Making a Domain earn £1 a week

[purg]

For .com domains and UK content and target audience its essential that you get UK hosting.

Re capping throught some old posts, the above comment is not true from a SEO point of view.

I mainly have co.uk domains but hosting on US servers because of price.
The main site ive been plugging lately a .ORG.UK is ranked 2 in google for a reasonable search string "uk domain drop"

Ive always not bothered with SEO holding my luck to the gods. But from this example it does seem hosting location might not be looked at any longer?

Either that or ive totally missed the point of SEO again lol

 

[monaghan]

A .uk on a non-UK server should generally be fine as the domain suggests a UK audience and for SEO purposes will generally be classed as UK content. The main issue is with non .uk's as the search engines often use the server location to determine the audience, so for a .com aimed at UK, then host in the UK, for a .com aimed at multiple audiences, then host in the country of the largest audience. Some will suggest hosting .uk's on a UK server has a benefit, my experience does suggest this is the case.

For UK audience, a UK server will often outperform a similiar US server as the network round trip is shorter than crossing to the USA, this may become more significiant as the uptake of broadband gives more "customers" fast Internet access. UK servers generally cost more than US servers, so it's really a case of evaluating each hosted site and picking the best option for that site.

 

[ScottJ]

Google Webmaster Central allows you to state your target country or location now so that hosting issues and targetting problems are dead and buried.

 

[monaghan]

This only helps Google traffic and does not address the speed issues though. Evaluate per domain is still the best option.

 

[melat0nin]

I have just launched my third minisite - NoisyNeighbours.net

It follows the same layout as my other two, but I've added a couple of extra pages and I wrote (and researched) significantly more content for this site. Still had it finished within a day though.

I'm experimenting by not linking profusely to it. Several people in this thread seem to have had success with minimal SE 'marketing', so I'm going to try that too -- after my experience with my ScottishRealEstate.co.uk falling off Google for no reason whatsoever, I want to make sure I do nothing this time that will hurt my new site's ranking.

Any tips would be great! There are no links to the site anywhere as yet - if I am going to create some, do you think having one from this forum (i.e. by editing this post to contain a working link) is the best place to start, since this is a thread about making money with adsense?

Many thanks again to everyone for this amazing thread, this noob is learning lots and although no money has been made yet, I'm hopeful!

Anyone have any comments on my approach? Do you think this forum is the best place to start building links? And, does the 'au naturale' approach (no promotion whatsoever) really work?

I earned my first click yesterday - 59p! 41p more and NoisyNeighbours.net will have paid itself off. It was quite a buzz seeing a return!

 

[Munders]

I dont have any advice as i am just starting out myself. I was just wondering if you built your own pages or did you get templates from somewhere

 

[melat0nin]

I dont have any advice as i am just starting out myself. I was just wondering if you built your own pages or did you get templates from somewhere

I got my template for those sites from www.oswd.org, but I edited them quite a bit by changing colours and some layout elements (usually I would code them myself but the whole point of this is getting them done quickly so getting a standards compliant template is definitely a good idea).

I'm looking for a new template for another domain I've just registered (the one I've been using isn't 100% suitable) and here are some other resources for free templates that I've found:

http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/
http://www.oswd.org/
http://www.openwebdesign.org/

Google finds others but they seem to have the biggest selection.

 

[BFTUK]

Re capping throught some old posts, the above comment is not true from a SEO point of view.

I mainly have co.uk domains but hosting on US servers because of price.
The main site ive been plugging lately a .ORG.UK is ranked 2 in google for a reasonable search string "uk domain drop"

Ive always not bothered with SEO holding my luck to the gods. But from this example it does seem hosting location might not be looked at any longer?

Either that or ive totally missed the point of SEO again lol

If you read my post i said if using a domain such as a .com you need UK hosting, if you use a country specific TLD such as .co.uk you can host it anywhere.

 

[melat0nin]

I've added a paraphrased article from NoisyNeighbours.net to the three big article sites, and I've submitted it to dmoz.org (pending entry). What other free link building strategies should I try?

 

[Munders]

There are some really nice templates on those sites. You mentioned that you were looking for some more as yours were not stable. Are they from the links you posted?

 

[melat0nin]

Just uploaded another minisite, Regrouting.net. I've streamlined my approach now and I managed to knock it together in about an hour, including content.

