Advice

I’ve seen quite a few logo-less mini sites (including one of my own), and as a person with a marketing background, I believe a logo is essential for a website. While search engines should bring a well designed website a large percentage of its traffic, it’s important to remember that a logo will help visitors remember your website’s name, making it easier for them to find it again in the future. Just about all of my websites have nice logos (at least in my opinion), and there are a variety of options out there for finding a good logo.
If you look around at brands from around the world – both large and small – almost every one of them has a logo to stand out from their competition. Some might be plain logos, while others are more elaborate, but the purpose is for customer recollection, brand positioning, and general marketing of the company. The same should go for your websites, as a logo makes the site – even a mini-site, look like its an official company rather than just a traffic-driving website built to generate revenues from PPC advertising. I received several compliments from people in the birding industry when I introduced TropicalBirds.com, and this allowed me to establish link trades of relevant websites. Without a logo, I doubt this site would have been taken seriously.
I have a web designer that created my geodomain logos, incorporating a variety of elements from each city. My other logos were designed by a company called LogoJeez, which has pretty quick turn-arounds. I always get the least expensive package knowing that they will re-do a logo if I am not satisfied with the initial 4 concepts. I’ve also used 99designs.com for a logo design contest, which I used for my blog’s header and my company’s corporate look/feel. There are plenty of options out there for logos that range in price from $100+.
As my track coach used to tell me, if you are going to do something, don’t do it half-assed. If you are going to build a website on a nice domain name with good content and SEO, you might as well pay a bit more and make it look even more professional.

Developing a website takes the same amount of time whether you are building it on a good domain name (CoffeeHouses.com) or an average domain name (FreeCoffeeHouseDirectory.com). Likewise, the cost of developing a website is pretty much the same whether it is a good domain name or a poor domain name. For these reasons, I would prefer to only develop very good domain names rather than putzing around developing new registrations (like I did with DebtAssistanceClinic.com).
When you are building a website, there is absolutely no guarantee that your website will be profitable and make money. No matter how good the site looks and how high it ranks, you can’t guarantee it will earn your time and financial investment back. The more effort you put into link building, content writing, search engine optimization…etc, the greater financial reward you will reap. Doing all of these things takes a considerable amount of time, and as you know, time is money.
While it’s great if you built a website that makes $2/day with Adsense on a low quality domain name, it will be difficult to get someone to buy it for more than 2-4x annual revenue because there is considerable risk in this type of investment. Basically, after many hours of work (let’s say 5 full days) you have a website that may make $700/year. Personally, I think it’s hard to justify spending a ton of time build a great, money making website on a poor domain name.
I’ve noticed a number of developers “bashing” domain investors for parking their domain names rather than developing them. Many of these developers, designers and SEO experts talk about how they could make one of these parked domain names into a huge money making website, and the owner is stupid for parking. While I may agree that parking can be a poor solution in some cases (could cause Google de-listing for one), it is far easier to make money on a parked domain name than to try and build dozens of websites on a domain investor’s prime domain names (all without a guarantee of any incremental revenue).
To the people who think they can do far better developing a name than those who park, I challenge you to go out and make a strategic decision to find a good name and develop it. With your expert plan, why not go out and find an investor who would be willing to front you the money to implement your plan. There are also some fantastic financing options like Domain Capital that can help you pay for your name. With all respects, if you have a plan to develop a high value domain name into a money-printing website, but you don’t have the stones to put up your own money or finance it, maybe the domain parkers aren’t the stupid ones after all?
This is a bit tongue in cheek, as a few of my developer and SEO friends have recently jumped in and bought some great domain names to develop.
While you don’t need a great domain name for a great website, you will certainly make it much, much easier to make money with advertisers and achieve higher search engine rankings (again, if you owned a coffee house, would you rather be listed on CoffeeHouses.com or FreeCoffeeHouseDirectory.com?). Additionally, if you do wish to sell the domain and website, an investor will pay much more for the website with premium domain name.
Since one can only spend a certain amount of hours per day developing a website, its better to spend that time working on a website for a great domain name rather than just an average domain name.

