Today,  I am publishing my first eBook titled “How to Make Money from a Mini website”. This eBook is a compilation of blog posts that I wrote at this blog. In this eBook I provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to make money online using Google AdSense and Mini Websites. I sincerely hope that you’ll find this eBook useful and will be able to benefit from it. Please pass this eBook to your friends who are interested in making money online.

Download Link

To Your Success.

Aaron

Go to Part 7

This is the final part in this series. In this part we look at how to configure Wordpress to make your Mini Website more search engine friendly.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

It is important to choose a search engine friendly URL structure for your Mini Website. One of the most SEO friendly URL structure is to simply use the name of the Wordpress post as the URL. For example, if your post name is called “How to Remove Stains in Carpets” then your URL structure will be something like “http://HomeCarpetCleaning.com/how-to-remove-stains-in-carpets/”.

Simply follow the instruction below to change the URL structure of your Wordpress based Mini Website.

1. Log into Wordpress
2. Select Settings –> Permalinks
3. Under Custom Settings in the Custom Structure field enter the value “/%postname%/” (excluding quotes)

That’s it. Now you have a search engine friendly URL.

Removing Multiple Posts from the Front Page

By default a Wordpress website always shows more that 1 post in the front page of the website. Ideally what we want is to show the best and most appropriate article in the front page. This is easily done with the following setting:

1. Log into Wordpress
2. Select Settings –> Reading
3. Set the value of the field Blog pages show at most to 1
4. To show the most appropriate article or post in the front page of your website, set the date of the post to the most recent date.

Using Multiple Tags

In order to get more pages indexed by Google, add multiple tags to your posts. For each new tag you add, Wordpress will create a new page for that tag. This means your website will have more pages indexed in Google.

Ending Note

Well that is the end of this series. I sincerely hope that you found this series useful. Soon I’ll be publishing this series as an eBook. Visit techthinker.com for more updates.

Go to Part 6

Building Links to Your Mini Website

In this part we will look at the link building process for your Mini Website. The efforts you have put on your site so far will be pretty much useless unless you start building links to your site. Link building will enable your Mini Website to rank well in Google searches bringing you more traffic. More traffic means more money!

There are number of ways to build links to your site.

1. Commenting on dofollow blogs

Many blogs allow you to link to your website when commenting on them. In most cases the link to your website does not bring you any SEO benefits. This is because most of the time the link to your website is specified as a nofollow link. The nofollow attribute informs Google that the author of the blog does not want Google to follow that link. Bloggers who belong to the dofollow movement believe that some link love should be passed to your website because you commented in their blogs. Therefore, dofollow blogs do not use the nofollow attribute. By commenting on dofollow blogs you can get inbound links that Google will follow bringing you SEO benefits. For more details on how to find dofollow blogs please read my article titled “Commenting smart on dofollow blogs”.

2. Article Marketing

By writing articles and submitting them to article directories you can get valuable back links to your website. Usually an article is published along with a byline or author bio where you can link to your Mini Website. There are number of article directories. The one I use is EzineArticles.com.

3. Link Exchanges

If you have friends who have blogs or websites ask them for a link exchange. If you do not have any online friends it is time to make some! Go to popular blogs or forums in your niche. Leave comments and interact with others in the forums. Once you have made some friends you could ask them for a link exchange.

4. Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites allow you to submit a webpage. When a webpage from your Mini Website is submitted to a bookmarking site a link is created to your website. Popular bookmarking sites include Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon.

5. Directory Submissions

Submit your Mini Website to directories. There are number of free web directories where you can submit your website details. You want to make sure that you are building links to your Mini Website from good and trustworthy directories. When looking for a free web directory look for one that has a good page rank, good Alexa ranking and lot of back links.

Note: During the link building process try to get more links from websites that are in your niche. Google gives more value to a link when it is from a website that is related to your website’s topic. Many SEO experts also believe that few links from very high ranking website is much preferred than lot of back links from low ranking websites. Remember, link building is not a one day activity, it’s an ongoing process. You have to be patient during this process until you get your website to the number one position in Google for your chosen keywords. If you quit early you will not reap the maximum profits from your Mini Website.

In part 8, we will wrap up this series by providing Wordpress tips to make your site more SEO friendly.

