Domainers, developing, minisites

[dmi]

This is really getting silly. Almost every day a new site that offers domain development / mass domain development services is born. They advertise like crazy on domainers' venues, they promise that you'll make a fortune... All it takes is to pay them to make a minisite on your domain name.

I don't know when will domainers open their eyes and understand that paying someone to make them a minisite or mass develop all their domains is NOT the way to go. By making a 5-10-20 minisite on a domain name that doesn't have any type-in traffic (or has little traffic) just won't do it. Do you think that by making a minisite you will rank in Google and get all the traffic from there? Yes, you wish. It's not about making a minisite, it's about working on it AFTER it's made. That's what matters. And those "We will develop all your domains and you will make a lot of money" sites don't offer you that -- they'll just make you a minisite and that's it. Ask them to guarantee that you'll earn more than you do when parking. They won't. Ask them to guarantee that you will rank high in Google with that site. They won't.

I am really sick and tired of all the sites that offer mass development services. They are nothing but "let's suck some money from domainers". I read somewhere that a domainer recently paid $2500 to one of the guys who offers development services to make one site which contains like 25-30 articles and a couple of videos. This is a complete waste of money. It's simply not the way to do these kinds of things -- you won't earn a dime from that. It's better to make a smaller (and a lot cheaper website) and invest the rest of the money elsewhere. "Elsewhere" will bring in traffic, and therefore revenue, eventually.

People love money, I understand that. But don't let anybody trick you. And everyone who says that you have to pay $2500 to someone who will develop a minisite on your domain and that you'll earn a lot of money from that, is tricking you. The funniest thing about that is that these "developers" call themselves SEO experts... Any real SEO expert will tell you that creating just the minisite and hope for traffic/revenue simply won't do it.

I know that the parking revenue has been down lately, but PLEASE don't think that by making just a minisite on your domain will make you more money than when you park it. It won't. And PLEASE don't pay these crazy amounts of money for a minisite.

If you really want to go the development route, then read everything you can find about properly developing a website, and everything that comes after. Do your research about it. Don't just blindly pay someone to do it.

</rant>

 

[enlytend]

There are services out there offering these minisites which don't even comply with Adsense program policies. One rather prominent one comes to mind... do your homework!

IF you're going to pay someone or a company to build a revenue earning site for you, make sure they have some experience monetizing websites themselves, not just the ability to throw together a pretty template, some cheap content and Adsense and link all the sites together in their own little network.

paid $2500 to one of the guys who offers development services to make one site which contains like 25-30 articles and a couple of videos.

Not having seen the site, that does sound really steep. But at the same time, don't expect everything for nothing. Let's say it takes a minimum of 10 hrs to write 5 pages of content with unique titles and good meta descriptions, license appropriate images, determine a layout, build the site, communicate back and forth with the client, set up all the utility pages, contact forms, email, robots.txt, htaccess, sitemap, analytics code, test everything cross-browser and post the site.

If you want that site for $50, that means the developer has made $5/hour - in the US, you'll make more than that flipping burgers! Don't expect researched articles with effective sales copy, quality on-page SEO or painstaking attention to detail for that price.

GOOD content will frequently get you decent search rankings and traffic even with minimal link building. Rehashed wikipedia content and feeds? Not so much.

Ask them to guarantee that you will rank high in Google with that site. They won't.

Anyone who guarantees "high google rankings" (for what keyword(s)? Important detail there!) is generally either clueless or blackhat. You can't "guarantee" anything in organic search, what you can do is do the appropriate research and use tried and true methods on an ONGOING basis to improve your rankings for the keywords that produce the best conversions / ROI for that particular site/business.

 

[tristanperry]

Anyone who guarantees "high google rankings" (for what keyword(s)? Important detail there!) is generally either clueless or blackhat. You can't "guarantee" anything in organic search, what you can do is do the appropriate research and use tried and true methods on an ONGOING basis to improve your rankings for the keywords that produce the best conversions / ROI for that particular site/business.

Yes, exactly right IMO Google's formula isn't definitely known (minor things have been confirmed but that's it), so someone offering (say) low $xx per hour (or similar) for "high Google rankings" generally is just trying to get money out of you.

I seen a guy a while back who genuinely was brilliant at SEO - he once built a website (I think something to do with real estate) from scratch and got the website really high ranked in the search engines within a few weeks (not using scammy methods of course! ) - BUT this success still wasn't guaranteed, and someone like this guy would not charge just low $xx per hour.

