Minisite Development
Domain development has been a very hot topic in the domain name world recently. One thing I’ve seen many domainers confused about is what exactly qualifies as a website and what qualifies as a minisite. When it comes to domainer-developers — those domainers developing domains, I would categorize most of the domains and all of the products offered by domain development companies aside from custom web design as being a minisite — generally not a very good one either. Calling a 5 page minisite a website is a joke — I can put up a 5 page minisite inside of a day if I wanted to and certainly wouldn’t think anything done so quickly qualifies as being anything more than a minisite. Don’t get me wrong — there’s nothing wrong with minisites and I certainly wouldn’t want to pay a web developer $XXXX+ to develop a domain which isn’t even worth that much unless I had big plans. This article discusses the benefits of minisites, the types of minisites, a comparison between paid minisites to free minisites, and goes on to explain why you best choose your web developer carefully.
MFA Minisites < Quality Minisites
You know the easiest way to rank high in the SERPs? Content — lots and lots of good content, along with a good link building strategy. Have you ever built a minisite using Adsense on a domain that was previously parked? You know as well as I do that your revenue generally goes down per impression — the only way to compensate for the lower click-through rate on a Made For Adsense minisite is to drive more traffic to the site. If you increase traffic by 100% but the clickthrough rate drops by 50%, you’ve made nothing. MFA minisites really aren’t usually much better than a parked domain and are *worse* most of the time for domains getting a lot of type-in traffic (which is now converting less frequently to clicks). How many people are going to bookmark an MFA minisite? How many people are going to link to it or tell their friends and family about it?
But a minisite need not be a MFA minisite. You can have a minisite that’s 5 pages long and high in the SERPs because it has quality content that people are more than willing to link to. There’s no way most people could put out a quality minisite inside of a day — depending on what one considers quality, one might even think a week would be a short period of time to put out a minisite with 5 pages.
The one thing I would think carefully about however is the future. You can SEO a domain all day if you want, however there’s no guarantee you’ll derive any value from that in the future. Good content and quality inbound links seem like the only sure bets. At the end of the day, the future looks a lot more promising for quality minisites than it does for MFA minisites. A MFA minisite has only 2 ways to get traffic — direct navigation and search engines. If your domain gets little type-in traffic, you’re now only one algorithm change away from losing everything you’ve built.The great thing about quality websites and minisites is that you no longer depend on Google. I get around 70% of this blog’s traffic from direct navigation and inbound links — Google could take me right out of the SERPs and I would expect to still receive 70% of the traffic I was previously receiving. Who the hell wants to be Google’s slave, doing whatever their master tells them for fear of not being able to put food on the table lest they disobey him? I get 1/3rd as much traffic from Twitter alone as I do from Google, so tweet-worthy content on a minisite can very easily make up for any shortcomings in the SERPs.
I’m a big fan of niche minisites — minisites built around very specific topics. Domain development for example is a very broad topic — something that thousands of pages of content could be written around. Less broad would be SEO — it’s part of the domain development process. We could then choose a topic from the field of SEO (eg. link building) and write a minisite about that. The more specific we get, the easier it’ll be to cover our chosen topic to the extent necessary that our minisite could become a valuable resource to people wanting information about that topic.
Free Domain Development vs Paid Domain Development
Stephen Douglas has done a great job promoting Whypark as not only an alternative to parking domains but also to paying steep minisite prices. I honestly think domainers would be better off most of the time using Whypark or another domain development platform such as Noomle rather than buying minisites. If you’re not satisfied with the results from one of these free services, you can always pay the $250 afterwards and see if a minisite from one of these domain development companies makes a difference. Starting your domain’s development using a free domain development platform should help you see whether any further development will likely be profitable or not. A lot of domainers seem to think developing their domains is some sort of domain parking panacea. Your domains making $0 parked aren’t likely going to start making $20/month parked just because you put up a few pages of content. There are a few things you may get from hiring a minisite development company to develop your domain that you wouldn’t get using a free domain development platform — link building for example. However, would you be better off going with a minisite development company or using Whypark to develop your domain and then hiring someone else to do your link building? Hard to say. One unfortunate thing is the lack success stories from all the domain development companies — aside from Whypark and Noomle, I really haven’t heard much about any of the others. Show me 100 domains you’ve developed, tell me how much the buyer was making before and after and any success you’ve had ranking sites high in the SERPs on reasonably competitive terms.
