One of the areas that I’ve been exploring more of lately is the potential to make a small yet consistent income stream from mini sites. I’ve been doing this with BANS for a few weeks (I will touch on this during a later post); however, I’m certain that with the right niche I can build a few sites that earn a modest sum of at least $100 a month.

I will be documenting this process and providing the steps I’ve taken to increase traffic, improve in the SERPS and most importantly - make money.

The first site I’ll be working on is a niche travel site based on a place I’m going to on vacation (I should be there as of the time this post is published). I will be taking pictures, and coming up with a rough outline of the fun activities to write about for this website while I’m on my vacation. I know there is a lot of money in niche travel sites so I’m interested in taking a stab at a travel based site.

The second site I’ll be working on is my Video Game Fonts website which I set up over a year ago and haven’t touched since then. It makes minimal income; however, I have several plans to improve the site and in doing so - the income it generates.

I am sure that there will be more mini sites that I will work on, but these are the two that I will be starting with. My overall goal is to create mini sites that require some work up front but little time to maintain in the future. I currently spend a lot of time managing forums and am interested to see just how much potential there is in mini sites. no time to update (or just an update once every 6 months or so) that each generate a small income. speak of I know there is potential to dominate this small niche.

Have you found success with mini sites? Share your stories below.

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I read a post from a blogger that recommended that if you have been paying the same price for a server for an extended period of time that you should try and negotiate for a lower price (sorry I can’t find the link). The basis for his argument was that because technology is always getting cheaper why should you continue to pay the same price for a server every month? The answer to this question is that you shouldn’t!

I have always been a fan of never giving up when it comes to getting what I want so I set out to negotiate with my current web host based on the argument I listed above.

The following is the conversation I had with my current host (scroll down if you want to see the end result as the exchange is fairly lengthy):

Me: Hello, I’ve been an existing SoftLayer customer for over a year and as we all know the price of technology decreases over time. I see based on the specials you’re running now the cost of my server could actually be a little less.

So am I able to get a price reduction on my server?

Employee Response
Hello,

The specials that we offer on the site are used mainly to provide incentive for new orders, and cannot be retroactively applied to exisiting servers.

If you would like to place a new server order, I would be happy to assist you in getting the best possible price based on what we are offering right now.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can assist you with.

SoftLayer Sales

Me: So in order to get a discount I’d have to buy a new server transfer the old stuff over to the new server and then close my old server account?

You can’t just apply the discount to the one I’m currently using to avoid the hastle?

Employee Response
Hello,

I’ve reviewed your account and your actually paying $20/mo less ($159/mo) for this server (Intel Xeon 3060) than what we are offering it for now ($179/mo). It also looks like we provided you with a free 100Mbps port upgrade.

The only thing available for a discount on your current setup would be the 250GB SATA II HDD for $20/mo but to do this we would have to negate any special pricing already on the server which would make the price $214/mo. So the deal/pricing you have is actually better at $204/mo.

Please let us know if you have any additional questions or request.

Thank you,

SoftLayer Sales

Me: Well, there is also double RAM for free now as well which is $50 a month.

What about just adding in 8 free public IP addresses?

Employee Response
Hello,
As noted above the double/dobule promos are for new server orders only. However we will be able to make a *one-time* exception and allow you to have the additional static ip’s at no additional cost as a thank you for your continued business with us. Simply add the static ip’s them directly though the customer portal, once this has been done update this ticket and I will get it to Accounting to have your invoice updated.

Thank you,
SoftLayer Sales

I already had a really good deal on my server when I first signed up when I negotiated for a lower price, a port upgrade etc. so I knew based on their first few responses that I likely wouldn’t be able to get the price knocked down much further. After I realized that I was probably not going to get a price discount I moved onto going after something I was already looking to pay for - more IP addresses. So after I went back and forth with the hosting company I was able to get 8 free IP addresses. While this seems like it’s not that much (I think it works out to like $8 a month or something). The important thing to remember is that I wouldn’t have gotten the free IP’s (which I had already planned to buy this month) if I didn’t ask for them.