Think about it - if you were a professional at SEO, would you accept low $xx per hour OR make websites for yourself, get them to a high ranking and earn the big bucks yourself?

It's like with e-books telling you how to make $x,xxx per week - if you really found a way of doing that, you sure as hell wouldn't sell that secret to hundreds of people for $50.

And it's the same thing here - there are people brilliant at SEO who can *help* you do well in the search engine rankings, but it is not guaranteed and it is not cheap

 

[-REECE-]

Well said Samir. Whenever I see people offering domain development related services, I ask myself why if they were truly as good as they say they wouldn't be developing their own domains instead of those of others. Not saying they're all crooks and who knows -- maybe they are developing their domains and are outsourcing their development operation.

But yeah, $200 minisites (nevermind $2500!) are going to have to be built around a mighty good domain or receive a lot of work to make that back.. Just think if you're an average domainer and have say, 500 domains -- that's $100,000 just to get them developed @ $200 per!

It's really not that hard.. So you spend a few hours or days learning how to make your first minisite and then you just do the same thing again and again. Why pay $200+ for that when you don't need to?

The only people I see value in it for are for people that don't have time to build minisites and already have domains making hundreds or thousands per month parked - if making it into a minisite even boosts your earnings a small percentage, it'll be worth it. But for people with ordinary domains? Not a chance.

Anyone who guarantees "high google rankings" (for what keyword(s)? Important detail there!) is generally either clueless or blackhat. You can't "guarantee" anything in organic search, what you can do is do the appropriate research and use tried and true methods on an ONGOING basis to improve your rankings for the keywords that produce the best conversions / ROI for that particular site/business.

Ain't that the truth

 

[enlytend]

Definitely go for self-made minisites, if you're up for it. If not, just choose wisely. I probably *could* learn to make small to medium plumbing repairs by myself, but I'm a walking disaster with anything that involves running water and I have no interest in learning the plumbing business, so I pay someone to do them for me. It's a trade-off.

It's like with e-books telling you how to make $x,xxx per week - if you really found a way of doing that, you sure as hell wouldn't sell that secret to hundreds of people for $50.

They actually do ... sort of. At least the big players in the "make money on the internet" genre. The secret there is that it's all in the upsell. They'll keep upselling and cross-selling you on more information products and more subscriptions until you've spent FAR more than the initial $50. If you want to learn how THEY make money, analyze THIS, not the safe little examples in their ebook Most of the people who buy the ebook will never take any action on what they learn - they will just keep buying product after product forever, convinced that they don't "know enough" yet. Sad but true.

 

[Brujah]

A minisite isn't going to guarantee your domain will become a money-making machine, but it's still better than just leaving it parked in my opinion. There are other benefits and reasons for having a minisite. Your domain might be less likely to be taken from you in a WIPO decision. Your domain might be more attractive to a buyer, than it would have been with a parking page.

Case study. I recently developed a few dozen of my own names using a small minisite script that I wrote myself. I hired my favorite writers to help with unique content for each site targeting roughly 5 to 10 articles per site. I established a linking structure between the domains. After several months, most of these domain names began receiving traffic, earning a pagerank of 3+ and ranking well enough in the engines. I sold my own advertising on these names for 6 months, which twice covered my original investment in having the sites built.

It really depends on the domain names, and your specific needs.

More proof of this can be found in some of the topics here on the forum. Look at some of the threads about people showing off their minisites, or their developed .info names, etc...

 

[411domains]

$2500 for a minisite? That seems a little steep. The articles and videos must have been truly amazing!
(Apparently this person has never heard of DN Media and MiniSites dot com.)

 

[JulieLA]

IMO, they're just taking advantage of people who think they don't know enough to put up their own mini site. And the bottom line is - you still have to do your own promotion and work on getting traffic to the site for it to make you any money. If you have to put that much work into something - why pay someone else? I don't care if it's a one-time fee or a monthly subscription, none of the ones I've tried out on their free trial basis have been worth continuing with once the trial was over. For the majority of them, I found them so flawed that I dumped them the first day.

People need to treat this more like a business. How much would you have to make per month to break even on $2500 within a reasonable amount of time??

 

[DubDubDubDot]

There is very little work involved in building minisites. The services have a standard set of templates they work from and slightly customize for you - usually just a change to the color scheme and a simple custom header. Time spent on design work looks to be around 30 minutes (not including text) and you get a site that looks remarkably similar to their other clients.

