Radio Electronics and iHorseracing

In an unusually productive week I have been able to add two more sites to the portfolio. Firstly, there is RadioElectronics.co.uk and secondly there is iHorseRacing.co.uk.

Two nice ones that shoud do well over the long run.

If I can keep up this rate of development I can probably build out my portfolio of domains in around 18 months. Thats if I don’t buy any more domains!

I also think that there is a second stage of development where mini sites that are showing strength should be built out into fully fledged sites. SIPTelephony.co.uk is an example of this, where although the visitor numbers are low earnings per click are relatively high.

This brings the number of minisites participating in the challenge to 16, plus Manchester Wide, which is really a fully developed site.

August 2007 totals

This has been an interesting month and I can report increased profits from Adsense this month. This is despite the fact that SIPTelephony.co.uk and DasKapital.co.uk were both pointed to SubprimeLender.co.uk  for much of the month. Indeed Das Kapital has not been rewritten yet and that is on my to do list for September.

The average weekly income per site is $0.88, an improvement of $0.55 per site over last months total. However, this is far short of the $2.00 per week, per site, set for this minisite challenge.

One thing that is clear to me is that many of the sites have content that pays relatively poorly. For a number of sites in the challenge it may be that they will not cover their costs unless they have much more promotion, other monetization options are considered and time and effort is spent on their development.   I am currently considering adding Amazon and eBay affiliate ads, as well as affiliate programms through Commission Junction and Trade Doubler. More on this in due course.

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.