Microsites and how to Use them

'What is a microsite?' you may well ask... If you've never come across the term before, it's about time that you learnt about them and how you can use them to make money for you.

With the Google AdSense program you can place ads on your own site and gain money from these ads (if you're not already a member then you can use the adsense link on the left-hand panel to join the program). Am microsite (sometimes called a minisite) is a site designed to drive AdSense traffic to a domain of yours. Such a site is usually eight to twenty pages in total and it's specifically written around a single highly-specific topic (for an example see this credit card information site of mine. The site is designed like any big site, with site links and contact pages and a sitemap. There's also real content on each and every page and this is something that the search engines love, proper content. The site is also optimized in that each header and each link contains text that relates to the site's keywords.

As a result of this the site is Search Engine Optimized (or SEO'd to use the current acronym). This improves the site's overall rankings in Google and overall gives you a higher ranking and therefore brings more traffic to your site and the aim of all money-making websites is to attract more traffic. Ultimately, the more people who visit your site the more money you will make...

Depending on the subject a single AdSense minisite will make you between $15 and $60 every month (though it can be more for some sites). For a single site this doesn't really sound like very much, however, as this income can be gained for each and every minisite you have then you can multiply this income stream by twenty, a hundred or even two hundred fold. This is when the monthly income starts to mount up.

I can hear you asking: 'But how can I generate 100 or more sites like this — won't it take forever?' with all the code and the images the first of these websites did take me about four evenings (24 hours) to complete. But I knew that I'd be creating many more of these, so I designed the code to be completely portable and easy to replicate for any website I wished. Indeed, the code is so portable that I'm making it available for FREE to anyone who wants to deploy their own. After that first site it takes me on average two evenings (12 hours) to make a new site live (and this includes all the research and the images!).

Admittedly this isn't my main income stream any more, but the 20-odd microsites that I currently have 'live' still make me a very nice income every month. Moreover this is a very low-maintencance way of generating income. I spot my niche, but a related domain name, create my microsite on my normal hosting plan, point the new domain name at the directory containing the site and the system goes live. To boost initial traffic and get links to the new site I'll write a few articles to be published on various article sites. These articles usually go 'live' in a week and within two weeks I generally see both traffic and income starting to emerge from the microsite.

Even if you can only spend two evenings a week generating your microsite you should have at least 40 such sites up and running within a year which should see you generating at least $400 a month by the end of the year as long as you've chosen your niches well.

One thing to remember is that you're looking for niches with little competition to maximize your traffic and your Google ranking. However, there's no point in making your site too focused otherwise you will have insufficient traffic. The adage here being first do your research. Think of your niche, then think of some keywords related to that niche. Once you have these use Google to perform a search and see how many competitors you have in the niche area. Remember to have a look at some of the top-ranking pages. After all, there may be many thousands of pages in your chosen niche but you may be able to provide better content than any of them and thus you can still come out top of the rankings. It's a question of balance and knowing a little about what you're doing and how you're going to market your site.

If you already have a domain and some server space you will lose noting by giving this a try and it might just make you a tidy extra income!