Mini Sites
May 2nd, 2006
I’m sure the majority of developers and domainers alike have heard of this concept by now, but for those that haven’t, i’m going to outline the basic idea and it’s advantages and disadvantages. All comments and additions are welcome.
As the name suggests, they’re small sites that are intended to be content rich and informative, ideally catering to a niche market that not many other sites do. This suggests there will be less competition to aid search engine rankings and turnover.
Since they’re very content oriented, it’s ideal to monetise them using the obvious Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network. Their targetted ads compliment the usefulness of the site for providing information.
Once created they normally require very little or no maintenance, and could theoretically sit in cyberspace forever generating a little income. Eventually with several of these up and running, a surprising amount of profit could be made. Interlinking these sites also has obvious search engine optimisation and traffic advantages.
It’s not unheard of for developers of these mini sites to republish other people’s relevant articles that they can get from well known article databases. Providing they have permission from the original author, this is not an illegal practice, but does not aid the credibility of the site itself.
The strategy for these mini sites can go either two ways. You can choose to develop a site based on a high payout keyword, but the problem with this is, there are normally hundreds of other ones doing the same thing. Instead you can choose to target a lower payout keyword but hopefully rank higher in search engines and have less competition.
Advantages:
Arguably make more money than parked pages.
Take up little bandwidth.
Indexed pages in search engines and possible pagerank increase domain value.
Content is readily available to use.
Disadvantages:
Have to pay for hosting, which is often more than you need.
Requires time and effort to develop.
May not rank well in search engines and therefore get no traffic.
Thomas White owns and runs TycoonForum.com.
Entry Filed under: General Information
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