Heck no! In-fact, it’s possibly the strongest and safest online business model going these days. That doesn’t mean details and portions of it haven’t been changing, everything does over time (especially online)…but the core system is still solid.
There’s been a lot of talk about Wall Street and stocks lately–most of it sour–so I thought I’d use the stock market (when doing well) as a comparison to prove my point on mini-sites.
If you ask most people who understand stock investing they will tell you that the long term returns on the market tend to average inflation (3%) plus +7%, or basically there’s about a 10% return to the good across the board long term.
That doesn’t reflect the “quick hitters” or windowed spikes and dips, but rather what a well planned and diversified investment portfolio can hope to earn over a long period. For example, 10 years or more.
For my comparison though I’m going to shorten that down to a single year and assume the “best case” scenario of earning a full 10% in just 12 months.
So, lets say you had $1,000.00 to invest and at the end of the year had earned a full 10% profit on it, that would mean you now had $1,100.00 in assets. That’s not too bad at all.
However, lets say you took that same $1,000.00 and with it purchased 100 various domain names (can be purchased for under $800.00) and spent the rest on one of those unlimited domain hosting accounts at either HostGator or Dot5 hosting. You would actually still have a little of your $1,000.00 left in your pocket, but for simplicity lets assume you spent the whole amount.
And on each of those 100 domains you placed a 3 to 10 page mini-site of good quality information on some topic, then only added Google AdSense or YPN! contextual advertising to monetize the sites.
Next you spend some time doing a little social bookmarking and directory submissions, and for good measure maybe you invest a couple of days to do some article marketing for the sites too.
Here’s the comparison: if you can average just $1 in earnings per month from each of those domains, then at the end of the year your return would be $1,200.00 — that’s double what your best case profits in the stock market above would be.
And seriously, how hard is it to make just $1 monthly from a mini-site? It’s just about a $0.03 per day average. If you can’t get a $0.03 per day average out of a web site then you need to forget the whole idea of working online forever. I don’t mean to seem harsh, but I have sites that earn over $1 for a single advertising click, which means I only need 1 click per month to make that $0.03 daily average from those.
Most sites don’t get that kind of payout for clicks though, but do still average $0.07 to $0.10 per click for me, so really I need about 13 clicks per month from each site to reach the $1 monthly average. That’s mad-crazy easy to achieve–it’s less than 1 click every 2 days.
Now, I’m using bare-minimum numbers here, but even with these bare minimums of averaging just $1 monthly per mini-site you’re going to make more from your investment in 12 months than you would have putting your money in Wall Street’s hands.
And that’s the real strength and attraction behind this in my opinion. By investing in online properties rather than stocks, you ultimately control the outcome of your investment. The more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.
For example, I average a lot more than $1 per month from all of my mini-sites. First of all, I tend to promote some affiliate product offer on every mini-site and most of those pay $15 or more in commission for a single sale. That means that I only need to make 1 sale per year off each site to do better than the $1 per month average needed to be profitable–and I typically see well more than 1 sale per year on each site.
Now, as I said at the start of this things have changed over time. Several years ago I was putting up single page mini-sites and with just a few minutes of work I was able to count on them to always average over $25 monthly for me. That’s not happening these days.
The search engines have shown a bias against single page sites, regardless of how good the content may be.
Today, you can’t just create a single page of static content, you have to have a few pages and content that changes or updates frequently in order to gain favor with the search engines and get that free, organic and targeted traffic they deliver.
The upside is that the search engines themselves, specifically Google, are providing tools to help you do that with very little effort on your part.
From RSS feed aggregating to small widgets for building mashups, there’s a lot of ways that you can creatively add dynamic and updating content onto your mini-site pages without having to manually edit them all the time.
In reality, even though I need to create more pages for a new mini-site now than I used to, the amount of original content I need to create for a mini-site is still about the same because much of the pages I create is fresh and updating content coming in from 3rd party sources.
