Three Reasons Your MiniSite is NOT Making Money

If 2009 was not the year of the MiniSite then 2010 most certainly will be. The Domaining world has made a big shift from buying and selling domains to buying and developing domains. This has been very interesting for me since I have focused on development since I started in the industry. Over the last two years I’ve learned some phenomenal techniques for monetizing domains as well as some great learning experiences on what doesn’t work.

With development, it’s all about setting-up a system. While every site you design should be different, you should continue to incorporate elements from successful sites into future projects. However, most people forget to look at their failed sites, the development projects that didn’t work-out as they expected. You can learn a lot more from your failures than your success (at least I have) so you’ll want to start paying attention to what might be holding-back your monetization efforts.

Since everyone is obsessed with monetizing their domains (and with good reason!) I thought now would be a good time for me to share three things I’ve found can hurt your efforts:

  1. Low-Quality or Duplicate Content – Content is king and having fresh, unique, relevant content is essential if you want to rank well in search engines. Don’t worry about updating every day or even every week, just focus on getting at least one page of well-written, search engine optimized content. If you are using an article that is already published somewhere online it doesn’t matter how great it may be…Google is going to ding you for duplicate content. This is where I made I made the most mistakes back in 2007 and once I bit the bullet and started paying for good high-quality content my world has never been the same!
  2. Selling Products That Are Not Relevant To Your Visitors – Do you know your visitor? You should! In fact you should know what your visitor would like to buy if you’re planning on making money from affiliate products. Initially I thought I could just throw anything on a site and it would sell. You need to be very targeted and make sure you put exactly the kind of products that your target customer is looking for.
  3. Using A Link-Generation Service – Stay as far-away as you can from services that promise to bring your site traffic or backlinks. Oftentimes these programs will almost immediately blacklist your site in Google. It may seem like the easy way to build-up traffic but in the end it could do much more harm than good.

As always I love to hear from you! Please feel free to share three things you’ve learned to avoid when building a successful MiniSite.

Want some samples of sites my company has built? Just check-out the company homepage for a list of some of our properties!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton