In a previous article, I’ve talked about making money with mini-sites using the 19Pages CMS, because of how easy it is to setup and use.

However, there are some cases when a WordPress installation is better.

Before you start that mini site, look at its topic and see if you might want to expand it into a full blog or a community in the future. Personally, I look to see if I might enjoy writing on that topic, how many keywords I’m targeting and what’s their traffic potential. If a mini site has 10+ articles and a traffic potential of at least 1000 visitors/day, I’ll usually go with WordPress.

This way, if the mini site takes off and starts bringing some serious traffic, I’ll just replace the static front page with a regular one that displays the latest blog posts. All the other articles that were posted on page remain with the same URL and Search Engine traffic.

I can then work on converting that traffic to subscribers and also take advantage of other income possibilities that are available only to blogs (like PayPerPost or ReviewMe).

The bad part is that it’s no longer passive income, but for topics that you feel might have potential for more, it might be worth it. Even if you don’t like the topic, you can always hire someone to write 15 articles/month for ~$60 and post them every other day. With the extra page views and advertising opportunities brought by a blog you should be able to cover the extra $60/month in expenses. And since someone else writes the articles, you can concentrate on getting those visitors to click the RSS button.

How To Make A Mini-Site With WordPress

Once I have the WordPress installation up and running, I usually go through these steps for the mini-site:

1. Change URL structure to SE friendly URL’s from Options/Permalinks
2. Change the settings of the articles not to receive link notifications from other blogs and not to allow comments (so I don’t have to deal with spam), from Options/Discussion. Also at Options/General I choose for users to be registered to comment, but I don’t select the option for anyone to register.
3. Create a page called Index
4. Go to Options/Reading and select Front Page displays: A static page. At the static front page select the Index page you previously created. This will be the front page of the site. (screenshot above)
5. Delete from the sidebar anything that makes it look like a blog: Categories, Archives, Latest posts, RSS feed button, Latest comments, etc. Leave only the code that shows the static pages. Or, you can use a widget sidebar and include only the Pages widget.
6. Download and install the All In One SEO Pack. Setup the front page title, description and keywords, and at the title format section delete the %blog_title% part from each line. Also, put noindex for categories, archives and tag pages, since you’re not using posts for the mini-site.
7. Create Pages and write your articles in them.

From WordPress Mini-Site To Normal Blog

1. At Options/Discussion and Options/General, set up the options back to be able to receive link notifications and comments.
2. Go to Options/Reading and select Your Latest Posts.
3. Copy the text from the static Index page, delete it and paste it into your first normal blog post. Or you can write a new text for it.
4. Copy the WordPress theme again so you have categories, archives and whatever else it initially had. Or if you used widgets, add the rest of the widgets.
5. Take out the noindex for archives,categories or tags from the All In One Seo Pack admin page. Depending on your permalink structure and if you use tags or not, you can keep noindex for one or two of the available options.
6. Start posting.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

After the success of the Making Money With Mini Sites article, I thought of doing a follow up on the keyword research part and give away a few niche ideas for mini sites.

The figures below are taken from the GTrends tool (the data that appears when you click the stat icons). It’s not researched on Google for competition, since the purpose is just to show you how easy it is to find keywords for mini sites. Do your own keyword research and look on Google for the competition (skip those with edu and gov sites in top 10).

As I said in the previous article, all you have to do is pick random words (preferably from non-technical areas), enter them into the tool and see what related words appear. Then check the GTrends data for those that look more promising. By promising I mean keywords that people might actually use on a daily basis. Don’t waste your time checking out keywords like “cgi proxy secure socket layer for digg”. Again, click on this icon to see the GTrends data, don’t use just the Wordtracker numbers. For this list I’ve started with the keywords layer, blanket, handy, inaccessible and dirt. Below are the keywords that seem promising, before any further research on the competition:

Do the same.

• Pick some words to start from (or take them from a dictionary),
• check what related keywords show up,
• what GTrends says about them,
• make a list,
• check Google for the competition,
• group related keywords together, 
• make your own mini sites, using either ref="http://shylockblogging.com/19-pages-review-mini-site-cms-0827/">19 Pages or WordPress

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

It’s been 3 days since I launched the mini site after talking about it in Making Money with Mini Sites, Step by Step. I didn’t do any link building yet, but it got indexed by Google in 2 days, just from the links that I used in the my previous article.

Here is how they rank so far, before any link building, just based on the SEO and the links that were pointed to them from this blog:

Ancient Warriors – 29th place in Google

Terracotta Warriors – not in top 1000

Aztec Warriors – 18th place in Google

The mini site got its first visitor from Google for the term aztec warriors and its first $0.16 click. I’m pretty satisfied with it so far. Top 30 for two of its keywords in just two days is not bad. I’ll do some link building today or tomorrow and I’ll update again when they rank better.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!