Building a Niche Minisite (Part 2)

Before I begin, let me remind you that if you haven’t read Building a Niche Minisite (Part 1), you should before continuing into this article. I’ve also created another post answering some questions about the first article.

Now down to business. By now we have selected our niche (Red Steel), done keyword and traffic research, and laid out a monetization plan. Believe it or not the hard part is done. All that’s left to do now is actually build the site.

Step 5: Lay the Foundation

The foundation of your niche minisite is of course the design. With a minisite, there’s no need to go overboard with a design. I would suggest you do it yourself if at all possible, even if you have little to no knowledge of design software. With niche minisites the design isn’t going to be the say all end all of the user experience – they’re going to be visiting for the content. That being said, there are two things you need to accomplish when designing your site:

1. Make it obvious what the site is about
2. Design around ad placements

The easiest way to make your topic clear to the user is by creating a good header. Don’t go overboard – just Google search a logo of your product and then add some relevant stock photos. The other thing you want to do is design around your ad placements. You want to make the products you’re selling stand out, and blend your Adsense with the content. The best way I can get these two ideas across is to show you the design I came up with for Red Steel. It’s really basic, and it only took me about 10 minutes to do.

Now that you have the design done, you need to code it into HTML/CSS. That’s not very hard to do, and if you don’t know how then you really should take the day or two needed to learn it. You don’t have to be an expert (I certainly am not), but knowing how to code your site so that it works on as many browsers as possible is definately a requirement. The only bit of non HTML/CSS code I’m going to use for this site is a bit of PHP includes to make editing the sidebar and menu text easier.

Step 6-7: Generate Content / SEO

I grouped Step 6 (Generate Content) and Step 7 (SEO) together because you can’t really do them separately. While you’re creating your content you always have to have SEO in mind, otherwise you’ll find yourself going back over the work you’ve done which is a real pain.

So here I am making a minisite about a game I’ve never played on a system I can’t stand (I’m sorry but Twilight Princess blew). How do I get content? Wikipedia.

Now before you run off and start copy/pasting to your heart’s content, I should warn you. If you steal content from Wikipedia Google will zap you, and your site will fall from the top 10 search results into the hundreds. What you should do instead is skim Wikipedia and put the content in your own words. It’s just like writing a “research” paper in college.

Wikipedia gives you all of the information about the game you could possibly want. It even has a nice little stock photo of the box shot on the right that I can use to advertise my affiliate (affiliates usually have really lame graphics with their campaigns). I spent about a half hour writing all of the content for Red Steel – it’s not gold, but as long as you provide what the user is looking for, that’s all that matters.

When writing your content you have to keep SEO in mind. Since my niche minisite is only going to have about 5 pages, I want to make every page and even every word count. My main keyword is “red steel”; therefore, I want to use it as much as possible. I also want to include it within my h1 and h2 tags for extra emphasis both to the user and to search engines. In addition to my main keyword I also have a bunch of secondary keywords: red steel cheats, red steel walkthroughs, red steel game, red steel reviews. If possible I should try to work these into not only the content itself but also to the page filenames and headers.

For example, I’m going to create a page with the filename: red_steel_cheats.php. I’m also going to include this in the page title and throughout the content. This way search engines know exactly what that page is about. Little bits of SEO like this is all you really need – it’s easy. Just browse the site and view my source to see exactly how I did the SEO.

So after about a half an hour of writing I have enough content and pages to call this a minisite. Like I said, it isn’t gold – but it doesn’t have to be. The users want to know a little about the game, see some screenshots, etc. If they want more information on the game they will hopefully click on your Adsense ads, but for most people (the mom shopping for her son for example) this will be enough information and should land you a sale.

Step 8: Setup the Ads

Now that you have your content and SEO sorted out, it’s time for the final step in the development process: setup your ads. First thing you should do is throw in some Adsense since that’s the easiest, but don’t forget to setup the colors so that they blend into your site.

It’s always better to have blended ads rather than ones that are sectioned off with borders. You’ll also see that this Adsense setup is completely within their TOS. One thing about Adsense on this site, however, is that there aren’t enough Adwords campaigns running for the term “red steel” as it relates to the Wii game. So much of the ads are off topic. Sometimes Adsense figures out your content and begins displaying more appropriate ads; however, if it’s still showing ads like this in a month or two, I would definately take them down altogether and switch to another source of ad revenue.

Before finishing up with Adsense, you should also be sure to add a URL channel to your Adsense for content so that you can keep up with ad impressions and CTR for your new minisite.

Now that we have our Adsense up we can move on to setting up the CJ store. A lot of people get intimidated when you start talking about adding an online shop to a website, but the kind of shop we’re going to setup isn’t a big deal at all. Basically we find CJ products that relate to our topic (in this case Red Steel game, walkthrough, and rentals) and set them up on a page. Users who visit that page and click on the product will be redirected to a secure eCommerce site where they can follow through with the purchase and we can earn our commission. We don’t have to ship anything, track orders, etc. Just collect the commission.

The first thing I have to do is search for relevant products.

I got the code for the GameFly pre-played offer (which also includes a lead payoff for whoever signs up for a free trial) and for the Buy.com strategy guide offer. However, I could only find one advertiser selling new copies of the game: CompUSA. Unfortunately they review all applicants to their program manually, so it may take a day or two for me to get in. When I do I’ll add that link to the top since it would have the highest payout. I’ll update this when I get approved.

Step 9: Setup Hosting and Transfer DNS

Well now we have a fully functional minisite. I have to admit it was a bit harder finding content for this site seeing as I’ve never played the game, and there isn’t a huge fanbase. However, I think there’s enough on the site to please most visitors and hopefully land me a couple of commissions. So now all that’s left to do is publish the site.

A couple people have asked me what hosting I use for my minisites. I use iPowerWeb, not because of their amazing service (their service stinks) but because they’re as cheap as you can get. I have their biggest plan paid annually. A nifty little feature that comes with this plan is domain pointing. Domain pointing lets me setup as many little sites as I want as if they were each on their own server when in reality they’re all contained in subdomains on my main website. It only costs $1/mo to add a new domain pointer to my account, which makes my earlier statement of $20/yr operating costs for niche minisites true.

If you want to learn how to setup your own account with iPowerWeb and setup domain pointing, visit their site. Be warned – they’re cheap but if you ever have a question for them be prepared for the worst customer service experience of your life. There are a ton of other services that allow you to setup domain pointing, but I’ve only ever used iPowerWeb, so I can’t give any alternate suggestions for you.
After I setup domain pointing, I go to my registrar (I use Namecheap) to change my A address to the new pointed IP.

Now all I have to do is wait for the domain to start working (which takes a couple of days).

Step 10: Link Building

Since this whole tutorial was basically teaching you how to create a minisite that was dependent on search engines alone (rather than PPC, paid traffic, etc) link building is important. You want to do all you can to get your new minisite into directories, on other relevant sites, etc. If you provide enough quality content you may even be able to sneak a link into Wikipedia. Simply put – the more quality inbound links you have the better your SE results. So you want inbound links. I’ll save more detail on link building for a future post since I’ve already been working on this one for the last couple of hours.

Now you know how to create a niche minisite from scratch. You may have to experiment yourself to find what works best for you, but I hope you have learned the foundation of researching and developing a niche minisite.