Computer Mouse

From doing some reading around, there’s a small amount of discussion around something called a mini site. A mini site is essentially a very small website featuring just a few pages about a specific subject, with affiliates and Google Adsense advertising on it. The whole point of a mini site is that you spend time creating it. A mini site does result in mini earnings (usually low $xx a month), but there’s little effort maintaining it.

There’s a slight variation that I would call a “mini tool”, which is a site with a single script that does something useful. This clearly takes some extra effort to do the programming, and then you need to find some mini tool ideas that people would actually want to use. The idea is that the tool becomes viral, so that you spend little effort promoting the site.

The basics of creating a mini site are actually quite simple. You come up with the idea, check for domains, get the domain, create the site, and then rank it for key terms on the search engines that the mini site targets. The idea is to focus on a very specific search term, get those terms in the domain name, and then get visitors to your site who click on adverts.

However, the real skill (and the reason why everyone isn’t doing it) is because finding good terms to rank for is exceptionally difficult to do. Once you get some basic ideas, you need to do some analysis for how well it ranks in the search engines. Again, not easy stuff.

I’m taking the plunge with an idea of mine because I was able to pick up a domain for ranking keywords really cheaply for just $25. I’ll give it a go, and report my progress and findings too.