You can get excellent copywriters for 5 cents per word — five pages of 500 words is only $125, so if you’re charging me $250, what am I getting for the other $125 that’s any better than what I can get for free over at Whypark or Noomle? Some of these domain development companies aren’t building sites any better than you could do for free on Whypark, aside from the unique content and a custom header for your website. So when it’s all said and done, you’re basically paying $125 for the header, seeing as someone would have been happy to set the rest up, along with the unique content for you on Whypark for half that $250. I don’t know about you however I know more than a few competent web designers that’ll be willing to make a nice header for $25. It’s really not a very time consuming task — especially when we’re talking about a header for a minisite…
Mike Cohen from DomainMassDevelopment.com is currently running a special of 20 domains for $999. The thing I like about Mike’s domain mass development service, aside from the price is that he makes it very clear that satisfaction is guaranteed or you get your money back — when minisite development companies cost so much more than doing it yourself through Whypark or Noomle, I think it’s important that they guarantee satisfaction. Not only is it nice to have that guarantee, however it also makes you know they’re going to try their best to meet your expectations. I checked out a couple other domain development companies and couldn’t find any sort of guarantee on their sites — that’s a mistake in my opinion. Not only can you not find guarantees, however product offerings are often vague at best. What exactly is link building? If I asked 100 different people, I’d probably get 100 different answers because there are over 100 different ways to build links — so which is this domain development company using? One domain development company says they do forum posting — that isn’t link building on a nofollow forum and with how many links are everywhere in a forum, a dofollow link in a forum isn’t link building either. Directory posting… You’re kidding me right? I thought that stuff died with the dinosaurs in like 1999. Get into a few quality, selective directories like DMOZ by building a quality website. I’m not going to pay anyone to spam links to my websites on a link farm that at best won’t do my site any good and at worst might get my site penalized in the SERPs.
Blog Commenting
Blog commenting.. No mention of whether these comments are on nofollow blogs or dofollow blogs, no mention of what blogs they’ll be targeting and if they’re even relevant to your minisite. There’s no mention of link popularity and no mention about whether they’re using automated software or a published dofollow blog list to find these dofollow blogs which would mean blog posts would probably have 50+ other comments on them and hence, offer very little link juice for your site. There’s no mention of whether these are quality, well thought out blog comments or spam that you’d be embarrassed to have your site linked to, and lastly, there’s no mention of the number of blog comments they’ll be making.
Link building and SEO according to domainers
Social bookmarking? Submitting bookmarks to unpopular dofollow social bookmarking websites is hardly link building. Article marketing? You mean like writing articles and submitting them to a site like Ezine Articles? That’s for noobs who have no better way of getting traffic to their site. The thing is, most domainers make for terrible developers — their SEO techniques might have worked well in 1999 but they won’t work well today. Many outdated web developers all still caught up in that more links > less links mentality. This blog had zero link building done and has PR 4 and plenty of search engine traffic. Why? Because the limited number of links I do have are mostly quality links — as in, links from other domain name blogs and reputable websites. Some of these domain development companies have made laughable mistakes in the on-page SEO of their own websites — you’d think they’d make sure their own site was properly SEO’d! I’ve said many times that I’m no expert on SEO and I’m certainly no expert on domain development… But guess what? I’m not the one going around offering domain development services passing myself off as one. I’m not the one telling domainers about how important SEO is and that their domain development package along with their expert SEO will get you more search engine traffic than you can imagine…
Domaining and webmastering are 2 very different things and there aren’t a whole lot of people out there thoroughly experienced in both. Unlike the real world, people can pretend to be whoever they want online and with the limited transparency that exists in this industry, there are a lot of pretenders. “Domain developer” isn’t a regulated term — anyone can call themselves a domain developer. Just because someone is a good domainer doesn’t mean they’ll make a great web developer and conversely, being a great web developer doesn’t necessarily mean you’d be a great domainer. If I wanted SEO advice, I’d go see someone who specializes in SEO. If I wanted help with link building, I’d go see someone who specializes in link building. If I wanted a domain broker or domain consultant, I’d go see someone who brokers domains or offers domain consulting. If I want a web developer, I’m going to go see someone who specializes in web development. See where I’m going with this? A Jack of all trades is a master of none. If you don’t mind having an “average” job done across all aspects of domain development, by all means find yourself a Jack. Hopefully he knows more than jack shit.
