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A lot of people have been asking me to post an update for my series on Building a Niche Minisite (Part 1, Part 2). I’ve gotten a ton of questions that I’m going to answer. I hope I don’t leave any out, but if I do don’t be afraid to contact me (or reply here) and let me know so I can put them up.

Isn’t this Niche Too Small/Old to Profit?

Probably. The thing to remember with popular release niches (games, movies, products) is that after the initial release and consumption, sales go way way down. For this reason it’s important to get in on these very small, targeted niches early. My Red Steel site was created too late to gain the benefit of the Wii’s launch which means it missed out on a lot of potential revenue. In addition, Red Steel got absolutely awful reviews; therefore, there’s a lot fewer people looking to buy the game now.

Are video game niches too small in general to profit? No. But they need to be created and marketed early. It also helps if the game you’re targeting is actually good.

I Don’t See Your Site Performing on Search Engines…

It’s not. In fact it’s not even indexed by Google or MSN. There could be a few reasons for this. I think it’s because just about all of the links to this site are links to the directory “netbusinessblog.com/redsteel/” rather than to “redsteel.co.uk”. This means “redsteel.co.uk” isn’t getting link love and therefore isn’t getting any search results. It should also be noted that I’ve done absolutely nothing to improve this sites rankings aside from the on-site SEO for demonstration purposes.

How Much Money is the Site Making?

Overall the site made $75 in January (mostly Adsense). The CTR was disgusting, however, which is obviously due to the non-targeted traffic it received from the article. I doubt I’ll ever have real data on this site since it was the example for my article.

This Was Just an Example

I’ve seen most of the off-site discussion about this article resulting in people creating only niche video game sites. I never said video game sites were the *best* niche. In fact it’s one of the lowest-paying and lowest-performing niches you could possibly target. I just had the domain lying around, and since it was getting some type-in traffic I decided to use it for the article. Please use your imagination when looking for niches. Utilize all of the tools I mentioned to find a niche that suites you.

I hope I’ve answered all your questions, and as I said before, if I left something out tell me. I don’t plan on creating another update on the Red Steel site ever, so now is the time to get the questions about it answered.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Popularity: 6% [?]

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.

Click here to see the design in .jpg format

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.

Click here to see the design coded in HTML/CSS

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.

To see how these ads show up on the site, click here. 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.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Popularity: 16% [?]

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…

Popularity: 26% [?]

Popularity: 26% [?]