I highly recommend you try negotiating for a lower price or some freebies (more RAM, additional hard drive, more bandwidth etc.) if you have been a customer with a hosting company for a period of time.

Have you tried this before? What successes have you had?

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Improving your Technorati rank may not seem like a priority to you, but it’s important to remember what a lower rank (lower = better) can do for you. You can make more money off of your advertising and sponsored reviews and you can also receive a big boost to your Google page rank by having a good Technorati rank.

So because of these factors and my top 10,000 Technorati rank goal I have come up with a list of ways I’ve been successful in moving towards that goal. Some of these I’ve yet to fully work on but I’m confident they will work. But first let me tell you where I a sat three months ago. My blog had an authority of 38 and a rank of 211,248. So obviously, there was plenty of room for improvement so without futher ado the following is a list of the ways to help improve your Technorati rank most of which I’ve tried myself.

1. Write Guest Posts

I can’t think of a blogger that doesn’t allow a guest blogger to link back to their own blog. In fact they usually don’t even mind it if you link back a couple times in a post. By writing guest posts for bigger bloggers it’s an easy way to get a link back to your blog as well as some extra traffic too. I’ve written a couple guest posts for bloggers with over 1,000 RSS subscribers and these posts have helped to improve my rank a lot. I plan on writing several more guest posts in the future.

2. Exchange links with other bloggers

I’ve exchanged links with a couple other bloggers that are around the same size as me and it has helped to not only improve my technorati rank but I’m sure it’s contributed to my Google page rank as well. The important thing to remember is that even though many bloggers are nice people they won’t exchange links with you if they clearly do not benefit much from the exchange. So don’t approach big blogs asking to exchange links with you unless you’ve developed a relationship with them first.

3. Link to other blog posts

By linking to other blog posts and sending out a trackback there is a good chance (especially if it’s a lesser known blogger that you link to) that they’ll check out your blog to see what you had to say about their post. They’ll likely comment on the post and in the future they may link to one of your posts as well. This may even turn into a potential blogger to exchange links with too.

4. Create a great Wordpress theme and give it away

By offering a great Wordpress theme and giving it away for free you can link back to your blog with a footer link. Simply request that people do not remove the footer links in the footer file and most people will be alright with doing so. I’ve seen this strategy work well for other top bloggers.

5. Sell your custom Wordpress theme

While this idea is similiar to the previous one some people don’t have the skill to create a useful wordpress theme (like myself) or the money to spend on a designer only to give it away for free. So one option is to offer your custom blog design for sale and include your footer link in the blog. You can then offer a more expensive version with the footer link removed. My theme designer is actually working on this for me right now and I’ll be posting a few different color variations to this theme for sale because I know the feedback on this theme has been very positive.

6. Comment on do follow blogs

While this tactic is great in practice, I’ve found that a lot of the lists of do follow blogs on the net are outdated and no longer do follow blogs. Overall, while I think this tactic can be beneficial it’s also time consuming to comment on lots of blogs that are on do follow blog lists only to later find out those blogs don’t follow.

7. Run a blog contest

In your blog contest require that entrants link back to your blog to participate in the contest. I’ve done this in the past and had some success. You can read what I’ve learned from running a past blog contest here, but one thing is for sure - the bigger the prize pool the more links you’ll receive.

8. Write helpful resource lists

Writing helpful resource lists provides an excellent opportunity for people to stumble or digg your content or to bookmark for future use. Many bloggers will also link to your list if they find it’s of value to their readers. In fact, if you think this list was useful to you please give me a thumbs up with Stumble Upon or link to it on your blog

9. Disclose the income you earn

Although I don’t make a lot of money from my blog yet because I’ve disclosed my income I’ve been linked to by various “Top bloggers lists.” Now I do find it hilarious that I’ve only made a little over $100 in my best month and still managed to make it on the list it doesn’t matter because people are still linking to me. Also, keep in mind this tactic won’t work in most blog niches. i.e. people reading your blog about geology won’t care to see how much money you make every month.

