Do mini-sites still work?

Definitely mini sites still work! Have tons of them making income every single month. And no, I don't have amazon mini sites, I guess I haven't caught on yet, but regardless my mini sites are my main income, they work, and I believe they'll continue to work for years to come.

That's BS.

You only need one page in order to grab the number one spot for a keyword.

Anyone who tells you different just doesn't understand this.

I have clients with small websites that rank number one for over 100 keywords/phrases.

Don't let what people tell you about search engines determine what size and shape your business should be.

You don't control the search engines and definitely should not make them the focus of your business or you could find your business disappears one night.

Yes, of course mini-sites still work. You can still earn huge income with mini-sites as long as you did it right.

Yes, they still work. Actually they work best as a foundation for a larger site or network.

What I mean is that you can get in to a lot of different niches with a low cost of entry with mini sites, then figure out which niches & keywords are producing for you and scale up from there.

For example, if you had 10 minisites you may net (on average) 2 performers (the 80/20 rule). Those winning niches could have the potential to be developed in to an authority site or more minisites and having already vetted the keywords you can justify dedicating more effort, time & money on those.

In other words, I would look at minisites as an easy way to "taste" keywords & niches to find out what deserves more attention and further development.

Hey quatto,

I'll try to answer all of your un-related questions:

1) A good exact phrase search count is pretty subjective. You can do some math though to check. Lets say best case scenario is 1% conversion rate. If your keyword has 1000 searches per month and you get 100 visitors from that search, you will make 1 sale. If your selling something that costs 3 million dollars then it's pretty good, if not you might need a different keyword.

2) Of course you should still go for it! It will take a little longer to compete for the #1 spot with aged websites, but if you are patient you can reach it in less than 6 months.

Hope that helps.

how does a one page sites rank top Google? by getting more backlinks?

Yep I have a few mini sites targeting one product and making money on autopilot, so if definitely does still work!

Made $240 on one such site and havent touched it for months.

We've had some good luck with mini-sites for feeding our larger money-makers. Where you can't always land the keyword from the big site, the mini-sites can often land them if they're focused on that word.

You will have to distinguish between "buying" keywords (people search for a product), and "info" keyword (people search for information), and have to treat them different whichever one you into.
Often the long tailed keywords, are more product specific (Nike Air Max 90), but not always.
There is a free keyword tool out there, and its free right now, called Keyword Hunter, that CAN distinguish between the to types.

Tom

Sure they work, but I think it's more important to focus on your business strategy and growing your business as a whole.

Just trying to "make money" on the internet with 1 page sites in a bunch of different niches isn't the type of business I'm personally comfortable with.

I'm focusing my efforts on delivering value to people and building my business around helping a certain group of people achieve the goals they're after.

Interestingly enough, I just had a student who inquired about the authority site vs. mini-site debate! Anyways, without a doubt, I've found that you're much better off building a bunch of mini-sites than 1 authority site.

The nice thing with mini-sites is that you can go after both category and product keywords with each site. So with one site, you can be ranking high on google for multiple keyword phrases.

And it is very doable! If you are comfortable with Wordpress or HTML, you can build up a nice base of mini-sites in a short period of time! You can go after way more keyword phrases in the same time that it would take to build 1 authority site.

What you describe would be a mid-level stradegy which would work, sure. If the 1st page competition is only PR3 or less and the backlinks to the top 10 pages are reasonably beatable, then you can realistically rank for your main term.

An exact match domain would get you there faster and with less work initially, although adding a word will work too - it just takes more effort / time.

You are correct that all that really matters is the strength of the competition - you will have to meet or beat them. Also, it is helpful to know if they have any authority backlinks like a Yahoo directory listing or DMOZ listing. Market Samurai will tell you this, if you have this tool. Otherwise you can scan the quality of their backlinks manually with Yahoo explorer.

If they have a lot of authority site backlinks, homepage backlinks, or other links that will take you time or money to replicate (yahoo dir & dmoz), then you have some work cut out for you since you will have to make up for it in volume. If the backlinks are from profiles, article directories, web 2.0's & the like then you shouldn't have a problem "meeting & beating" them.