This isn’t content scraping or theft by any means, it’s mashup building done in ways that provides a unique and valuable on-page experience for visitors. I’m not talking about those crap scripts that go out and steal everything from some other source just to repost it as-is, I’m talking about taking a topic and giving your visitors a unique hub with highly relavent and fresh content from all over the web on that topic.
This does create a higher amount of traffic leakage from my sites as visitors follow the 3rd party content links rather than my advertising links, but the trade-off is I’m noticing higher average traffic levels on mini-sites today than I used to with the single page sites, so it’s about a wash.
The key to the mini-site model today is in building systems for yourself because you need to deal in volume without sacrifising value. You need a system for getting your mini-site created and online fast. A system for promoting it quickly and easily to get it indexed by Google and Yahoo! as soon as possible. And a system for on-going link building (far more important than it was even 2 years ago).
Like I said, the search engines provide almost everything you could need for creating your mini-sites absolutely free, in-fact since I also use them to search for information when writing my unique content I’ll go so far as to say they provide everything I need to develop my mini-sites.
Social bookmarking (free) gives you an easy path to getting your mini-sites noticed and indexed by search engine bots.
And RSS feeds along with article marketing (also both free) give you ample opportunities for on-going link building.
Of course, when I call these resources free I’m referring to financial price, there is a trade-off of time involved which is where this model and stock investing can differ greatly, but given the fact that you can earn so much more with site investing that’s something I’m always willing to accept.
This post is already longer than I intended, and I’m honestly not trying to make the argument that people should invest in web properties rather than the stock market. I just wanted to use the market (when it’s going good) as a comparison to show that the mini-site model is far from dead for those who like to roll up their sleeves and be hands-on with their investments.
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Tags: mini-sites, stock market
You have good arguments for the mini-site. I suppose the amount of time to make a mini-site might be a factor (mini-sites require some time working to make them profitable).
From my experience, when I have spent equal time on a large site and many mini-sites, the large site has done better even though the mini-sites have more total pages and more promotion. For this reason, I think google is giving greater SEO weight to large sites.
Have any others had similar or different experiences/results?
You’re right about the time and I made a point of mentioning that in the piece. It’s one of the reasons why developing systems for everything is crucial. Automating as many processes as possible helps too.
For me, I’m using a custom script for mashup page building on most of my mini-sites now. That lets me put a 10 page, tightly focused niche site online in just a few minutes.
Then it’s just a matter of spending a little time getting some backlinks for the site to get it indexed.
In all it takes me under an hour to have a new mini-site online and have the links in place so that search engine bots will find it.
Then I have a monthly system in place for on-going deep-link building which has become a key factor for good search rankings.
I don’t disagree that larger sites can do better, though I wouldn’t say they always do better.
Personally, I have a healthy mixture of mini-sites and larger sites in my stable. I would never rely on any single source or method for my income.
This post wasn’t to say that mini-sites are the way to go, just that the mini-site model is still a very effective one to run.
Thanks for your comments.
I think you are right on but it is hard to write articles. I have a mini-site and about 400 other parked domain names.
One way to get multiple mini-sites cheaply is to use subdomains, but you can’t submit them to directories.
You also need to be careful about auto-generated content if you do this. I think Google looks for signs of quality, and 20 subdomains of scraped content suddenly appearing looks suspect and can get you banned.
If they were all different and appeared over time and were _not_ interlinked, you might be alright [grin]
Some compelling stuff here. I’ll be sure to return. Thanks!
Another method is mini-sites within a large site. As people thin in specifics, creating a few pages specifically for them, either as a mini site on its own, or as a mini site within a larger site is still targeted to them specifically.
I guess it depends on how good your system is for maintaining loads of mini sites compared to a larger site.
Another alternative is to pay online freelance writers to write the articles for you.
With regards to the content scraping issue, you can always “reword” or “rephrase” the content, right? Do the bots have enough artificial intelligence to spot it? It’s just like retelling a story you’ve read, in your own words. It uses less brain power.