10. Participate in blog carnivals

I haven’t tried participating in a blog carnival yet, but I’ve heard that it’s one of the easiest ways to earn backlinks and help improve your technorati rank. I’m going to be testing this out soon and will certainly post my results here.

Wraping it up

After incorporating several of these tactics I now have a Technorati authority of 62 and a rank of 106,632, which is still short of my goal of breaking the top 10,000 by the end of the year, but I have plenty of time left in the year and plan on really working on my rank hard in the upcoming months.

What tactics have worked well for you? Do you even care about your Technorati rank? Discuss in the comments below.

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In the past few weeks I’ve been working on several ideas for some really compelling content on my blog. In fact, as I write this post I currently have 36 drafts in my wordpress admin area. Some of these drafts are just one line topics but others are half completed work in progress posts that I’ve been updating slowly from time to time. All of the posts ideas I come up with are done using my simple steps to avoid writers block that I’ve written about before.

The posts that I’ve been slowly working on for the past few weeks are the ones that excite me the most. These are the posts that I truly believe have the potential to be linked to by top bloggers, receive a spike of traffic from Stumble Upon, Digg etc. and could even be used as a future resource for bloggers to come back to. I’ll be posting a few of these in June and am really interested to see how they do to not only increase traffic but to also improve my RSS subscription numbers.

Other posts that I’ve been spending a lot of time on are case studies. What I won’t do is write about a new website I’m going to launch on my blog (post the URL) and then analyze the web statistics after a certain period of time. Do you see where the problem is? If you’re analzying data after posting the URL on your blog the numbers won’t be as accurate as they show be. I hate when people do this. Especially if the website that is being written about is a test to see how much money can be made from it “without work.” Either way I really enjoy reading detailed case studies because I’ve been able to learn a lot from them which is exactly why I want to document and share more of my real life examples as well.

How do you plan out future posts or do you just pick out a topic to write about it that day?

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What criteria do you look at when deciding what type of forum you should start? I’m sure you’ve heard many other people recommend that you should start a forum based on a topic that interests you. The logic if obvious, if you don’t really care about the forum topic(s) than how can you set about creating a successful forum? I agree with this reasoning and even wrote about this a while ago. However, what can you do when the topic that interests you is not a profitable niche?

How I Chose My Niche

As some of you may already know by reading my story about getting started earning money on the internet, I run several video game related forums. I’ve always had a passion for video games and have even played Halo on the professional level. I also sell Halo lessons through my blog (in need of a serious redesign) over at thehalogod.com. In fact, I was even fortunate enough to use the success of my Halo videos to help launch a couple game related forums. However, as I look at the forums I’ve created I can’t help but think about the profitability of the niche I’ve chosen to target on the web.

The Low Profit Niche

I’ve focused most of my web properties around video games and in one circumstance - a single video game franchise i.e. Halo Boards. The question I now ask myself - that I should have done long ago - is how can I really make good money from these video game focused forums? Now I’m not just in it for the money and in fact if my revenue ever grew a substantial amount I would sponsor bigger events, provide giveaways, make improvements to the forum, and the list goes on. However, how can you really expect to make money off of advertising when nearly all of the active members and even the guests that find the site through search engines or other websites already own the video game system and games that most of the conversations center around (as in the case of Halo Boards)? The answer is simple - it’s extremely difficult. Even if the members of the website do click ads you have to remember these ads are still focused on video games which are frequently low paying.

Now the reason why these keywords don’t pay out well is because quite simply the ads that are displayed are for inexpensive items. When you see ads to buy third party game controllers, new video games and xbox live subscription cards you know that because these items hover around $50 there is not a lot of money to be earned with each sale. The advertiser can only make money if the cost of advertising is low enough that the conversions outweigh the cost of the ads. So to even make a decent sum of money you’ll need a lot of clicks.

