.
The tool is called Blog Storm and it tracks how many links your blog posts attract. That way you can see which of your posts are getting the most attention (or not). It produces a league table of your posts and a couple of pretty charts. You can see the stats of our recent posts over here, or the graph below.
Remonetize Popular Content
Using Google Analytics it’s easy to see which of your pages are the most popular. I find you never really know which pages are going to become popular in the search engines but statistical analysis does sort of give you the benefit of hind sight. Once I see a page is bringing in a bit of traffic I’ll revisit it and see if there are any suitable affiliate programs I could promote. You know what people are searching for to find the page so if you can find them a suitable product everybody benefits.
When blogging on CG I often get asked how do I find new products to write about, I won’t provide exact sources but I will share how I found the sources that I use.
In the gadget niche there are a hundreds (if not thousands) of sites reporting on all the latest and greatest gizmos. I subscribe to about 200 feeds and monitor them though out the day, especially the less popular ones which often pick-up on new stories that the big boys haven’t seen yet. If I see something that’s new and hasn’t be covered on a load of other sites yet I’ll write about and link to the source I first saw it on.
The internet still takes a written form for the most part and as many of us ‘publish’ content for the web we are in effect professional writers with a duty to make sure our work meets an acceptable level as far as spelling and punctuation.
With text shorthand on phones & spell checkers prevalent in today’s society you have to fear the worst for the next generation, parents can usually calculate sums in their head better than their children due to our reliance on calculators and so this cycle may carry on and evolve as we rely on machines instead of knowledge for spelling and punctuation.
With this in mind I asked Charlie of Perfectly Write whether she would be so kind as to answer a few questions I had on basic grammar, spelling and proofreading.
I started reading a book called “How they started ”(Amazon UK) yesterday, which covers 30 well known businesses that were started without any large existing capital or family connections, basically one person or a small group of people that had an idea and how that was transformed into a successful business. Looks very good from what I have read so far so may be of interest to some of you, not sure if it’s availability outside of the UK as yet.
Some people seem to come up with new business and site ideas really easily whilst others struggle to see an opportunity when it’s staring them in the face. I find if you put your self in the right mindset ideas and opportunities spring up all over the place.
To me the right mindset involves having an open mind and actively looking for inspiration. The following are a few examples of ideas I’ve thought of but haven’t taken any further (yet).
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I’m never really content just following a huge crowd of people on safe bets when it comes to making money, in the world of making money online through website and domains I think it is fair to say there is a very large crowd nowadays and it is growing all the time. Most forums are so heavily diluted with poor domains and duplicate turnkey sites it’s hard to see anything of value at times. What I have done recently applies to possible website ideas as well as looking to put some money down on domain names for future profit.
Last month my better half gave me the good news that she was pregnant with our second child, yikes! It wasn’t long after I had heard of a test you can do online, is it a boy or a girl?
In the UK it is a sad fact that at the 20 week pregnancy scan they can no longer tell you the sex of your child as it leaves them open to being sued {sigh}. So they won’t say anymore unlike first time round when we had our son, some people prefer a surprise, I don’t, I prefer to plan ahead so when a company offers the ability to send away a blood sample and tell you to within 99% the sex of your child at 8 weeks into the pregnancy I find that appealing!
I think it is pretty safe to say one of the most successful method is a tool or calculator based mini site. A tool or calculator does a simple job cleanly and quickly that is of use or service to the visitor thus making it extremely bookmark worthy and link worthy through social sites such as Digg/Stumble etc etc
The way I’d see it working is as a user submitted review site, where tourists could write about the various places they’ve visited and eateries they’d got food poisoning at (only happened to my girlfriend once so far this year).
Databases are cool! That may sound like something that only a total computer nerd would say but I don’t care as they make me money.
Just over a year a go I had an idea for a site that I thought would be fun to do as a joint project with my daughter (I often look for projects that I can get the whole family involved in, a/ For fun and b/ For the cheap labour 
The site required the gathering of a vast amount of data so I decided to take a shortcut and purchase a database from Oddity Software. As the same database could be bought by anybody and I wanted mine to be unique so I combined it with another freely available database. This gave me unique content as well as adding value to the readers. As you’ve probably guessed I’m not sharing full site details in this post but I’ll to give a similar example of what I did.
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What sites do you build?
Do you just build lots and see what sticks?
Personally I took a different approach when choosing my first genre, many years ago I subscribed to Wordtracker who offer a free email service whereby they email me the top searched terms, I still get this today. This would be more a reflective approach to look at what is already out there and what is already profitable and then to try and jump on the bandwagon by looking to obtain a piece of the action.
In this email you get
1/ The top 300 surge report
These are the top 300 queries from the last 48 hours, which represents the complete queries from the largest Metacrawlers on the web (Metacrawler/Dogpile etc..) for the last 48 hours.
Domain names, well certainly the good one’s, brandable one’s and generic one’s are all snapped up, more and more people come to the internet each day looking to make money, build websites and start businesses. It seems to me that perhaps it is early days now but the domain market will mature at some point.
Good domains should rise in value, I think most people would agree with that, I also think there should be a lease market that will develop at some point. Think about the high street in any major city that you know of, how many for sale signs do you see up in the main shops? Very rare. People/businesses that own shops know that rather than sell a shop in a prime location for a quick buck they can lease their shops to generate an income, all the time owning an asset that can continue to rise in value.