Over the past week I've made just under $6 from two of my minisites, which is nothing but at least NoisyNeighbours.net has managed to pay for itself! Haven't had any clicks in the past couple of days, but I was pleased with the CTR when I was getting clicks - traffic as low as 9-10 visitors and a couple of clicks. That seems promising, I must have picked decent niches.

All that remains now is to keep finding decent niches and building minisites, and to try and link build.

Having said that, I've noticed that the Long Tail is really effective - I'm getting traffic from the most obscure searches, which is really gratifying!

 

[rob]

This seemed the most relevant thread, I have been building up a few minisites and a few 'farmed' mini sites totalling over 500

If anyone is looking for link exchanges, either general or niche let me know.

Anyone with music related minisites get in touch as well as that is one area I am looking to hammer

Get in touch on rob atsign hey.co.uk rather than PM.

Cheers,
Rob.

 

[melat0nin]

Changing host

Hi all

I'm planning to add a comments feature to one of my minisites, but the host it is on at the moment does not support the PHP needed for the script. I have copied the site to another host I use, and installed the script, and all I would need to do to make the whole thing operational is to change the DNS of the domain to the DNS of the new host.

Is this likely to affect my ranking? Will SEs even notice the change? It should be pretty quick; both hosts have in general been very snappy at changing DNS entries.

Advice appreciated

 

[melat0nin]

New minisite

I'm picking up the momentum with minisites now, in partnership with my brother-in-law.

We've just launched http://www.hangingwallpaper.net

I'm going to try and order the ads properly so that the big square gets the prime ads.. but this doesn't seem to be too easy, even with CSS. Anyone got any tips on this? It would be great if Google would let you define an ID for each ad, so you could specify which should be treated as first in the page.

 

[paulc]

From everyone's experience with the mini sites, are many ranking consistently well, or do they simply rank well for the first few months and then vanish from the rankings.

 

[miked]

From everyone's experience with the mini sites, are many ranking consistently well, or do they simply rank well for the first few months and then vanish from the rankings.

I've always found that sites that are simply put up and left alone are more likely to disappear than ones that show a gradual expansion, in terms of both content and links. Suppose it's all down to what Google terms 'trust': a site that's thrown up quickly and then not touched looks more suspicious than one that has care and attention paid to it, and therefore fares less well.

Problem with mini sites is that if you have many it's difficult to look after all of them unless you have a gang of tame SEO monkeys...

Mike.

 

[melat0nin]

New minisite!

Just launched my 7th minisite, MyCeramicStraighteners.net. What do you guys think of having 'my' at the start of the domain? I know long tail is the way forward, but having the keywords in the domain name is certainly beneficial in my experience. Do you think the 'my' will in any way prejudice this? I'm inclined to think it won't (I have other domains which get successfully searched on one of the keywords in the domain name) but I'd be interested to hear your opinions.

 

[melat0nin]

Any thoughts on having 'my' at the start of the domain?

I've had another thought - if you have a keyword phrase you want to register as a domain, for example 'mobile phones', if the standard domain isn't available (i.e. mobilephones.com, mobilephones.net etc) would a domain with a hyphen between the keywords have as much success in terms of search traffic and a minisite? (i.e. mobile-phones.com, mobile-phones.net)?

Obviously the likelihood of getting a domain with the hyphen is much higher than getting one without it, so if it works then it could open up a lot of possibilities.

 

[jhulott]

My My My

I have just done exactly that with a few sites.

www.mypetinsuranceexpert.co.uk www.mylifeinsuranceexpert.co.uk

I think it will work okay. The pet site has only been live a month and it is now a PR3 so I'm doing something right!

It also sounds better. I think hyphens are okay but only use 1 if you can help it. I have domains with several in such as www.uk-diets-online.co.uk and they don't roll off the tongue nor would then get direct traffic as people won't remember it. But they are then keyword loaded.

Just my 2p

 

[melat0nin]

I have just done exactly that with a few sites.

www.mypetinsuranceexpert.co.uk www.mylifeinsuranceexpert.co.uk

I think it will work okay. The pet site has only been live a month and it is now a PR3 so I'm doing something right!

It also sounds better. I think hyphens are okay but only use 1 if you can help it. I have domains with several in such as www.uk-diets-online.co.uk and they don't roll off the tongue nor would then get direct traffic as people won't remember it. But they are then keyword loaded.

Just my 2p

That's great to hear! I've bought two today on the basis of your advice, it will be interesting to see if they are successful