It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Caroline Middlebrook’s. I’m sure I’ve mentioned her here on the blog before and also linked to postings on her own blog as well.

While going through my daily reading list of RSS feeds I came across another fantastic posting by Caroline titled “A Simple Strategy to Make Money Online with WordPress”

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time at all you should know I’m a big fan of small niche minisites. I’ve been building these things for years now and I’ve even written a book on the topic.

The concept is really simple and the practice is a sound business (or money making) model as I can personally attest to. I’ve got over 70 mini-sites operating right now. Most earn me between $25 and $40 per month, some earn me over $200 per month; and while those numbers may not seem Earth shattering at first glance, the key factor is that none of them cost me anything in time and only pennies per month in money for the hosting since I use hosts that allow multiple sites on a single account.

That’s the gem with mini-sites, once you build them you can forget about them and spend your time on either building more or getting into other projects while those mini-sites keep earning you a steady stream of income–and there’s nothing special needed to do this, seriously I believe anybody willing to do the tiny amount of work involved in making these quality mini-sites can do it the model is so simple.

In Caroline’s words:

1. Pick a topic
2. Do some keyword research
3. Write or buy some articles on that topic targeted to those keywords
4. Use the articles as your site content
5. Monetize the site with ads of your choice
6. Allow the traffic to come in from search engines
7. Go to Step 1

Now, Caroline takes a slightly different approach than I do with the idea only in that she promotes using WordPress to build niche sites from. I don’t disagree with her by any means, in-fact it’s something I’m going to look at to see if there’s any benefit to doing so. But my concept has always been that a niche mini-site is going to be between 1 and 6 pages at most, so using strict XHTML validating templates from places like Open Web Design was perfect.

The search engines love the compliant coding of these templates (though a good WordPress theme should also be compliant) and I have a couple that seem to work perfectly in how they’re designed for advertising placement that facilitates high click-thru rates.

That’s my only concern with using WordPress for a mini-site really. The fact is mini-sites tend to get very low traffic levels and so making money from them depends upon being able to maximize that traffic for the highest click-thrus and sales. I’m just not sure that I’ve ever seen a WordPress theme that was designed perfectly for optimal ad placements, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any out there.

And if using WordPress has some SEO benefits that might increase traffic over the use of an ordinary template that could be a mute point anyway. So I definitely intend to do a little personal testing for myself to see what I feel works better for me.

The Real Key

Okay, the most important thing I want to comment about is step 7 in Caroline’s description quoted above.

Read it over and over again as many times as it takes to sink in deep.

Honestly, no matter what you’re doing online to make money–it doesn’t have to be mini-site related–this is the #1 rule of every successful business.

Find something profitable that you can do on a regular basis, then rinse and repeat.

Seriously, I don’t care what you’re doing to make money, if you find something that earns you a profit from your time and money investment and you do it over and over again you’ll be able to build a solid business from it.

Everything else you ever read or hear about making money online or tweaking this and that to increase the bottom line… it’s all just peripherals! Those are important, but they won’t make or break your efforts alone. It all really comes down to being able to do something that’s profitable over and over again.

Once you’ve got that core principal in place, then the peripherals become important.

Some Final Thoughts

Caroline touches on most of this in her posting, and I really urge you to check it out if the topic of niche mini-sites interests you, but here are the basic reasons I’ve always supported this model so strongly:

1. The startup investment is almost nil. A basic hosting account (and some include the domain registration free), a domain name and a little bit of time to research and write about your site topic. I can’t image an easier or cheaper business model to start from for anyone with so little risk versus potential rewards attached.
2. To be effective a niche mini-site must be of value to visitors. Call me prudish but there’s plenty of garbage on the web already. Quality mini-sites are of informational or resource value to visitors, so when you add in that they’re profitable to the owner it’s a win-win situation in my mind.
3. There’s no Google-dance worries to fret over. I say Google-dance because the term is popular, but what I’m really talking about is you never have to worry over a specific site or topic falling from favor with people or the search engines–and that can happen to any site in an instant. If your business is built around a single site or topic that suddenly falls off the radar it can be back-breaking to your income. But if one of my mini-sites drops off I’m able to easily absorb the loss of revenue and replace it fast with another.
4. There’s no earnings ceiling. As long as you’re able and willing to do the little bit of work behind creating a niche mini-site you’re able to continue growing your income. There is no maximum level to it as there’s always something to talk about, which means there’s always something to build another mini-site about.
5. I get bored easily. It’s true, that’s why I don’t post to this blog more frequently. I simply get bored talking about the same topic every day. Mini-sites allow me to explore and work on new and different topics with each one though, so that’s a huge bonus for me.

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Technorati Tags: mini-sites, niche, wordpress

This is a shout-out for a great how-to posting over at 45n5.com on finding and grabbing keyword rich domains that my readers who work on niche marketing and mini-sites will really benefit from.

The direct link is http://www.45n5.com/permalink/how-to-find-a-domain-name-that-contains-keywords-w.html so check it out!

There’s a treasure of information about making money online available at 45n5.com too, so I definitely suggest browsing the archives there when you have the time. Sometimes Mark can be a little rough around the edges, but its good to have someone shooting-from-the-hip about making money online rather than sugar-coating everything to make you “feel good” just so you’ll come back for more.

Seriously, I get put-off sometimes by his style, but I can’t argue with the substance and that keeps me going back to 45n5.com over and over.

Disclaimer: This is NOT a requested or compensated posting in any way! I simply felt the keyword rich domains post was a solid resource which I wanted to share, and that 45n5.com is a quality blog to have on your daily reading list.

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Technorati Tags: domains, keyword, marketing, niche

I’ve been accused of being a bit of a quack because I’m content with getting relatively low traffic volumes to many of the Mini-Sites I run. My response to this is that I’m not a quack, I just believe in qoq (pronounced: ka-wok), or quality over quantity.

I could ramble on here about my experiences that have brought me to this point, but instead I’ll use this short video I had created (for promotional use) some time ago about this very subject to explain for me:

See the Video

Sorry for the link rather than an embedded video, but WordPress did funky stuff when I tried to embed the video into the post and I’ll have to figure out why later.

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