Many domainers (myself included) are seeing PPC drop down to nothing. But this post is not to complain about parking revenues. It is to (hopefully) motivate domainers to start developing mini-sites.
For me, mini-sites have been 1000% more profitable than parking, with some names. One of my favorites is SalviaFacts.com. Salvia is a new drug that teens are getting into. As you can see, setting up that site didn’t take much time, or work. But from parking, I made a total of $.02. Over the past week and a half, adsense has earned me a little less than $2. Of course, that is not a lot of money, but it is a major improvement on the 2 cents from parking. Traffic to that site has been steadily increasing, mostly from longtail searches.
The beauty of mini-sites is how fast and easy they are to set up. You can literally set up a mini-site in 10 minutes.
Once you figure out what domain name you want to set up a mini-site on, here is what you need to do:
- Purchase web hosting that allows multiple domains.
I’d suggest using HostGator. - Point your domain name “nameservers” to your host.
- In cPanel, go to “Fantastico”, and automatically set up “WordPress” on your domain name.
- Once WordPress is installed on your domain name, you should find a good looking design.
Personally, I find my themes at FreeWPThemes.net. But a quick google search will provide you with 100’s of other free template sites. - If necessary, you can tweak the template to your liking.
- Once your template is set up, all you need to do is implement AdSense, and add some unique content to your new blogs.
- I would suggest signing up with Google Webmaster Tools, so that you can insure your site gets crawled soon.
- Now you just sit back and watch the money roll in! **
** If only it was that easy 
Keeping up with your mini-sites is important. Google loves to see new content, and if you update your blog once or twice a week, it will help your rankings, and it will also help get traffic from longtail searches.
If you don’t have time to be constantly researching the topic of your mini-sites, I would suggest signing up with Google Alerts. Google Alerts will send you an email however often you select, about the topic you select. It’s extremely helpful for mini-site owners 
Jake Fedosky “15 Year Old Domainer”
TeenDomainer.com
First Salvia is a very very old herb used to meditate.
Anyways, couple what is here with a little bit of link building and focus in on your SEO skills along with UNIQUE content, you are on your way to making $100 a month off one site.
Ross, you are 100% correct.
I forgot to mention that in my article, but unique content is a MUST, or you will not get any attention from search engines.
You should seriously consider signing up with a salvia seller’s affiliate program. The profits on salvia extracts are ridiculous… Will trump those PPC earnings with 1 sale.
That’s a great idea. I thinked about this but i don’t hawe built any minisite. Noew few days ago i descided that i put a minisite on one off my domains and untyl now i get out from it $0 money but i got few subaffiliates. I put only affiliate offers on the site, so i could’t get out money in the past days.
The domain is hxxp://y-e-s.info and it’s gettint a minimum of 50 uniqe pageviews in one day. True that not from search engines but i puted it on few forums and will see. Howewer ther’s not WP on it but the WP is the best while it’s realy seofriendly and extreme customisable.
So domainer’s get some hostings with unlimited addon domain posibility and make minisites …
Thanks!
Strength of minisite coparing to parking page : yes of course. All your advive are very good Jake but you miss something very very important and maybe the most : the content .
If you don’t want your minisites to be blacklisted and disapeared from Google index in few weeks, monthes, and if you realy want to increse your revenu with the long tail : You must have a better and complete view about your minisite content.
My advices :
- NO Duplicate content from other website like wikipedia …. No copy paste
- Original content do not mean that you have to be a writter, but no copy paste, re write wiki content and mix with others sources (minimum 3 mix re write sources if you are not able to invent your own real text)
- At least between 200 and 500 words / page or 15, 20 lines / pages. For 500 lines, no more that 4 external links
- Concerning content you can also find some good free content that you can use : Free pictures
- But never use Free text content or remix and re write it very well.
Others SEO Advice :
- Don’t miss to complete good meta tags for your pages (title , keywords, description)
- Your footer can’t be like a christmas tree (don’t put lot of partner … links)
You can now powered your minisite and also yu can see more advice concerning ergonomy to increase also your Google adsense revenues.
Ruben,
Thanks for the well thought out comment!
You are completely right. I forgot to mention anything about content in my article, but it is necessary. Without unique articles, you can expect to get 0 help from search engines, and you will likely be dropped from search engines completely, or banned from adsense.
You might also mention to the non-native Wordpress user that to put adsense on the site you need to get a wordpress plugin, of which there are several variants. Personally I like Adsense Manager because it has such a wide range of features and allows me to place the content with unique channels and formats
The adsense manager is a huge help, but personally, I just use the WordPress “Theme Editor”, and insert my adcode where I see fit.
I don’t use WordPress or XSitePro I just use http://venturenames.com MFA templates and setup all my 200 domains there. You can switch off the auto articles and simply paste your own content and images, they have lots of templates to choose from too – fast setup and instant AdSense! Cool!
If I might add to this a bit:
1. Find appropriate affiliates and put those ads on the site too.
2. The only outbound links should be ads.
3. Point all relevant domains to your mini site.
Anyone else have any stats comparing parking revenue to mini site revenue?
Is it ALWAYS the most profitable plan?
This is a good strategy as long as you update your Wordpress scripts as security patches become available. It’s not difficult, but it is time consuming and you need to be careful to overwrite the correct files. The same is true of other CMS software like Joomla and Drupal.
Congrats on your revenue.
Totally agree
I earn almost nothing on my domain name www: growingjade.com and I just built a mini site with my huge jade plant and earning more than $5 per day.
Yes, I have the largest jade plant in the world.
Free content from my own personal experience
Its true that parking is a waste of time. What we get is absolutely peanuts. Few articles on website is the way to go.
I’m pleased with the whypark.com platform. Very easy to use for non-technical people like me. You can see a sample at http://www.namecollector.com.
Very easy to customize site and add adsense and other affiliate programs.
I am a big Whypark.com supporter too. (Disclaimer: my employer).
Get a quick site built with content feeds for only $.99 a domain, min. 100 domains ($99). We host em, we provide you adfeeds, although you can insert your own monetization sources exclusively.
A minisite sounds like a good idea but you’ve still got to get visitors, they don’t just turn up by themselves and you’ve still got to update your site. If you’ve got a 100 sites how do you update them all ?
If you have unique content, and a few links coming in, you will very likely see traffic turning up by itself. (from google
)
But like you said, updating 100 minisites would be extremly time consuming,
I would suggest some kind of a plan.
Maybe you update 5 sites per day, so each one of your sites gets a new article once every 20 days.
Or maybe the more popular sites get a new article every week, and the less popular sites get a new article every month.
Just my suggestions
-Jake
You can make it an automatic blog if you want. Thrue that then don’t will be a minisite.
Thanks, great post and great comments.
By the way, Salvia Divinorum is a type of Southwestern and hallucinogenic Sage. (SalviaDivinorum.com is also available).
Finally, @Steve Jenkins, thanks for that tip.
Oh, siteflip.com has hosting plans with good diskspace and bandwidth for only $12/year. I’ve had my goofy personal site with them for years. Very reliable.
Great post – straight to the point – Nice one.
I just want to make one quick note.
Once your site has been parked for a while, doesn’t matter if month’s or years… it is very likely that it has already been penalized by google if not banned… so unless you get a few strong and I mean quality textlinks pointing to your site your newly launched website from on-topic websites it will not rank for anything in the near future. It may get crawled but it will take time to get re-established and once again trusted by google.
Nice little write up though…
Best,
Mike
http://www.wannadevelop.com
That is a very good point.
In this case, I would suggest signing up with Google’s “Webmaster Tools”
You can request that your site be crawled, and I think it would speed up the re-indexing process.
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