Update Jan 2009

Since December 2008 I’ve been developing MancesterWide.com. Initially it was a series of html pages but in early January 2009 I redeveloped the site completely. Now it is powered by WordPress and I have seen a lot more visitors.

Of all my mini-sites only two are ‘doing well’ – subprimlender.co.uk and SIPtelephony.co.uk. The rest are costing me money.

I will update in due course. In the meantime if you are visiting Manchester, England please visit ManchesterWide.com and find out more about domaining at Domaining.org.uk.

November 07’s Minisite Challenge totals.

November’s totals have been a little dissappointing with each challenge site earning only 16 cents ($0.16) per week. Hopefully this is a exception and things will improve in December.

I have decided to get rid of any sites which I thought would never make money for me. The first to go is CSIFan which generated very little cash, and was a complete waste of time.

I will update you with December ‘07 earnings early in 2008. 

Hello, first time buyer mortgage

Just one more addition to the portfolio, so far this month. First-Time-Buyer-Mortgage.info has been developed because I think it has a chance of ranking highly in searches on these keywords.

I have also re-written DasKapital.co.uk and now has original content, which again should do well for a narrow band of search terms. However, I am not so sure about its revenue potential………………………………

Challenge Results – July 2007

Well it has been an exciting time here at mini site challenge HQ. As the team (er….OK just me!) gathered around the computer screen on the 1st of August to see the final totals from Google Adsense, the excitement in the room was almost too much to bear.

So, here they are…………….

But, just to remind you, there are nine websites, so far, in the minisite challenge. The challenge is less than one month old. The total revenue generated by these nine sites reflect the fact that most of them are very new. The sites have been monetized using Google Adsense.

It takes time for new sites to be integrated into Googles search engine – perhaps 3 – 6 months, and these sites are too new.  So this problem is reflected in the revenue figures. 

Finally, there is clearly a big difference in the traffic that different sites have been able to achieve. The performance of some sites in terms of visitor traffic was dissappointing – there is no other word for it. Some sites performed quite well in terms of visitor numbers – better than I expected. So the results have been very mixed, but it really is early days for these sites.

The average income per site each week was $0.33. [*] This is $1.67 short of the goal of $2.00 per week, for each site,  set for this challenge.

This month will be spent consolodating these sites, improving SEO etc, adding pages, and possibly adding a few sites to the challenge – so I am sure next months totals will be even better…………………………

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[*] Here is the way I calculated the weekly figure………………

Total for month was multiplied by 12 months to get ‘yearly total’.

‘Yearly total’ was then divided by 52 weeks to get the weekly total.

This weeks new additions

Four more sites have just been included in the challenge. These are:-

DasKapital.co.uk - this is about Karl Marx’s classic text on capital and capitalism. It has an important place in political and economic history and some argue that it still has relevance today. Leaving the politics to one side it is clear that a site devoted to the academic study of this historically important book would be of interest to academics and students alike.

SIPTelephony.co.uk - this site covers Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) telephony, a new emerging technology. SIPTelephones.co.uk is also pointed to this site.

ResidentialMortgages.org.uk – this site is slightly more ambitious than the others and will be a detailed advice site around UK residential mortgages.

Domaining.org.uk – blog relating to the buying, selling and development of domain names.

As a general point it is worth mentioning, and this applies to many of the sites in the challenge,  that single page sites are quite limiting. I have a few single page sites and I have a lot of concerns about their money making potential as they are at the moment. This means that my plans are to develop all of my sites to have a minimum of 3 – 5 pages each.   

So for the next stage in the challenge I think I will spend August developing the sites in the ministie challenge before moving on to developing more sites. There are 9 sites in the challenge. So thats a goal of $18.00 per week for all 9 sites. Thats also $8.67 per month, per site and $78.00 for all 9 sites. (The calculation to get $8.67 is multiply $2.00 by 52 weeks to get $104. Then divide $104 by 12 months.)

My site SubprimeLender.co.uk received a welcome boost of traffic last week when I pointed a couple of my domains that have type-in traffic to that site. However, the topic of the domain names are unrelated to finance, loans or subprime lending, so the traffic does not convert into ad clicks very well. This is cheating a little, but as my goal is so challenging I have to use every opportunity open to me. However, I think that because of what I suspect is a very poor conversion rate from unrelated traffic, this move will have a limited effect on earnings.

The Mini-Site Challenge

Here is the mini-site challenge I have set for myself………………………

The challenge is, quite simply to create mini websites on domains in my portfolio that earn one pound Sterling (about $2) every week!

By minisite I mean a website of anywhere from 1 to 30 plus pages. I suspect that the vast majority will be no more than a few simple pages, but that depends on whether the sites reach the goal of $2.00 per week.

But the point is that it has to be achieved with the very minimum of effort.

The reason I have set myself this challenge is quite simple. I have quite a few domain names. One day they might be worth a lot. At the moment they cost me money – lots of money. If I want to keep them then they need to pay for themselves – and if they make me money then thats more cash to buy more domains. In the end I might have in excess of 100 sites so this is a massive undertaking for someone with a ‘day job’ too.

I have worked out that if this challenge is successfull each .com, .net or .org domain that I own will pay for itself in about 10 weeks and every .co.uk or .org.uk will pay for itself in about three weeks.

The aim of this blog is to describe the strategy and tactics I use to develop domains that will grow to earn what is really very minimal amounts of money. Nevertheless, the small sums will add up and if they cover my costs I will be reasonably happy.

I will of course report back regularly on the (average) earnings per site to show how things are progressing.

I have a number of websites but these don’t really make any money. For the purposes of this challenge I will include the following three websites which are the first to be included in the challenge:-

Espressos.org – all about espresso coffee

SubPrimeLender.co.uk – about bad credit loans

ScienceFantasy.co.uk – about a popular sub-genre of Science Fiction

The key here is not to make leading edge web 2.0 sites. All I am aiming to do is produce simple information sites that can exist generate relatively modest revenue.

In conclusion, I suppose that the skills I will learn in this challenge will be very valuable later on so it is simply a matter of experimenting and learning for the moment.