Make Money from a Mini Website – Part 5

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.