The High Profit Niche

Now lets look at another example. Let’s say you run a forum focused on HDTV’s and the discussion of new HDTV’s, reviews and anything else related to this “new” technology. Immediately you know that a significant portion of the members on the forum are there to buy a new HDTV and are using your forum as a resource to help make an informed decision. And because of the nature of the forum members that are gathering more info to make a purchase, if they do click an advertisement they’re more likely to buy. This will help prevent your Adsense account from being smart priced but that’s a conversation for another day.

The cost of an HDTV can range from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. As you can see the products that will display in the advertisements on the HDTV forum example are much more expensive than those being displayed in the low paying niche. Naturally, because the products are so much more expensive advertisers have to pay much more for their ads ad clicks. With one low paying niche forum you could make a couple hundred dollars a month and on the other high paying niche forum you could make a couple thousand dollars a month with the same traffic level and activity. So before you launch your next forum make sure that you are not only interested in the topic but you also ask yourself, “How much money is there in this this niche?”

Lessons Learned

I’m not going to look back and view the decisions I made as a mistake, because starting those forums is what got me into earning money on the web in the first place. I also had a lot of fun doing it, but now that I’ve learned some lessons I’m certainly going to do more extensive research to determine how profitable the niche is.

Have you ever made this “mistake” before? What factors help you determine which new websites and forums to run with?

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For those of you working any significant amount of time on the web I urge you to purchase a second monitor. I’ve been doing most of the work for my blog on my laptop while I ride the train, but I have several other projects I’ve wanted to start that will take much more than the time I have on my daily commute. With that in mind, I finally purchased a second monitor that is basically the same as my old monitor (i.e. same screen size and max resolution) but a newer model number.

I never really bothered purchasing the second monitor before this because I wasn’t really focused on starting any new projects but I have several ideas lined up that I couldn’t put off any longer. So although I should have purchased the second monitor long ago I’m looking forward to the increased efficiency that it will bring to the table. In fact, part of what kept me lazy was the fact that at my 9-5 job I have two monitors and it’s frustrating to come home with only one to work on. Again, yes it’s that stupid that I never purchased this long ago but either way check out the new set up:

Before:

After:

By the way, they’re two 19 inch monitors. The next time I’ll upgrade is when I get a bigger desk. Then I’ll go with two 24 inch monitors.

Are you dual wielding?

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After running the contest to celebrate my blog’s first birthday I realized that I made a few mistakes in the execution of the blog contest that I have since had some time to reflect on. So as a result of that contest I’ve come up with a list of 5 lessons that I learned from running my blog contest that I believe will help improve the effectiveness of your blog’s contests as well.

1. Define your contest goal(s)

Before starting a blog contest you should clearly define the goal of the contest. What are you trying to accomplish?

Do you want people to post about your contest and receive some link backs?
Do you want to increase your RSS subscriber count?
Do you want to encourage more participation?

It’s important to determine what you want to accomplish with your blog contest otherwise it won’t be as effective. I never really set out to define the goals of my blog’s contest and so I ended up with a contest that I ran but without any strong numbers to shoot for. If you set specific and measurable goals for your blog contests you’ll see improved your results because you’re more invested in the outcome.

2. Simplify the contest

First and foremost make it easy for your readers to participate in your blog’s contest. Don’t create a laundry list of hoops your readers have to jump through, but at the same time you don’t want to innundate them with too many ways to enter. If your contest is relatively small like mine was, try providing only one way for readers to enter your blog’s contest. If your primary goal is to increase your RSS subscriber count than use that criteria as the only way to win prizes in the contest. The size of the prize pool should also help you to determine what you should require your readers to accomplish. Because if you’re not offering a lot of prizes than it will be hard to get people to put forth the effort and write about your contest.

