Is this the end or is it the begining?

It seems to me that mini sites will not always be the best way of monetizing domain names. This is especially true if the domains have little or now traffic. So I have decided to bring this part of the challenge to a close.

Some people may feel differently but I think that for me, developing ‘authority websites’ has to be far more profitable than basic minisites. An authority blog that domainates it niche can be relatively profitable. Once established, individual pages in an authority blog will generate at least as much revenue as a three to five page minisite that has no more than a couple of backlinks and which is just left. The decision might be different if the domain has traffic. But unless the trafic can be monetized for a reasonable amount per month it is not worth it. The reality is that some topics do not generate much with Adsense paying as little as 1 or 2 cents per click. 

So this experiment has been interesting but ultimately unsuccessful. But this is not the end – this is only the begining. I am working on plans for a number of authority blogs. I am currently working on Domaining.org.uk, an authority blog dedicated to buying, selling and monetizing domains, but with a UK slant. Other authority blogs are in the pipeline.

I will continue to post here occasionally, but you can keep up to date with my domain name activities on  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. 

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.

Wow, September’s figures.

Now that I have your attention I have to say that September’s figures were a little disappointing. During the month of September the 11 sites in the challenge managed to average $0.90, compared with $0.88 the month before.

The figure is influenced by the fact that a significant proportion of my domain name portfolio is pointed to one or two sites, so the income from ‘natural traffic’ is far less.

This has important implications for the project as the break even point for .com, .net, .org and .info domains is around $0.41 per week and is around $0.18 per week for .co.uk and .org.uk domain names.

A single page minisite takes about 2 hours to complete, including writing and using my regular template. A minisite using wordpress and free articles would take about 1 – 2 hours to set up at leisurely pace (finding articles, searching for a wordpress theme etc) and perhaps 20 – 30 mins a month to search for and add articles.

In total, I would say that the revenue for the 11 sites in the challenge probably covers their costs. However, with a portfolio of 100 + domains that might be suitable for inclusion in the challenge, I may be better considering alternative monetization techniques.

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………………………………

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.

Domaining.org.uk has a forum

When I found out that there was a forum plug in for WordPress (there are a few actually), I decided to give one a try. The results of my efforts can be found  at [.....forum now removed......still liked the plug-in though..]

I am really impressed with how easy it was to install. It is simply a WordPress plug in that can be configured from the wordpress dashboard. The plug in comes from xdweb.net and more information and download details can be found at http://www.xdweb.net/wordpress/2007/03/15/xdforum-20/

It will be interesting to see how visitors respond to the forum and to see how the new content from posts on the forum affect ranking, traffic and revenue.

100 sites at $2 per week or one site at $200 per week?

Although, tthis month, I have only added one site to the challenge, and I am rewriting daskapital.co.uk, I do have the content written for another four sites. These should come on stream next month.

As I develop the text for each site I am beginning to see very clearly, that not all clicks on adsense ads are equal! Indeed, looking at my stats, depending the site, revenue from individual clicks has ranged from under 30cents for a click! to more than $1 for a click. This is not a random variation either. Hobby sites make far less per click than business and finance sites. The question is why build additional websites that are only making a few cents per click when I can be making additional pages on existing sites that pay 50c/ $1/ $2 per click.  Now I appreciate that the amount of traffic a site gets should be added into the equation – the lower amount per click may be compensated by high levels of traffic. However, there is clearly something to think about here and this will be a theme I will be following up on in future posts.

Duplicate content

You will have noticed that some of the sites in the challenge include content from either Wikipedia or from ezine article sites.

The use of this material is permitted as long as the rules and regulations are followed precisely. However, I have been particlularly concerned about Wikipedia material as the authors of Wikipedia articles could be submitting copyrighted material that they do not own the copyright to, and I would never know. It appears to be less likely with ezine articles, as the author is usually easier to trace through websites associated with the articles, but the risk is still there with ezine articles as well.

As a precaution, over the last few weeks, I have been removing Wikipedia material from my minisite challenge sites and from one other site, not in the challenge. This process meant that I had no choice but to write my own content for several sites, which was quite time consuming. Furthermore, DasKapital.co.uk is still not finished. However, it has enabled me to add one more site to the challenge portfollio, :-

CSI Fan – This site relates to the CBS television show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and it’s spin offs, CSI:Miami ans CSI:NY.

This brings the total number of sites in the Challenge to 10.