Case Study: Building A Niche Mini Site

Yesterday I reviewed the what’s and why’s of building niche mini sites.  Today, I’m going to give a rundown on exactly how to go about creating your first mini site using my site Learn Spanish On Your Own as an example.

Choosing A Niche

The first order of business is to select a niche to build your mini site around.  There are two schools of thought here:

1. Find a niche with low competition and relatively high profitability regardless of whether or not you enjoy the topic or even know anything about it.  Web entrepreneurs following this pattern often rely on sheer volume of sites to build their income.  They build a small site (outsourcing content creation or BSing it) and move on to the next idea.  If you build 100 different sites, some of them are bound to be profitable.
2. Find a niche you enjoy and are knowledgeable about.  Even if it’s not the most profitable topic to build a site around, focusing on a topic you enjoy will make it seem much less like work and more likely you’ll keep at it for the long haul.  For new web entrepreneurs without the skills to reliably sniff out profitable niches with low competition (like me), I think this approach makes much more sense.

For more on choosing profitable niche topics, check out the following resources

• How To Choose A Niche Topic For Your Blog at Problogger
• How To Find Profitable Niches at The Unofficial Adsense Blog
• How Do I Find A Profitable Niche For Affiliate Marketing at eHow

Do Keyword Research

In all honesty, keyword research is something that comes with practice.  I could tell you exactly how I do it, but you probably won’t really “get” it until you try it out for yourself.  Since I’m still not all that great it it, I’ll refer you to an excellent free ebook written by a guy named Josh Spaulding, an ebook I use myself whenever I build a new site or need to do some keyword research.  It’s not easy, but I have seen dramatic results applying the simple techniques he teaches to target specific keywords on this blog, the Spanish blog, and a few other sites I dabble in.

One free tool I can whole-heartedly recommend is Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool.  Of course, this blog and my Spanish site have accumulated enough links and search engine juice over the year(s) that I can rank for keywords far out of the league over the average new site but if I had to start from scratch, I would target keywords with between 1000-1500 searches per month, according to the Google tool.

Create Unique And Useful Content

Here’s where I feel many make-money-online gurus lead you astray.  Many of them advocate sourcing free content from article directories such as EzineArticles or spinning Wikipedia articles just enough to fool Google to post on their site.  Personally, I feel that strategy is a recipe for disaster.  You may fool the search engines temporarily, but you have to believe they will one day grow wise to your shenanigans and turn off the spigots, leaving you with dozens of worthless sites.

By far the most effective way to attract links and build traffic over the long haul is creating a ton of free, valuable content.  Some examples of this from my Spanish site are the free Spanish lessons, pronunciation guide, verb tutorials, conjugation charts, learning guides, et al.  If you can create something unique, you stand to gain a lot of attention.  You don’t have to break new ground to succeed, however.  If you have a knack for distilling complicated topics into simple, easy-to-understand steps or gathering disparate knowledge from all over the net into a single place, you can do just as well.

Monetize Your Site

Now that you’ve created tons of valuable content, you’ll need a way to capitalize on all that quality traffic and turn it into revenue.  Google AdSense is the easiest most popular way to monetize almost any website and that’s how I got my smart, but over time I discovered I could make much more money promoting products created by somebody else.

For Learn Spanish On Your Own, that comes in the form of product reviews for various products sold on Amazon.com, particularly high-dollar Spanish audio learning programs.  It’s no accident I mention the virtues of various high-quality commercial products at every opportunity.  My Rosetta Stone reviews and Pimsleur review pages are two of my biggest earners not only because of their extremely high quality and good reputation among learners, but also because I spend so much effort promoting them.  Note: Do not promote a product you haven’t personally used and don’t honestly recommend just to make a quick buck.  Your lack of knowledge and personal experience will show and readers won’t buy through your site.  Furthermore, you risk seriously damaging your reputation if you aren’t careful.  Never sell a product you don’t believe in.

Promote Your Site

There are many ways to promote your site, but they all come down to attracting links from other sites.  Article marketing is my promotional method of choice, although you could use any marketing technique you’re comfortable with.  Article marketing boils down to writing articles for distribution on article sites like EzineArticles, Ideamarketers, etc.  These sites allow you to include 2 or 3 links back to your site at the end of every article in an attempt to entice readers to click through, providing an easy source of traffic.  Since you get to control the links’ anchor text, you can use article marketing to target promising keywords for SEO purposes.

Rinse And Repeat

While you’re unlikely to make more than $100 or so per month from any one site, the key here is volume.  Three or four years of consistent effort should be enough time to build dozens if not hundreds of different sites.  Even if most of them never earn you more than $2 per day, their cumulative earnings can become significant over time.  Fifty sites earning an average of $2 per day yields $100 per day, or $36,500 per year in extra income, and that’s a conservative example.  Certainly you will have some sites which earn considerably more than $2 per day even if you have many that don’t.

The point is, several years of dedicated effort is likely to pay huge dividends in the future.  It’s conceivable that 3 or 4 years building niche sites could generate enough cash to achieve financial independence, or at least enough to quit your job and focus on your internet projects full-time while you build your income.  Or if you prefer, you can simply save and invest the extra income for retirement.  Even an extra $5,000 per year over a 30 year career can make a huge difference in your retirement nest egg.