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.

October 07’s Minisite Challenge totals.

It was an interesting month with only 9 of the 14 challenge sites registering any sort of income whatsoever.

I have decided to remove two sites from the challenge as they no longer fit the minisite challenge criteria. Domaining.org.uk and Subprimelender.co.uk are out, which has had a serious affect on income.

So now the challenge is based on 12 sites, of which only seven registered any income. This means that each site averaged only 19 cents! per week each during October.

The main implication is that the .co.uk and .org.uk domains are in profit, the dot coms are running at a loss.

This is not a problem at the moment, as I would need to examine the trends over the longer term to build up a picture of whether this is just a blip and what is really happening. So I’m not too worried – I have more text for more sites and I want to improve the look of the sites I added last month.

Career Handbook, Small Business Finance and Unsecured Personal Loans

I have finally managed to add three more sites to the challenge, bringing the total to 14 sites in the challenge. Having said that, however, there are two sites that I may remove from the challenge. The first is Domaining.org.uk which I am developing into a domaining blog. The second is SubprimeLender.co.uk which I plan to develop shortly as well. I will see how things go and decide in the next few weeks.

This brings us to the three new sites. These are:-

UnsecuredPersonalLoans.info

SmallBusinessFinance.org.uk

CareerHandbook.co.uk

Three nice names with lots of potential. The first two are just crying out for development and the thisrd could be used to promote a career handbook, or to sell career books. However, in this challenge all that matters is how much money they will make as a minisite, and I will be reporting on that, in the next few weeks.

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.

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.