Yesterday, I wrote a couple of articles giving updates on my mini sites that were built by Wanna Develop and Big Ticket Domains a year ago. Over the last year, I’ve worked with a few mini site development providers and built my own mini sites, and I want to share some tips and advice based on my experience.
– Mini sites may not make a lot of money, but they can be good traffic producers
– A mini site can help get a domain name get ranked in the search engines, which is beneficial to a potential buyer (or the current owner) looking to avoid the typical sandboxing that comes with newly developed websites once the mini site is turned into a comprehensive website.
– With the traffic some can bring in, lead generation might be a higher paying option than Adsense.
– If you can learn enough coding to enable yourself to work with a WordPress or static html template and use it for various sites, you will save money on many templates (if you have the time). You can use services like TextBroker.com or eLance to find good writers, and sites like Flickr can be a source of free-to-use images.
– If you don’t have the time (or desire) it may be worth your effort to build some of these mini sites on names you haven’t successfully monetized with PPC and/or you don’t have the time/desire/funding to build a big site/
– There are several companies out there that can build you similar mini sites. If you don’t want to do it on your own, test the various services and choose a provider that meets your needs (price, time, personality…etc).
This year, I haven’t done much more with mini sites (aside from a Epik site on BumperProtectors.com). I think this is more a result of buying higher value domain names that are quickly selling than buying the less expensive names I invested in during last year’s tougher times. I am sitting on less new inventory this year than I was before, and I have been focusing on growing my revenue-generating websites.
About.me is a new website that allows people to create a personal profile page, and it recently launched in beta. Invites to people who signed up a few weeks ago are slowly being distributed, and I received mine yesterday.
For the past month or so, I’ve been using a great new WordPress back up plugin called