Go to Part 8

Go to Part 5

Creating Content for Your Mini Website

In this part we look at the content creation process for your Mini Website. I recommend that you create at least 10 to 15 articles with each article containing around 300 – 500 words. It is important that your website has reasonably good quality content. Otherwise Google may not approve your application when you sign up for AdSense. When writing the article make sure you are paying attention to the placement of keywords. For more information on keyword placement please read my post titled “10 Spots to Stick your Keyword”. I would recommend an average keyword density of 2%. Your keyword placement should be natural as possible. Forcing keywords can reduce the quality of your content.

Now that you have created the content for your website, signup for the Google AdSense program. Go to https://www.google.com/adsense and click the “Sign up now” button and follow the easy to follow instructions. It is important that you signup for AdSense only after creating and publishing the content on your Mini Website. This is because when you sign up for AdSense you will be asked to enter the URL of your website. If your website in not fully developed, Google may reject your application. But don’t worry, you should be fine with 10 average quality articles.

In part 7 we will look at the process of Link Building which is very important to bring traffic to your website.

Go to Part 4

Choosing a Domain Name and a Web Host

In this part, I look at the process of selecting a domain name and a web host for your Mini Website.

When you choose a domain name for your Mini Website choose a name that will match your keyword phrase. In our example we chose the keywords “Home Carpet Cleaning”, therefore, we should go with the domain “HomeCarpetCleaning.com”. If the .com version is already registered try a name with hyphens, for example, “Home-Carpet-Cleaning.com”. If the hyphened version of the domain name is not available, try another TLD such as .net or .org. If the .net and .org TLDs are taken as well, then you may need to consider a domain name with a prefix or a suffix. For example, “GoodHomeCarpetCleaning.com” or “HomeCarpetCleaningTips.com”.

Make sure that your keywords “Home Carpet Cleaning” stay together. It is very important that your keywords should be present in the right order in your domain name. For example, the domain name “CleaningCarpetHome.com” will not do you any good. Google tends to favour websites that have the search keywords present in the domain name in the right sequence.

Once you have chosen your domain name, you need to find a hosting service to host your website. I use HostGator for my web hosting needs and I am very happy with the level of service provided by HostGator. Make sure the Hosting Company provides the CPanel software preinstalled for your account. Using CPanel you can easily install a Wordpress blog. Once you have bought your web hosting package, you can install Wordpress on your blog. For more information on installing Wordpress on your blog read this article.

The reason I recommend Wordpress as the platform for your website is because there are number of Google AdSense optimized Wordpress themes that you can readily use for your Mini Website. By using Wordpress as the software platform for your website, you can concentrate on creating the content for your Mini Website, instead of worrying about how to design and code a website. My favourite Google AdSense optimized Wordpress theme is ProSense. This theme is very well designed and the theme developer has given a lot of thought to the placement of Google Ads. I have seen really good improvement in my AdSense Click Through Rates after moving to the ProSense theme.

In part 6, we’ll look at the process of creating actual content for your Mini Website.

A reader of this blog, who uses Google AdSense to monetize his blog, emailed me the following question:

I've had 3 clicks and yet zero dollars. Is that normal? My IT guy tells me that Google takes a while to evaluate things before allocating money but I just want to confirm.

Here’s my answer to this question.

There are 2 reasons why you may have a zero dollar value against your clicks.

(1). Google thinks the clicks are invalid.

If you happen to click you own ads or if someone clicked from a computer on a Local Area Network (example at work) where you have logged in to check your AdSense revenue, then Google will consider the click invalid. The reader also mentioned that he did not click his own ads. This leads us to the second reason.

(2). CPC vs CPM

The AdSense program has two types of ads. CPC ads that are paid on a per click basis (thus the name Cost Per Click) and CPM adds that are paid based on 1000 page impressions. CPM stands for Cost Per Millie. Millie is the Latin word for thousand. For CPM ads the publisher is paid each time the ad is displayed on a page. This means when a user clicks on a CPM ad there is no payment made to you, even though Google reports that click. There are CPM ads that are priced at very low rates, for example 50 cents for 1000 page impressions. This means when an ad is displayed on a page you earn 50/1000 = .05 cents. Google does not report any earnings under 1 cent. Google will keep track of these earning and will display them once the accumulated earnings reaches a cent.

Therefore it is perfectly normal to have Clicks and no dollars against the click.

Go to Part 3

Calculating the Income Potential of Your Keyword Phrase

In this part, we will look at how to calculate the income potential of the keywords that we chose in part 3. In part 3, we chose to optimize our Mini Website for the phrase “Home Carpet Cleaning”. So let us do some number crunching to find out how much money we can make from our Mini Website.