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June 20th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Hi Reece,
Very nice article, I agree with much of it. I’ve recently got into minisite development and am interested in testing out the various free/’cheap’ sites like WhyPark, etc.
I’m a web developer myself so wouldn’t pay to get a minisite developed, although this article makes for some interesting reading/thought and I’ll definitely try out services like WhyPark.
June 20th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Hi Tristan,
Thanks for stopping by. I’ve tested Whypark out a bit myself but really haven’t used it to the extent I want to in the future. It really is an excellent platform to develop domains on and if you don’t mind writing your own unique content, makes a great alternative for minisite development.
June 21st, 2009 at 2:34 am
This whole link building is very interesting Reece, as a novice with not a lot of knowledge of the ins and outs it would be great if you did a full post on link building, do’s and dont’s, what works and what is going to hurt the seo of a website. Great article here.
June 21st, 2009 at 10:05 am
Thanks Ray — I’ll make a note to get that done
June 21st, 2009 at 11:14 am
I too have been caught up in the mini-site hype. Luckily for me, my natural sense of caution (or cheapness) allowed me to experiment with only two paid mini-site providers. Both experiences have been disturbing to say the least and perhaps fraudulent to say the most.
Right from the beginning where I submitted a keyword name with over 18000 “exact” searches per month this mini-site company states that their tools are showing much lower results but that my name “makes the cut”. This set off alarm bells in my head immediately. So many scammers in other fields have the “exclusivity” factor in their pitches ie; not everyone can get in, or it’s not for everyone - but you make the cut!
So far after 70 days this site has not made 30 cents while a similar name at Whypark has had substantially more traffic and more than triple the revenue in only 45 days.
My other experience was with an Indian company that decided that the city of Philadelphia was a western state. Complete waste of money.
I think it is crucial to every domainer to realize that no one is going to do their hard work for them and they must learn to develop themselves.
In the meantime, services like Whypark and Noomle provide a solid bridge.
June 21st, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Hi Chris,
Can I ask - what was ‘wrong’ with the site you had developed from the first company?
An interesting experience you’ve had
Was the coding bad, content bad, etc?
As you say, though, it’s always best to learn how to develop websites yourself.
June 21st, 2009 at 2:32 pm
I don’t think the content is very relevant on the first site. Either are the ads. The banner ads on the site are for asian girls. The domain is map related. Their directory submissions they reported went in most cases to directories that specifically exclude MFA sites and they were all no follow directories creating not a single backlink.
As far as I can tell the coding is fine (I’m a beginner).
I promised myself I would give them 90 days to evaluate what they do before committing any other names or money, but I already know I’ll never use them again.
This particular site has no chance of recouping the $250 fee in the first year or ever, until I properly develop it myself.
June 21st, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Hi Chris,
Thank you for sharing your experience. If most domainers spent 1/4 the time learning about domain development that they spend on social networks, instant messengers, and domain forums, they’d be more than capable of properly developing their own domains in my opinion. Whypark and Noomle really are a solid bridge as you said. Domainers could even use a blog theme like “ProSense” which already comes set up for adsense. Wordpress is a nice platform to test development skills because of how much you can do with it.
June 21st, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Reece,
I don’t mind sharing my experiences at all. In fact I hope it convinces someone not to spend the $250.
Thanks for the tip about “ProSense”. I am putting a server together end of this month to really give Wordpress a thorough going over by completely redesigning 2 or 3 dozen of my sites.
Thanks for letting me vent.
June 21st, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Hi Chris,
No problem at all — we can all learn plenty from listening to the experiences of others. All the best with the Wordpress sites!