On the flip side you don’t want to make it too easy to enter the contest. The perfect example here is just requiring readers to write a single comment on a post to enter the contest. While this makes it incredibly easy for readers to participate I wouldn’t recommend using this entrance method exclusively even if your blog is really small.

3. Offer more prizes

With the contest I ran I offered five 125×125 blog ads on the sidebar along with a 468 x 60 ad. These prizes came out to a total cash value of $140. This is a fairly small sum of money and it doesn’t really bring about a strong call to action to participate in the contest. Looking back at how many people entered the contest I can see how this contest served more of my current readers as opposed to bringing in a ton of new subscribers and link backs. Perhaps a few people subscribed to my RSS feed that were sitting on the fence, but again if I offered more prizes I could have seen much stronger results.

4. Set a deadline that provides plenty of time for readers to enter

I ran my blog’s birthday contest for only two and a half weeks, which doesn’t allow for a long time to enter a contest. Granted, I already knew that the prizes I was offering weren’t really that huge but I should have ran the contest for at least one month to grant plenty of time for people to read about and enter the contest.

If you’re running a really large contest than you may want also want to consider running it for a couple months to not only provide ample time people to participate but to also provide a lot of “face time” for the sponsors of your contest. The lengthy deadline will also give you more time to heavily promote the blog contest as well which leads me into my next point.

5. Promote your blog contest

Just because you built it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Promotion is one of the most important aspects of a successful blog contest. One way you can promote your blog’s contest is through advertising on your own blog. I did this for my past contest by creating a couple simple banners. By promoting the contest through your own blog it will help to inform any new readers that may have missed the initial contest announcement post. Another way to promote the contest is by mentioning it in the bottom of each post during the run of the contest i.e:

I’m running a contest to celebrate my blog’s birthday. Subscribe to my RSS feed for your chance to win free advertising on ChrisGuthrie.net

Another option that should work well is if you’re offering such a large prize pool that people are much more inclined to write about your contest for a better shot at the prizes. This will help to further promote your contest but will only work well if the prize pool is significant.

Wrapping it up

Overall, I know that the next blog contest I run will take into account some of the lessons I’ve learned above and I’m sure I’ll learn even more the next time around. I don’t plan to run any more “small” blog contests in the future though as I want to go for something much bigger next time.

What do you think of the lessons I’ve learned? Have they helped you think about how you’ll run your next blog contest?

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Are you struggling to come up with a domain name for your blog or next project? Why not choose a name that sounds like or rhymes with an existing well established website. I thought of this the other day when I was waiting to catch my bus to take me into Seattle for work when I saw this truck drive by with big bold letters plastered on the side - Jobdango.com. Now what site immediately comes to mind when you hear ‘dango’? For me it’s the wildly popular Fandango.com. I checked out Jobdango.com and while it’s a Northwest job search engine and not something related to the movie business it’s easy to see what they’ve done by incorporating ‘dango’ into their domain name.

I’m certain that most people that see the advertisements for Jobdango.com or have heard of the website already have likely heard of Fandango.com. They may even go so far as to believe it’s a partner company. What Jobdango.com has done is used the association from another well known brand and applied it towards their Northwest job search engine Jobdango.com

This advertisement on the side of the truck got me thinking about other websites I’ve seen that have used similiar domain names in an effor to build off of some other websites’ branding success. Some other prime examples I’ve seen are dogster.com and catster.com both of which are named after friendster.com. The only difference is that they’re used for pets. However, it’s safe to say that the creators of dogster.com and catster.com knew what they were doing when they choose domain names with ’ster’ at the end to cash in on the success of friendster.com. Now some of you might be worried that it’s possible you could run into legal trouble for purchasing domain names with this practice in mind; however, as you can see from the above examples they’re different enough that there have been no lawsuits filed yet close enough to cash in off the previously established successful brand.

What are some other examples you’ve seen? Do you believe this is a good way to get a kick start to the branding of your website?

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