Minisites are websites composed of a small number of pages and are usually focussed on a narrow topic or niche. Many domainers have found monetizing domain names through the developement of ‘minisites’ to be a worthwhile and profitable alternative to doman name parking.
A number or months ago I started to examine the potential of minisites as a way of covering the cost of my domain name portfolio and perhaps as a more long term way of generating significant income. I have outlined the basics of minisite development at length on this blog, which you can read about, here.
I decided to set myself what I thought was quite modest aims - to set up minisites on my inventory of domain names and hopefully earn, on average, £1.00 ($2.00) per week. These would be sites which, once developed, would bring in income with little or no input from me.
The criteria I set myself was:-
each site would be composed of between one and three pages
monetize traffic with Google Adsense and Amazon
the sites would not be promoted apart from a few links from sites I own already - build and forget!
Building the sites is easy - getting income has proven very difficult to achieve!
There are currently 14 sites in the ‘challenge’. I have established a minisite challenge blog to discuss my progress.
One feature of most of my domains is that in most cases type-in traffic or pre-existing traffic of any sort is negligible or non-existent. This is common even with attractive generic terms with unpopular extensons such as .biz, .info and so on.
It is early days for this experiment and only a small proportion of my inventory is developed yet. However, the following facts seem to be emerging:-
Its not worth building sites on some topics because revenue is too low - this is obvious but cannot be stated too many times. Google pays more for clicks on ads related to some topics than it does for others - thats just a fact of life. The thing that surprised me was the difference between low revenue clicks and high revenue clicks. The revenue per click I expereinced ranged from as low as $0.02 on leisure related sites through to something in the region of $1.00 per click on business and finance related sites.
Unique content performs best and Google does not like duplicate content - I appreciate that it has been said before, and my expereince has shown this to be true. I have used ezine articles on some of my sites but unless I constantly add articles to the site, traffic seems to drop off quickly.
UK domains are best - UK domains (.co.uk and .org.uk) are cheaper, leaving a greater margin for profit. I calculated that, to cover domain name renewal fees, each week I needed to earn around $0.41 for .com, .net, .org and .info domains and around $0.18 per week for .co.uk and .org.uk domain names. Anything I earned above that, was profit that would help pay for my hosting costs.
Search Engine Optimization - In terms of income generation, the key words in the domain name was more important than the extension or if it contained hyphens. MiniSites built on domain names with hyphens or less popular extensions such as .biz or .org.uk could rank quite well in Google Search - but for a very limited number of search terms. Names that are full of hyphens and have unpopular extensions such as .info or .biz could do well if they were close to or matched things people were searching for - and the dream combination, obviously, is a domain name which is a popular search term on a topic which generates high paying Google ads - business and finance topics, for example.
A lot of what I found out confirmed what I probably knew already. Having said that, it has been very useful to develop a range of sites to see what happens. I will continue to find new ways to develop my domain portfolio - and I will continue to share what I have learned.
