Building a Niche Minisite (Part 1)

One of the easiest ways to make money online today is by creating “niche minisites.” The internet is huge, and it’s growing bigger everyday. You can always make a site that attempts to compete in large content areas, and you can succeed if you put enough time, effort, and money into it. What if you don’t have a lot of time? What if you don’t have much startup money? What if you’re lazy (even too lazy to start a Myspace turnkey)? Well then maybe you should give niche minisites a shot.

A niche is “a distinct segment of a market.” A minisite is simply a very small website (typically 10 pages or less).

When you combine these two ideas you get a small site that targets a specific people or product rather than a large site that attempts to encompass a large group of people or products. The benefit of this is that everyone who visits your site will be looking exactly for what you provide. This means higher conversion rate and more money for you.

Rather than bombard you with more theory, I’d rather show you step by step how to create, launch, and market a typical niche minisite.

Step 1: Find a Niche

This is obviously the most important part of creating a niche minisite. There are millions of niches just waiting to be filled, and finding one, quite honestly, isn’t very hard. You can make money off of just about any niche if you work smart.

One of the first places to look for a niche is at your favorite news portal. In my opinion it is much easier to create a niche site for a new product or trend rather than an existing one. Although one can create a niche minisite for an older product, it’s just harder. Everyday new products are being announced that have the potential to become successful. What you have to do is look at these new products and decide which ones you can grab at least a smidgen of the market for. Some easy ones to keep an eye on are new TV shows, movies, rising artists (I hate rap, but rap niche sites are some of the easiest to turn into money makers), cars, and then your typical new inventions/products.

At last year’s E3 a weird little gadget was unveiled called the Nintendo Wii. Everyone instantly started jumping on Wii-related domains, including myself. One little nugget I managed to grab was RedSteel.co.uk. Red Steel is supposed to be one of the first Wii titles to make use of the Wii remote in all it’s glory. The domain is decent, but it isn’t anything to jump over joy for. If you remember from Domaining 101: Extensions, .co.uk isn’t as good as .com, .net, or .org; however, this domain does contain my main keywords and will do just fine for the niche minisite I plan on putting up. I’ve had this domain for months, but simply haven’t gotten around to putting up a site for it yet. You’ll find that happens sometimes when you’re constantly finding new markets to exploit through niche minisites. The beauty of it is that if I never use this domain, it’s less than $10/year loss, and I can always revisit it and put up a new site.

Keep in mind that I registered RedSteel.co.uk based on speculation alone. When setting up niche minisites for future products you will be doing this often; however, if you are creating a site for an existing product then you will need to do extensive keyword research before investing. In the case of Red Steel, it was a safe bet that the game would build enough publicity upon release to make this minisite profitable, so I went ahead with the purchase.

Step 2: Research

When building a niche minisite you will never stop researching. Before you solidify your niche, you want to get an idea of the search traffic. A nifty tool you can use for this is Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. This tool compiles search data from the big 3 engines (Google, MSN, and Yahoo) into one easy location. However, since Aaron’s tool isn’t working for me at the moment, I’ll just be looking at the Overture Suggestion Tool (which displays only Yahoo results).

A quick search for “red steel” brought up the following results:

For those of you who have never analyzed Overture results before, I’ll go ahead and tell you that these results are WIMPY. They’re very lame. If I had to guess looking at these numbers about how much monthly traffic my minisite will get through SE alone, I would say about 50-60 uniques per day (keeping in mind that these are only Yahoo results).

Lucky for me, the domain RedSteel.co.uk although not premium, is good enough to get some type-in traffic:

The fact that this domain is not only getting type-ins but that the traffic is converting at a very nice rate (especially on SEDO‘s ugly as hell parking pages) is amazing news. The screenshot above is from the month of November which makes it seem like the numbers could be inflated due to Christmas shopping; however, just over a week into January I’ve gotten 32 type-ins. So even if the numbers do fall some from this screenshot, they’re holding up enough to give me some motivation to get this minisite up and running.

Another important piece of data to gather is your competition. The easiest way to do this is simply by doing a Google search:

What caught my eye when doing this search was that the number 1 result was the Wikipedia entry for Red Steel. Believe it or not that’s fantastic news. One of the rules I follow when making a niche site is that usually if Wikipedia appears within the top 5 results on Google, I can get my minisite to show up in the top 10 (after it gets out of the sandbox). This doesn’t apply to large, general terms (such as “Poker” or “Duct Tape”) but usually holds true for more specific niche terms. Other than that the competition consists basically of review sites. There doesn’t seem to be any community or portal sites that have a firm grip on the niche. That’s also good news.

Step 3: Analyze the Data

Now that you have your niche and the research to go along with it, you need to take some time to sit down and think it over. A couple questions you should ask yourself are:

• Is there a large enough buyer pool?
• Can I compete with the other sites?
• Can I get a quality domain for SEO purposes?
• What will be the life span of this niche minisite?

As I’ve already shown above, RedSteel.co.uk has all it needs to become a successful niche minisite at this point. The buyer pool, although small, does seem large enough to create profit, especially since I don’t plan on spending more than $20/year on this minisite. The competition is scarce, and I already have a good domain. The main problem with this minisite is going to be its life span. Video game minisites usually don’t last as long as other niche minisites; however, I expect this minisite will bring in money for at least a year which is long enough to produce a good profit.

Once you’ve looked over all of the data, you have to decide whether or not to pursue the project. I’m going to go ahead with the RedSteel.co.uk minisite.

Step 4: Decide on Monetization Techniques

One thing a lot of people want to do as soon as they’ve found their niche and done their keyword research is dive into making the site. Then once they have it up, slap some Adsense on it and call it a day. This isn’t what you want to do. I always develop a plan for monetization before I launch the site.

Adsense will always be in the plan when it comes to developing a minisite. Others use YPN, but in the end I suggest always using one source of contextual advertising on your niche minisite. Adsense can be used on any niche minisite and will always be targeted.

So Adsense is a gimme, but I don’t plan on it being my main source of income for RedSteel.co.uk. The bulk of the revenue I plan to generate through commission from selling copies of the game itself, and maybe some other merchandise/accessories. So how do I get started doing that?

The first thing I do is do some searching through my favorite affiliate program: Commission Junction (aff). After searching for a while I found an offer that I didn’t really expect. In addition to selling copies of the game, I can sell GameFly
memberships so users can rent the game, and I also get a lead payout if users just sign up for a free trial. I also found an offer for a Red Steel strategy guide. So now it’s clear to me that affiliate marketing on this minisite is going to be the majority of my income from it. Setting up affiliate marketing on your minisite takes a little bit more time than slapping Adsense up, but it pays off a lot more in the end.

Click here to continue to Part 2…