It really comes down to how fast you want to see results & how much work you are willing to put in before you see results. If you are eager for some success, I'd lean towards a smaller site dedicated to a single product that has good enough search volume, exact match domain available, and little competition. If you are willing to work away at it and wait for results, then absolutely go ahead with the category level site assuming a closer look at the competition's backlinks checks out ok.

One other point to consider (and I know that I am reiterating this again, but it bears repeating) - you can't know for sure that "garage sump pumps" (I know it not the real KW) is profitable. There's no way to know for sure until you try it which is why testing out a niche with a laser focused microsite can be a good idea.

Ive come across many keywords that I thought for sure would make big bucks only to find out that for whatever reason these products just don't sell or the Adsense ads in a niche just don't pay what I was expecting based on the data. It happens - lots actually. The best way to know if a niche is worth all of that time & effort is to attack a very small piece of the pie (single longtail kw or single product microsite) before you spend months on a site that may or may not reward your efforts.

Just something to consider, because it can be discouraging when it happens but is completely normal. You can sort of spread out your risk with small small sites to test and build more from there based upon what is actually making you money.

As for what to build in the way of pages on a category level minisite, I'd go with both reviews and longtail keyword focused articles. This would give you the most chances to rank as well as help your site be less of a "thin" affiliate site. In general, you should have no more than 1 - 3 (tightly related) keywords per page that you are optimizing for. Take the extra time to do a really good job with content & on-page optimization because this will give you one extra advantage over the competition.

They work for the moment you dont hit the google filters or their algorithms. Once you hit that you see many of them losing out on rankings. But if you see gogole panda update, the sites that are now on first page have the keyword in their domain.

So all i can guess is that with google being very smart--- the purpose with whihc site has been made decides its life.

It's all about conversion ratios in my opinion. How many targeted hits would you have to send your sponsor before it converts? I'm in adult so I can often get this information easily - because they tell you. In setting up Amazon product sites, you can only spend a lot of money on PPC to test and come up with a conversion ratio.

As of now though, I only go after a keyword if I can get the .com .net .org and it has at least 8k in monthly exact traffic. This way I can at least send 50 uniques a day to my sponsor. But I'm aiming to have 50 sites generating 2-4 sales a month each so I don't do the "one main site" thing.

I did not like messing with Amazon crap, myself. The commissions were pathetic. I'd rather make $35 per sale.

single page minisite still outsells social media when it comes to selling on the Internet.

Mini-sites work! They will continue to work forever, but only if it provides quality and USEFUL content to the visitors. So dont make things easier by copying content. Write your own stuff and update your blog once in 10 days or so for 2 months.

A minisite is not a website that has just 1 piece of copied content. It is a site that focuses only on 1 keyword. So please update content whenever you can and keep it original.

Nobody ever start with authority sites right away.

You start with mini sites, and build the winners out.

Mini sites still work well. Long-term authority sites are always going to win out. As @uniches posted above most people don't start of with authority sites. You just need to build it out. I like to go for sites to have at least 100 indexed pages, blog posts etc.

This thread is good! Quatto has found his answer though and I believe doing well so far with his ventures at the AMZ Academy.

Personally I'm going to have product number sites all linking to a niche review site for those products

Chris

The more authority your site has the more you will rank and the easier it will be to rank other pages that you add to the site. So I highly would recommend building out an authority site.

Interesting to see that this thread is still active. I posted in it last year.

We have several mini sites. We take the ones that are performing the best and optimize those. That's been a strategy that's been working. For example, we have "gifts for hairdressers" (we're in the gift business). It was performing well on it's own before we really did much with it and we were getting some sales from it, so we started with that and built on it then significantly increased those sales. Then we moved onto the next better-performing site. By the way, that site is on the first page of Google and it's got a zero page rank.

For me mini sites still work, too. But you have to do what it takes to rank them. Most of the time this is the expensive part. After this, of course, you can pick the best and scale them up.

I have a question on mini-sites vs. authority sites? When does a site stop being a mini-site and become an authority site? Say for example you ordered an Adsense site from a provider on Warrior and it came with 10 unique articles. Over time, you write another 10 articles on the topic. Is it still a mini-site? If so, how many articles would it take not to be a mini-site any more?