ShedsForSale.com, the work of AEIOU, is an example of everything that is wrong with minisite services. That site is just terrible. One would expect a hardware store theme for a domain like that, but instead they went with a crappy farming theme that doesn't fit with anything. The text content is also an absolute trainwreck, consisting only of general statements and nothing that information hungry viewers don't already know.

The minisite services are either employing wannabe designers and writers, or they are using foreign outsourcing. In the past 3-5 years the lower and middle part of the web design industry has taken a hit by outsourcing. It has been a race to the bottom for prices as webmasters don't seem to mind sacrificing quality to get a site on the cheap. But at the end of the day an Indian "with an interest in design" (which is who the outsourcing firms employ) simply can't match the quality of a western designer with 10 years experience and a real education.

There is no reason for people to be paying $250... $500... $1,500 for the quality of minisites out there right now. They are trash.

 

[enlytend]

There is no reason for people to be paying $250... $500... $1,500 for the quality of minisites out there right now. They are trash.

A small HIGH QUALITY site with some real work behind it would justify that price, but agreed, there are a lot of people out there charging that amount for pure trash.

Part of the problem is that the demand is for cheap and high volume. Companies and individuals have jumped in to fill that demand at whatever price the market will bear while cutting as many corners as possible to increase their own profit margin.

The reality is that one DECENT, well-planned site on a commercial topic which can be monetized is worth 100 half-a**** 5 pagers full useless drivel and 3 blocks of Adsense. That one site is likely to generate more revenue than the other 100 put together and still be producing income several years down the road.

 

[HuntingMoon]

mini-sites are the tip of the iceberg. original content helps... google has no problem determining when a mini-site is a ppc template based on our experience.

 

[Tia Wood]

Excellent topic. I do want to stress the differences between mini site / mass domain development vs. full scale development. Please don't throw them in the same pile.

Mini site/mass domain development involve an assembly line process which which should not be confused with what web developers do on a daily basis or even services that web developers provide. We seem to be thrown into this "mini site" catch phrase melting pot.

Bottom line, these companies are still young. AEIOU.com has been out for awhile and I trust Rick Latona to take care of his customers. MiniSites.com is one that just launched (not familiar with who runs it though). But as as far as the development method that goes into mini sites/mass development, it's similar to MFA (made for adsense) sites so be careful. Time will tell if these methods really work.

 

[-REECE-]

I came across one Wordpress theme developer recently whose fees started at $15,000

Domain development seriously has to be one of the areas were people can get gouged the most if they don't do their research.

For those wondering about Minisites.com, send Michael on Namepros a pm ( http://www.namepros.com/members/63110.html ). Minisites.com is I believe a joint venture between Michael's company DN Media and Telepathy, Inc. which owns some mighty fine domains: Telepathy , so I'd say you're in pretty good hands going with them or AEIOU.com.

 

[Michael]

Thanks for the kind words Reece. I don't think I've seen any major mini site providers promising people the first page of Google, please correct me if I'm wrong. We've gotten plenty of 5-page sites on the first page of Google, we've even gotten 1-page sites there. It really depends on the competition for the keywords. All the major mini site providers offer their opinion on whether a domain could do well, based on their experience.

A very small handful of the ones that we've gotten first page results on extremely high-competition keywords are: Motorsports.com (#4 G | #2 Y | #1 B), Bicycle.com (#10 G | #2 Y | #10 B), HouseOwners.com (#6 G), PetSitter.com (#8 G), Sitter.com (#2 Y | #2 B), BabysitterJobs.com (#6 G), Bifocal.com (#6 G | #5 B), and the list goes on and on and on. If we can get first page results with a thin site on colossal keywords, imagine what we can do with a long tail that has low competition. I think we have about a 75% success rate for getting on the first page of at least one of the big three search engines.

Another issue I see with the OP's analysis is that he, as with many others, have been brainwashed by parking companies to think their traffic is only worth pennies. We've had plenty of clients get advertising offers to the tune of $xxx/month from companies that want to have a banner or link on their mini site. One that comes to mind off hand is Beachwear.com. If you get decent rankings in the SERPS... forget Adsense, think direct banner sales through Google Ad manager or OpenX. Think CPA affiliate programs. Think eBay or Amazon affiliates if you have product-related domains. You can make your money back in a few months if you land a direct advertiser or use a good, relevant affiliate program.

