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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