The average search volume of the phrase “Home Carpet Cleaning” is 14,800 searches per month. With proper SEO and link building you can rank your Mini Website on the number 1 position in Google for this phrase.

If your website appears in the number 1 position in Google you can expect around 56% of searchers will click on your link in the Google search results. How did I arrive at the magic number of 56%. Well, this is based on a study by Cornell University that used eye tracking technology to find what percentage of users will click on the first position of Google results. It is interesting to note only 13% and 9% of users clicked on the 2nd and 3rd position of Google results.

Based on the above percentages and assuming our website will be ranked in the number 1 position, we can recalculate the number of visits per month as follows:

Number of Visits  = 14, 800 (Avg Search Volume) * .56 =  8288 visits

Out of the 8288 visits per month not everyone will click the ads. If you have placed your ads in the proper locations on your Mini Website, on average you should be able to get 5% of the visitors to click on your ads. Therefore the number of clicks is calculated as follows:

Number of clicks = 8288 * .05 = 415 clicks (approx)

So how much money will you earn per click? The phrase “Home Carpet Cleaning” has an average CPC of $4. On average we can expect Google to pay us 20% of the CPC value when an ad is clicked. The average earnings per click can be calculated as follows:

Average Earnings Per Click = Avg CPC * 20%

4 * .2 = 80 cents per click.

So the total monthly income will be

Number of Clicks * Average Earnings Per Click  = 415 * .8 = $332 per month!

Not bad, after all this is nearly passive income!

In Part 5, we’ll look at how to select a Domain Name and a Web Host for your Mini Website.

Go to Part 5

Go to Part 2

Choosing a Niche

The first step in creating a Mini Website is to choose a niche. When it comes to choosing a niche for a Mini Website, your passion is NOT the most important thing. You have to find a niche that is profitable and one in which you have reasonable knowledge. You can find the profitability of a niche by doing some basic keyword research using the Google AdWords Tool.

Let’s assume that you have some basic knowledge about Carpet Cleaning and you want to create a Mini Website on this niche. So let’s examine this niche to see whether it’s a profitable one.

The Estimated Average CPC and Advertiser Competition columns in the AdWords Tool will give you a general idea on the profitability of a niche. For example, the keywords “Carpet Cleaning” have 100% Advertiser Competition and the Estimated Average CPC is around $6. The global monthly volume for this nice is around a million searches! Everyone wants to keep their carpets clean so it is no wonder that this niche is popular. But this does not mean you pick the keywords “carpet cleaning” and build a SEO optimized Mini Website around these keywords. In this next section we’ll look at how to pick the right keywords for this niche.

Picking the Right Keywords

The profitability of a keyword is determined by the following 3 factors:

1. Traffic

Traffic is the search volume of a given keyword. The Global Monthly Search Volume column in the Keywords Tool is a good indicator for this factor. But higher traffic does not always mean the keyword will bring you profits. Sometimes a keyword has a large search volume and virtually no advertiser competition. So simply there is no value in targeting that keyword because it does not generate income.

2. Money

The term money refers to the amount of money advertisers are willing to pay for a given keyword. The Estimated Average CPC column is a good indicator of how much money the keyword can make. Some keywords are very sought after by advertisers compared to others. So you might think that picking a keyword with a large search volume and one that makes money is the best option. But looking at only these 2 factors is not good enough. This leads us to the third and most important factor.

3. Competition

For example the keyword “Carpet Cleaning” is searched 1,000,000 times per month in Google, while the word “Carpet Maintenance” is search only 3,600 times. At first glace “Carpet Cleaning” seems to be a great keyword than “Carpet Maintenance”. But this is not always true. The keyword “Carpet Cleaning” is very popular so there will be many websites that are already targeting this keyword. A rough measurement of competition is the number of pages Google finds when you search for that keyword. For example the term “Carpet Cleaning” is found on 14,400,000 pages! This indicates high competition.

So the idea is to pick keywords that have less completion and one that can make decent amount of money as well. This means the search volume of the keyword will be relatively low.

For example, the phrase “Home Carpet Cleaning” is searched 14,800 times a month and has an estimated average CPC of around $4. This phrase also has a very healthy advertiser competition. This keyword phrase may be suitable for your Mini Website.

