To Develop or Not to Develop

[sammyman]

I have a question about a site I am planning on purchasing. It is a shorter dictionary word, but not something that I think an end user could be found for. I am considering developing this site and creating an acronym to use to explain the word and its relevance to the site. Would this be a waste of a good dictionary word site? Or a waste of money since I am not developing it for it's intended use?

 

[tech4]

Develop with end users in mind. Don't develop with domainers in mind. That's a mistake.

If you should develop, plan to spend a good amount of money like 5-10k.
You are not going to compete well if you spend too little on development, and then you need to spend it on advertising as the second step.

Development alone is not enough. It has to be great development, which is going to cost you. But if you develop it and didn't advertise, no one would know you have a jewel of the world. So advertising is as important as development. To keep site alive, I consider paying for content/users, which is not part of development but as part of maintenance, along with freelance developers to fix or change site.

If you don't have a budget plan in mind, don't know what you want to develop, to who (users or domainers), marketing plan, maintainance plan. You should come up with one.

 

[sammyman]

Thanks for the tips. Is there anywhere where you can find example maintenance plans etc online? I would like to include this in my business plan as well as my marketing strategy.

 

[-REECE-]

There's absolutely no reason someone has to spend 5-10k on development.. Without knowing the word, it's hard to suggest a budget or alternative use. Going with the original idea listed by the OP for the site is a job a lot of members around here would be willing to do for less than a couple hundred.

Develop with end users in mind. Don't develop with domainers in mind. That's a mistake.

If you should develop, plan to spend a good amount of money like 5-10k.
You are not going to compete well if you spend too little on development, and then you need to spend it on advertising as the second step.

Development alone is not enough. It has to be great development, which is going to cost you. But if you develop it and didn't advertise, no one would know you have a jewel of the world. So advertising is as important as development. To keep site alive, I consider paying for content/users, which is not part of development but as part of maintenance, along with freelance developers to fix or change site.

If you don't have a budget plan in mind, don't know what you want to develop, to who (users or domainers), marketing plan, maintainance plan. You should come up with one.

 

[tech4]

There's absolutely no reason someone has to spend 5-10k on development.. Without knowing the word, it's hard to suggest a budget or alternative use. Going with the original idea listed by the OP for the site is a job a lot of members around here would be willing to do for less than a couple hundred.

There's an example posted by 24hrdomainer in the newbie section.
24 posted that he spent over $20,000 on mini sites and it went no where. (meaning no profit)

There's some more example in the development section.

If you plan to build a minisite, you are wasting your time. It does not help you increase adsense or traffic as you think you would. It does not pay for itself. Again, you have to have great development, and then you have to market it or else no one knows your site, and then the maintenance which are required.

If you do it, plan thoroughly, if you have never (NEVER) develop a site of anykind or only a few most likely your next few developments will be the same qualities as your previous experience.

Which is why there's about 180 million domain names and only 10% of it is develop site with real content. But then out of that 10% there's competition, the bigger ones get 90% of the money. Its like saying how 1% of the world owns the rest of the world, and 99% owns nothing. Which is very true in business.

 

[gazzip]

If you plan to build a minisite, you are wasting your time. It does not help you increase adsense or traffic as you think you would. It does not pay for itself. Again, you have to have great development, and then you have to market it or else no one knows your site, and then the maintenance which are required.

If you do it, plan thoroughly, if you have never (NEVER) develop a site of anykind or only a few most likely your next few developments will be the same qualities as your previous experience.

I doubt that is always the case, my first 3 page mini-site using a few affiliate links has paid for itself many many times over. I just checked the last two months and its made $90 - Its been up a couple of years and I'v only looked at it maybe twice since I build it - it sure ain't pretty looking either, in fact its fugly

I don't market it all all, it ranks number one in Yahoo for a few good search terms, number 2 in msn for the two keywords of the domain, it does'nt rank in Google as far as I can see but if you type in the domain with no space, ie: wordword (which not many people will ever do) it ranks as number one.

Maybe my example is just beginners luck but I'm more than happy with the result - It would have made virtually nothing parked, that much I'm sure of.


I say give mini-site development a try ! :tu:


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[notlikeyou]

Spending thousands on development is not always the answer. You could spend 20K developing a site on a crappy domain, in a flooded niche and do no better than using WP to create a 3 page site.

 

[DubDubDubDot]

It is a shorter dictionary word, but not something that I think an end user could be found for.

If you develop it, you become the end user.

And if you are questioning that no other end user wants it, then why do you?

 

[HappyDay]

To Develop or Not to Develop is always the question.
I have site names where the product still doesn´t exist.
So its really hard to develop something but I ´ve always ideas what I could write about it thats not the problem. The question is only is it worth efforts and time.

 

[tech4]

If mini sites were so successful we all would be developing ours. Blown sites does not even make money.

You are more likely not to cover to your costs.

Imagine, $25,000 in mini sites development, $50 USD each sites (bulk discount) 5 pages each with real contents.

2,500/5=500 sites.

And if 500 sites doens't make it...does that mean they have crappy content or crappy domain names?

The fact is, 1% of the population makes everything, takes all the profit. The rest gets nothing.

That's life.

 

[-REECE-]

A lot of people are -- hence why services like Whypark are so popular with domainers and why other sites like AEIOU and Site Graduate sprung up.

If you have 500 sites that each make even say, $1 per day on average, you're making $500 a day or about $180,000 per year. Absolutely no need to be that one authority site in your niche to do well for yourself -- just keep repeating what works.

If mini sites were so successful we all would be developing ours. Blown sites does not even make money.