On the other hand, I think your comparison with the stock market is false. While it is true that stocks are crashing these days, how you earn money from the stock market is totally different from the highly speculative model of just sitting it out hoping that some guy out there in the internet would click your ads for a fraction of a cent. What drives the profitability in the stock market, is a different animal altogether.
Simon, I wouldn’t reword or rephrase the content of others, that’s illegal. Rewriting your own work, or PLR articles is border-line but okay in my opinion.
You’re right that “how” you make money online vs. the stock market is completely different, but what I was comparing is the average returns from using the 2 methods so I stand by my comparison.
I would add that investing in web properties is only scalable to a certain point though, so if you had 7 figures to invest then I’d look to the stock market first and review the pros and cons before jumping into either.
But with 6 figures or less to invest the potential for higher and faster returns is definitely tilted in favor of web properties in my opinion.
But Scott, how would the Search Engine bot algo know that your content was just rephrased? For example, if your niche site is about stock market investing, try to scan the internet and almost a hundred other stock market experts are giving the same tips.
For a human reader, you could readily say that these experts are just saying the same stuffs. Only narrated differently. But for a machine, how can it tell “identical” content without resorting to scanning word sequences in a paragraph?
And besides, there is only enough unique content to be generated about many popular topics, without becoming redundant already compared to other writers. Take “dating” tips, for example. Almost every dating tip invented by gigolos have already been discussed in the internet. What else new is there to write about the topic then?
Simon, you’re right that on some topics there can be only so many things to say, and eventually you’re just finding new ways to say the same thing that someone else already has–but from your own perspective which is the added value.
Where I’m making the distinction is in the mechanical rewriting of someone’s work.
It’s one thing to read someone’s article, take the underlying idea or theme from it and then write your own article based on that.
This is you putting your own original and unique spin on the idea, which gives it a new value for readers to consume.
But when you just scrape someone’s content and use some mechanical word replacement filtering on it that’s not adding any unique value at all, it’s theft and plagiarizing.
Sure, it will fool search engine bots a lot of the time, but it won’t offer your human traffic any new value…so what exactly would be the long-term point to doing it?
That’s true. Unfortunately, the mini-sites business model is driving people to do the brute force method to earn a buck. There is no inner conscience or human value involved anymore. It’s all Accounting. $2 x 300 mini-sites is 600 bucks. It’s like spamming the internet with mini-sites. Actually, this business model is not unique. The Chinese are known to employ such methods. They simply flood the market with tons of cheap merchandise to beat the high-margin players. They simply add the cents and turn a profit by bulk.
That’s actually what I mean with the sensitive issue of content scraping. If you have a mini-sites factory, you simply have no more time for creative content. It may be termed as “subtle” plagiarizing, but many mini-site factory owners out there in cyberspace are in denial that all they are doing are just “Made-For-Adsense” websites in a fancy dress.
Simon, the mini-site model doesn’t drive anyone to do anything. People make their own decisions based on their own goals and lines of morality.
I have over 150 mini-sites online at the moment and only have AdSense or YPN! ads running on about 30 of them.
That’s because AdSense or any contextual advertising is the worst way to monetize a mini-site in my opinion. AdSense depends on high volume traffic to earn money, but by design mini-sites are low volume, targeted traffic magnets. It’s far better and easier to monetize them with affiliate products related to the site content.
If people are building mini-sites as “Made For AdSense” sites they’re completely missing the point. Yes, you can sustain razor thin profit margins this way, but you can also do far better than that with promoting affiliate products instead.
I used AdSense as an example of the lowest and most conservative earnings required for a mini-site to be profitable in my post, but I also said I promote affiliate products most of the time and earn a lot more than the minimums I was quoting because of it.
As for subtle plagiarizing, I’m not sure what that is. Someone either steals or they don’t. There’s no gray area that I can see with it.
With so much freely available content to use out there between RSS feeds and mashup scripts or widgets there’s really no reason to play on the edge or cross the line.