One fairly simple development strategy that I am beginning to use involves building a website template and using that for all minisites. Instead of building a brand new web template for every site, save some time and money and use a very similar template. It doesn’t have to be fancy or flashy, but as long as there is room for content that can be viewed on a variety of browsers and screen sizes, room for Google Adsense banners, and room for other advertising banners from direct-to-advertiser sales (or affiliate relationships), you should be okay.
Personally, I wouldn’t recommend this for sites with a considerable amount of content or for high value domain names, as you probably want those to be more customized, but for your mini-sites that will have 5-10 pages each, I think one template should be sufficient. For those debating whether to use HTML, WordPress, or another type of tool, I am not the best person to make a recommendation. I think WordPress is easy, and I use Dreamweaver for HTML, which I learned on my own. Both are fairly straightforward and self explanatory – especially with a bit of background in HTML coding.
When it comes to the technical aspect of web development, my skill level started off at somewhere near a 1 on a scale of 10.   I am now probably around a 2.5, but I am still able to add pages to my WordPress and HTML sites easily. I’ve been told that I should use php to create my header, navigation and footer – which I probably should, but I’ve been too busy to learn. In the long run, I probably would save a ton of time by committing to a few hours now, but it’s hard to do that with so many things going on at the moment.
From experience, I can tell you that building a mini-site using strong SEO techniques will help increase traffic to a domain name/website. The more traffic that visits the site, usually the more revenue the site earns. I think if you put some time into development – but keep the time/financial commitment in line with your expectations for the site, you probably can’t go wrong. As I’ve always said, feel free to drop me a note with questions, and if I can’t answer them, I will try to put you in touch with someone who is more knowledgeable.

On the mini sites I’ve either created, am currently creating, or plan to create, Adsense is the most visible revenue generating tactic. People find my “mini” websites through various means (mostly search engines), and they click on the Google advertisements to find more information, generating revenue for me. While this is great, it will certainly take quite some time to make a decent amount of money this way.
As most developers would agree, the real revenue generation from a developed website comes from direct to advertiser ad sales. Selling advertising space takes a bit more time than just putting up your Adsense code, but that’s where the money is. When building a website, you might consider tailoring parts of it to meet the needs of potential advertisers and give more opportunity for advertising.
A quick example would be with TropicalBirds.com. I created a page to advertise bird breeders from around the country. Since the site was just launched and traffic is minimal, I decided to offer free listings by state in exchange for a reciprocal link to TropicalBirds.com on their sites. This should help boost the ranking of my site and also provide a service to visitors looking for bird breeders. I sent the following email that was individually to bird breeders I found online:

“I recently launched TropicalBirds.com, a website with information about many species of tropical birds, including parrots, macaws, conures, cuckoos, cockatiels, and many other types of birds – both domesticated and wild. In addition to discussing the proper care of pet birds featured on the site, I am also going to build a small directory of breeders. I would like to include you on the site in exchange for a link to TropicalBirds.com on your site.
If you would like a free listing and will link back to TropicalBirds.com, please send me the following information:
1) Business Name
2) Business Location (city, state)
3) Website Address
4) Types of Tropical Birds Bred
5) One sentence about your company
6) Location of link to TropicalBirds.com on your site
If you are interested, please send me the requested information as soon as you have a chance. We are still building TropicalBirds.com, and not all of our links are working yet. We anticipate a full launch by the end of this month. This is the main directory page: http://www.tropicalbirds.com/tropical-bird-breeders.html”

In addition to receiving several positive responses, I also received a request for a featured listing, which the breeder will pay $xx annually for each category. She breeds several types of birds, and she would like a breeder list by breed in addition to a list by state. I didn’t even have to solicit upgrades, yet I can make $xxx/year from this one person if I create a breed by breed listing. The cost of building this is very minimal, as it will probably take just an hour of my time to do. Once done, I can also seek out other advertisers who may wish for the same type of listing, potentially netting me $x,xxx/year, making break-even less than a few years away including acquisition and development expenses.
Point of this is to let you know that you shouldn’t have to be reliant on Adsense or affiliate advertising to make money. There are plenty of old-school businesses out there who would just as soon have a relationship with a small business than one with a big search company. If you give someone a reason to pay to upgrade, chances are good that someone will take it.