You are more likely not to cover to your costs.

Imagine, $25,000 in mini sites development, $50 USD each sites (bulk discount) 5 pages each with real contents.

2,500/5=500 sites.

And if 500 sites doens't make it...does that mean they have crappy content or crappy domain names?

The fact is, 1% of the population makes everything, takes all the profit. The rest gets nothing.

That's life.

 

[tech4]

"A lot of people are -- hence why services like Whypark are so popular with domainers and why other sites like AEIOU and Site Graduate sprung up.
If you have 500 sites that each make even say, $1 per day on average"

Alot of people are not making money with mini sites.
AEIOU and site Graduate sprung up to make profit from new domainers who do not have experience in making a site, or have never went full scale because alot of them, never made money on their own.

The middle man always make money, domainers creating mini sites making money? alot of them? that's very questionable.

 

[-REECE-]

You could buy a few different templates and then just paste the same source code in for each of your domains (maybe do something simple like edit the colors) and just change the text written to whatever you want to write -- it's not like anyone would pay $200 per minisite for 500 of them.

If you bought 5 different templates @ $200 per, that cost you a grand -- spread out across hundreds or thousands of domains, it's a pretty insignificant sum.

The only real question is: Does it make more than parking your domain? If yes, then it should be a minisite. If not go back to parking for those domains. I don't see what anyone has to lose by trying.

"A lot of people are -- hence why services like Whypark are so popular with domainers and why other sites like AEIOU and Site Graduate sprung up.
If you have 500 sites that each make even say, $1 per day on average"

Alot of people are not making money with mini sites.
AEIOU and site Graduate sprung up to make profit from new domainers who do not have experience in making a site, or have never went full scale because alot of them, never made money on their own.

The middle man always make money, domainers creating mini sites making money? alot of them? that's very questionable.

 

[NameClerk]

The middle man always make money, domainers creating mini sites making money? alot of them? that's very questionable.

BuzzFestTickets (dot) com

I made it a month ago in about 4 hours. It's averaging about $6 a day. Not a waste of time.

 

[tech4]

BuzzFestTickets (dot) com

I made it a month ago in about 4 hours. It's averaging about $6 a day. Not a waste of time.

Thanks for sharing, and could you provide the info to how many sites you have and do they all make $6 dollars a day or $1 a day on average ?

 

[NameClerk]

Thanks for sharing, and could you provide the info to how many sites you have and do they all make $6 dollars a day or $1 a day on average ?

I'm just getting started with minisites. I've created plenty of other sites though. I've created 3 minisites but the last two are still brand new and just starting to gain traction with the search engines. The one I referenced above was the 1st site and it's ahead of schedule. Maybe I got lucky but I'm getting traffic from the keywords I targeted so things are working exactly as planned.

My goal is to have 30 sites averaging $3 each by the end of the year. I think that's a pretty modest goal. Once that's done, I want to dump those funds back into larger development projects and start building real authority sites on premium domains with plenty of content.

I think the most important thing is to have a plan and see it through. This stuff isn't rocket science especially with Wordpress but you still have to get busy and do it.

 

[gazzip]

Thats an excellent start, I bet you after its been up for a few months (3 to 5) it works its way up high on the first page of Google results, good chance it will even be number one. Then you'll really see an increase in $s

Great plan too !


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[HuntingMoon]

mini-sites work better for us if the domain has some hardlinks. for our type-ins, parking does better. it seems to me like Google is pretty hip to mini-sites because we used some services and the sites are not appearing anymore.

 

[DubDubDubDot]

A lot of people are -- hence why services like Whypark are so popular with domainers and why other sites like AEIOU and Site Graduate sprung up.

If you have 500 sites that each make even say, $1 per day on average, you're making $500 a day or about $180,000 per year. Absolutely no need to be that one authority site in your niche to do well for yourself -- just keep repeating what works.

Have you actually done this, or is it hypothetically speaking?

Even if you averaged one decent mini site every 3 days, it would take 4 years to do 500. And forget about hiring them out. Even at $200 each the info will be shoddy and the designs iffy quality, and it would cost $100,000 for 500.

 

[-REECE-]

You wouldn't be buying 500 minisites -- you'd buy a few and hopefully most domainers can get around coding enough to change the color of the minisites they do buy so they can have some variety without spending a fortune. You could also pay zero and just use Wordpress templates -- some of the free ones are pretty nice.

As Nameclerk.com posted above, he's been averaging $6 a day on a site which took him 4 hours to build. I don't know how it would take 3 days to build a minisite to be honest, even if you were doing all the coding yourself.

Of course it will be much easier if you already have decent domains that are easy to optimize for search engines (eg. when I bought LLLL.com, it was already the number three listing [I already had number 1 and 2 from a different blog of mine] for LLLL.com and first page for "LLLL" even when it was a parked page, giving it a couple hundred free monthly uniques courtesy of Google for doing nothing at all).

Even at one minisite every 3 days like you suggested, that would still have you with 500 good minisites in about 4 years, which is a pretty good turnaround time if you ask me. And no, I don't have 500 or anywhere near that at present (then again, minisites only recently caught on with domainers, so give me a few years :] ) -- just an example that making a few bucks here and there can and will add up over time. Not really any different than domaining -- you need to make $1 before you can make $2, etc. Slow and steady wins the race

Have you actually done this, or is it hypothetically speaking?

Even if you averaged one decent mini site every 3 days, it would take 4 years to do 500. And forget about hiring them out. Even at $200 each the info will be shoddy and the designs iffy quality, and it would cost $100,000 for 500.