In Part 4, we will do some number crunching to see how much money we can make by optimizing our Mini Website for the phrase “Home Carpet Cleaning”.

Go to Part 4

Go to Part 1

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

In this part, we will look at the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Google provides this tool for advertisers to create effective ad campaigns. But as content providers and publishers we can also use this tool to perform the keyword selection for our Mini Website. The main objective of Part 2 is to learn the basic concepts of the Keyword Tool. The process of keyword selection for our mini website will be discussed in Part3.

To access the AdWords Keyword Tool go to the following location:  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Once you are in the Keyword Tool page, you can enter your keyword phrase. Let us assume that you are interested in creating a website about carpet cleaning. So naturally you will enter the keywords “Carpet Cleaning”. Once you have entered the keywords, press the “Get keywords idea” button to get a list of similar keywords for the phrase you entered.

If you are using the Keyword Tool for the first time, you may also have to fill in the Captcha text. Google wants to make sure that you are human and not an automated program that might overload the Google servers with repeated keyword requests.

Once you submit your keywords, the tool will show you a list of related keywords with various details. By default only a certain columns are shown in the result set. To display all the columns select the option Show All from Choose columns to display dropdown.

Let us look at the important columns and see what they really mean.

The keywords column displays related keywords for your search phrase (“Carpet Cleaning”). You can see Google suggesting keywords such as “carpet steam cleaning” and “carpet cleaning machines”.

Estimated Avg. CPC column shows the average cost of clicking an Ad for the given keywords.

Advertiser Competition column shows how popular are the keywords among advertisers.

Local Search Volume column shows the number of times the keyword was searched in your country for the current month. The local country by default is the United States. You can change this setting near the top of the Keyword Tool page.

Global Monthly Search Volume column shows the number of times the keyword was searched around the world for the current month.

Search Volume Trends column shows the keyword search volume for the last 12 months.

In the next part we’ll look at how to use the data from the Keywords Tool to make intelligent choices on keyword selection for our Mini Website.

Go to Part 3

Part 1

In this series, I give you step by step instructions on how to create a mini website and make regular monthly income from Google AdSense. There are Mini Websites that make couple of thousands of dollars every month! While this kind of income is achievable you have to work very hard towards it. Realistically speaking $100 per month is the average. $100 per month does not look like a great income. But once you have successfully implemented one mini website, you can easily replicate the same technique to create more sites. This series is composed of 7 parts. Today in Part 1, I look at why Mini Websites are a great source of passive income.

If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to leave a comment.

What is a Mini Website?

A Mini Website is one that has content on a very narrow topic or niche. For example, take the website Carpet-Cleaning-Tips.com, in this site all the materials are specific to the topic of cleaning carpets.

What are the benefits of a Mini Website?

• Mini Websites are easy to create and they require less skills.
• Mini Websites require less maintenance and administration.
• For the initial efforts you put into your site, you will reap the benefits for many more years to come. I like to call this as passive income!
• With Mini Websites you are not putting all of your eggs into one basket. You can easily build a dozen Mini Websites. This way you are not dependent on a single site for your income.
• Usually Mini Websites do not require great content. Any average content is good enough for Mini Websites.
• Usually you do NOT put your name or brand behind a mini website, this means you can get away with average quality content without affecting your brand or name.
• Once you create a successful Mini Website you can replicate the same process as many times you want!
• It is a great revenue option for those who are unable to commit regular time for their online ventures. For example, maintaining a blog takes regular commitment and effort.
• Mini Websites are great if you find it hard to stick to a particular topic and your passion for a topic changes frequently.

What Makes Mini Websites so Special?

Mini Websites are special because it is relatively easier to create a mini website and rank high for a given set of keywords in Google. For example, Carpet-Cleaning-Tips.com ranks at number 1 position for the keywords “carpet cleaning tips”. It is interesting to note that Google decided to rank this site as the number 1 site for “Carpet Cleaning Tips” even though there are many larger websites covering the topic of Carpet Cleaning. This is because the above site focused on a very narrow niche.

I hope that the above benefits of Mini Websites has convinced you to create a site by yourself.

In Part 2, we’ll look at the Google AdWords Tool. A basic knowledge of this tool is essential to perform the keyword research for your mini website.

Please check back soon for Part 2 of this series. By the way don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on Twitter. I’ll let you know on Twitter when Part 2 of this series becomes available.

Go to Part 2

Photo Credit: AMagill's photostream