The problem with most domainers is they are cheap, and they want something for nothing (I'm guilty of that sometimes). A guarantee? Please... do you get a guarantee from your stock broker? Do you get a guarantee from Sedo that when you buy a domain, you'll be able to sell it for more? There are no guarantees in investments, if someone makes that kind of promise to you, you're getting scammed. You have to do your due diligence, weigh your risks, etc. If you're not willing to pay low $xxx to have a nice looking site created on your domain that usually does well in the search engines, perhaps you should let your domain drop, you clearly don't believe in its potential.

As for those who think that creating a mini site is easy, please show us some of your work, as well as your 100% developed portfolio. Not everyone has the time, skill, or desire to spend a majority of their time developing web sites. Not everyone wants to learn how to use Photoshop, learn to hack up the WordPress templates, research topics and write pages upon pages about it, find stock photos to add to the pages, do hours and hours of linkbuilding. If you think low $xxx is way too expensive for several days worth of work, you don't know the first thing about development.

As for why we offer this service instead of just developing our own portfolio, I can't really say I've ever understood the logic behind that question. Developing domains for clients doesn't prevent us from developing our own sites. In fact, a lot of the domain-related companies you use every day started as something that a domainer created for personal use, and wanted to make it available to the public.

 

[DnEbook]

i wonder if anyone here did the noomle thing ??? certainly a cheap learning experience

 

[Michael]

Why pay for a cheeseburger at a restaurant when you can make it yourself? Why pay for an oil change when you can put your car up on ramps and do it yourself? By that logic, the service industry wouldn't exist. Not everyone can be skilled in everything, or have the time to do it.

You spent 10 minutes on a site that, no offense, looks terrible and will likely never rank in the search engines because of the dup content. It will probably do even worse than a parked page, because adding content drops CTR, which can only be offset by an increase in search engine traffic.

Think of the opportunities you're missing out on from not getting organic search traffic, businesses not wanting to advertise on your site, people bouncing because looking at the site gave them a seizure, etc. In some cases you lose more by not making the investment and taking the development seriously. Although in the case of that domain, with only 22 searches per month according to Adwords I wouldn't have recommended development anyway.

 

[Burano]

If you want that site for $50, that means the developer has made $5/hour - in the US, you'll make more than that flipping burgers! Don't expect researched articles with effective sales copy, quality on-page SEO or painstaking attention to detail for that price.

GOOD content will frequently get you decent search rankings and traffic even with minimal link building. Rehashed wikipedia content and feeds? Not so much.

It's funny...I was thinking of offering services for a short period of time to build mini-sites for $75...but was on the fence as I knew that 1) I'd end up working way more hours than the price payed for 2) Domainers are cheap and probably STILL wouldn't cough up $75.

Then I had one guy asking me to teach him how to build sites, he'd pay me this & that...and I turned him down saying that in all honesty - for the time I'd spend on teaching him, I'd have to charge a lot of money considering it would be taking my time up and away from other endeavors. I offered to recommend some courses to him..and said that I would still build him a quality site with unique, well-written content for $75 - I realized that I'd probably lose money in relation to time...but at least I'd have a 1st 'client' if I wanted to pursue doing more mini-sites....

So, the guy comes back to me - mind you this is after practically begging me to teach him one-on one as he says he prefers that to courses...and asks me not only to reconsider still teaching him...but also if I'd build a site for him for $50! I figure if that's people's attitudes - than why even bother? I'm not from a country where I can get by on $2 an hour - I live in California, I blink here and 10 bucks is gone! People want quality content, sites that will make them some money...they are given a deal - and still want something cheaper! unbelievable.

 

[Michael]

...

 

[-REECE-]

Meh.

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It's expensive for most domainers because they have garbage domains they should have dropped in the first place.. Compared to well known people in the seo biz, $200 is like 15 minutes of their time.

 

[tristanperry]

I guess you're calling me out to defend your mini-site exorbant fees?

I'm not looking to get involved in a flame war, I'm just giving an opinion

However I wouldn't say that MiniSite's fees are extortionate or anything - $225 for a unique design, which is SEO friendly, and has 5 pages of unique content is actually very cheap

Such a website may take 6-10 hours, so you are looking at $22.5-$37.50 per hour, which is pretty cheap for a good job.

I've heard of professional design companies requesting (and getting) $100/hour, or SEO firms getting a similar amount.

Quality, SEO friendly, web development isn't cheap. Good job on getting your websites high in Google/Yahoo, honestly But for the most part a $25 total job *usually* doesn't get you ranked too high on Google since 1-2 hour's work on low wages isn't the 'market norm'

But if you are having success using your method, then well done.