Yesterday, I tried to live blog my development of AthensVacations.com, although with a few breaks and interruptions, it wasn’t as quick as I wanted it to be. I am going to be working on a few things on the site today as well, which I outlined below:
– Adsense ads on the site aren’t relevant to Athens or Vacations, so I made a few changes and added some content to beef it up. Adsense should automatically display ads based on what it thinks the site is about, so I am hoping this change works. Hopefully relevant ads will appear soon.
– I need to create the History page, which I will do at some point today. I use a variety of resources (such as Wikipedia) to get an idea about the history and create a custom page with unique content writing.
– I want to add another restaurant – maybe the Hard Rock Cafe since that’s a tourist spot, and many fans of the chain try to visit every Hard Rock around.
– I want to add a page about transportation and the airport because people presumably want to know how to get around the city and how to get to the city. I will link this page from a couple of pages already on the site, but I won’t add it to the top navigation, as I want to keep that clean and limit the number of links.
– Over the next few days, I will do some link building by responding to Yahoo Answers questions and by finding blogs that have information about Athens and Greek travel. The key is that I don’t want to be annoying and/or post irrelevant responses because people do that here all the time, and it’s frustrating.
There are also a few things I want to mention here because I am sure some of you are wondering:
If I was actually paying myself for doing this, the cost would be much more than if I bought a mini site. I realize that I could have paid a few hundred dollars or less, and someone else could have built the same or better mini site, and I could have been doing other things. However, I like doing this type of thing. It gives me a break from other things, so I don’t mind. If I had a corporate job and was sacrificing time from the kids I don’t have, it would have been a bad move, but I enjoy this and a lot of my domaining activities are automated – or they don’t take up much time.
This mini site may or may not pay off in terms of advertising revenue and earnings. It may or may not sell for my asking price down the road. It did give me a chance to show you how I go about building a mini site, and I really appreciate all of the comments received. These have been helpful to me, and I hope to others as well.
I will continue to build out mini sites. Individually, they might not make a lot of money each, but I am increasing the value of my holdings in this down economy, and when people are spending more for good, revenue generating domain names, these will be competitive.
Transparency is an awesome thing and i congratulate you on that ;)! Mini-site does not look half bad either, actually really nice ;)!
Elliot,
Thats 1 nice looking mini site,
Quality of design is second to none 🙂
I think you should stard developing as a business 🙂
Very nicely done.
Stevie.
Elliot, how much you paid for it? Private deal or grabbed it from the drop?
Hope you don’t mind me asking.
I bought it privately.
What about the script ?
Is that custom also ?
Thanks,
Stevie.
@stevie
It’s a template design called Brightroom available for around $15 at themeforest.net
Good Mini Site and Good Template.
Now I´m following the development.
I think the Mini Site is the best way to use domain names for money.
There is a way to send a search term parameter to AdSense so that you can control which ads display. I don’t remember the specifics, but I’m sure you can google it and find out how to control it. I had to use it a few years ago for one of my sites that were primarily form based on Google didn’t display the proper ads.
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/google_adsense_parameter_google_hints.html
i think this was the parameter I used. The name “hint” seems familiar. This guy mentions it is only for some publishers. I don’t know, it worked for my site.
Some strange adsense ads are showing up!
Maybe change the H1 tag “Visit Athens” to the title of “Athens, Greece- The Guide.” The adsense should get better.
Would you consider out sourcing the content for a future minisite? What about $45 dollars for 3000 words = 6 *500 word articles or split it up anyway you want. Then it would be just a game of copy and paste and playing around with advert placings? Interested?
By the way Elliot, the theme is called bluelight not brightroom.:)
Really enjoyed the blog updates of the development and the lifestyle of a full time domainer living in New York :). Going to use some of your tips/hints today on a site I am building, cheers.
Thanks for the innovative blog post idea.
This is an excellent site so far. It’s too bad about the adsense content I hope you find a solution soon.
My question is are those paid links to the hotels and restaurants? If not have you tried to sell ads directly?
Good luck with this site. It looks like a winner to me.
Is that site developed using WordPress? If so would you mind sharing what template you are using?
if u sell the minisite i suspect the content can be delivered fastly.
Hi Elliot, could you provide a sample of the .htaccess file that you used for the redirects?
Cheers
Rosco