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:02 am
Hi Reece,
Thanks for the kind comments about my efforts to promote Whypark, you took me by surprise. I read your whole article and you hit so many points perfectly I’m thinking “man, why doesn’t Reece try out 10 domains on WHYPARK and push it to the limit?” You can do that for less than $50 a month. I’d like to see your results.
Why don’t I do that myself? Because I’m spread so thin, I have so many projects that should be in the can and aren’t, I’m beating my head against the wall. I really need to just break down and hire two assistants and a programmer to work full time, but then, the employee regulations in just doing that will saddle me for a few weeks. I have clients I have to help achieve success, and their great variety of issues helps me learn more and more about this industry and its future. However, for the domainer focused only on their domains and their monetization, Whypark provides the tools and inexpensive services to achieve incredible websites for those who are focused and believe in their domains.
I can tell you that my domains I have at WHYPARK are ONLY DOMAINS THAT MAKE NO REVENUE OR TYPEINS AT TRADITIONAL PARKING SERVICES. So when people ask “well, how much are you making at Whypark?” they say it as if they expect a gold mine to occur within a month of parking there. My answer is “I have domains that are now indexed by google and other SE’s that weren’t because I had them parked at PS’s. In fact, I made $.76 on a domain that made nothing three months ago”. That sound kinda funny, and even weak, except that this domain is indexed, and starting to make money when it wasn’t before. I love the domain, or I would have let it expire. That’s what WhyPark is about, putting your favorite domains into a position of growth when parking them provided you nothing for them. And now Whypark is FREE. That’s the magic word for domainers!
Whypark, like other great content development services, AEIOU.com, NoParking.com, Cohen’s Massdomaindevelopment.com, Devhub, Minisites.com and others, are only giving you the concrete foundation in which to build your masterpiece architecture of a successful website. If you just let it sit, maybe it will bring in rev, but you should be making the attempt to use the tools, and services, of any domain development site to give the visitor the most out of their visit. Reece, I know you and other domainers who understand domain website development agree on this point. You can’t just place a domain, throw a few dollars at it, and then expect big results. BUT, you need to start somewhere, and there are more than a few services (mentioned above) in which to do that.
Bottom line, parking a domain that gets no typeins, but is clearly a generic descriptive domain, or even an LLLL.com or actually any memorably domain in ANY EXTENSION (cctlds, sld’s, gtlds, TLDs, IDN’s etc) has a chance to make revenue from OST (Organic Search Traffic) if the owner BELIEVES in the domain, has prodservs that reach a market, and then regularly brings current and valuable info to that website.
We all know what Amazon.com is, but the domain has nothing to do with selling prodservs of every type, which it does. However, they were the first to use the viral affiliate program in order to grow, and it WORKED for them. What about eBay? What the hell is that domain name? It’s a domain name that was created as an LLLL.com and the “significance” was the “e” “bay” where an imaginary electronic harbor of ships trading were docked. They spent a lot of money making that company known, and its biz model spread fast. No more needs to be said.
This is possible for anyone with a good idea, dedication, focus, funds, and the ability to express that idea to reach ALL the possible visitors within their niche market (and if you’re lucky, the wide open wild market of populous trending).
Usually, I would write this much info on my own blog and get the traffic myself (!!!!!), but Reece, you did such a good job writing about this subject, and giving me some cred, I owe this much back. Everyone who knows me knows if you’re with me, I fight hard for you. Varangian oath… I’m sworn to follow them.
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:44 am
Good article. I pretty much agree with everything, except for the “Mike Cohen and DomainMassDevelopment.com” part.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Hi Stephen,
Thanks for your kind words and taking the time to write such a great comment.
You’ve been an inspiration to me and no doubt countless other domainers, encouraging us to do more with our domains than just park them. I’ve tested out Whypark a bit (enough to be confident that it would be a great choice for visitors here) and definitely plan on building some sites with it in the future.
I know a lot of domainers were making more with Whypark than they were parking their domains even before Whypark was purchased by Parked.com and with Domain Name Wire having recently reported that domainers are now earnings as much as 10 times more with Whypark today than they were before it’s purchase by Parked.com, there really hasn’t ever been a better time to give it a try.