Anyway, I think that this concept had a great welcoming, so I decided to separate it on a different site and expand it from there. Go to http://www.elegantbusinessmanual.com/ and read the previous articles, as well as some new ones. I will keep them coming if I see that people like them.

I just had my first site crashed by the sheer power of the facebook like button.

Most webmasters are familiar with the “digg effect”, or at least the effect of any major social site that suddenly sends thousands of hits per second to your site. It doesn’t have to be digg.

In order to explain this post better, I whipped up some crude shots of how I imagine the two effects.

This is how I imagine the Digg effect:

Yeap, this is what happens to a site when it gets frontpaged on Digg, or any other big social cesspool like Reddit or Stumble. Of course there are the pictures of burned servers etc, but that is the aftermath. This is the action shot.

Now, here is what happens to a site when it reaches the level of 4000 likes per hour, the Like effect:

It doesn’t seem that bad, does it? Well, lets go deeper and you will understand. When you implement the open graph protocol, you basically add some metadata to your pages so that facebook knows what to show on a user’s stream.

On your server logs, you will see this dreaded line of text:

Browser Type: facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)

That is not a visitor, that is the facebook bot pulling the metadata, every time someone loads a facebook page with an external like line.

So, if for example 100 people liked your page, and for simplicity’s sake lets say 2 of each of those people’s friends visited their profile page, you would have instant 300 metadata pulls off your site. I am sure that facebook has some sort of a short-lived caching in place, but from the practical data that I see, the metadata gets pulled quite often.

On my case, my moderate VPS crashed 10 times in a single day when people started liking and visiting and re-liking and spreading the word. I think, that facebook’s multiple servers were pulling data from my website from different locations, like the hands on the picture. Simply put, a DOS attack.

And if that doesn’t seem that bad, remember that you actually do get visitors from facebook likes. And the like plugin loads data from facebook again, to show the like count. And images get reposted on facebook streams (when the user likes and leaves a comment, RTFM), with an average of 200 friends per user. So the images get hotlinked, the site loads for the users, the metadata gets pulled every few seconds. I believe the scientific term for this is “clusterfuck”.

The worst of all is that the caching plugin didn’t help that much. Usually, with a cache you get to survive a digg effect, but in the like effect, it pulls on the server CPU and the cache does not save the day.

We still don’t know if the facebook likes have any SEO value, and the traffic is the standard low quality social one. From what I have seen, it is not viable to maintain a powerful server for viral content with low conversion rates.

Has anyone experienced the Like effect? Have you found a way to ease the impact?

Well, today I have that example, and have written the methodology of creating one.
I want to point out, that this is not the only way to make money making minisites (from now on referred to as 3m) and it is certainly not the best way. But it is a tried and true way, and can be applied even by newbies to many niches. Also, I have spent a lot of time experimenting and a lot of money trying out tools, and in this guide only the very best are mentioned. Every tool that I tell you to buy, IS, I swear, the best tool I have discovered up to now.

I will outline in this guide the creation of a 3m, as I build them, and as I market them. This is my way, and it works for me. I invite you to learn from this guide and make your own 3ms, and shape the process the way it suits you.

Lets begin.

A money making minisite, a 3m, is simply a site made for making money. Nothing else, nothing more. A perfect 3m will:

• Rank in its niche, and get organic visitors.
• Pre-sell people to buy through your affiliate link.
• Gather emails, for a niche mailing list that can be used in the future.
• Use an engine that makes it easy to change content (remember, the point is to have multiple 3ms working in parallel)
• Work as both a great landing page for ppc and a site that makes recurring income from non paid traffic

The parts that 3m consists of:

1. Wordpress
2. WFreview
3. Tweetadder
4. Aweber
5. Fatcow hosting

The concept:

I will make a minisite, for a juicy niche. I chose DSLR cameras, because they are a good trend these days, they are a narrow niche, and they are juicy products. I also chose Amazon as my affiliate link, but the concept works with any other affiliate offer, even different offers of the same niche. The idea here is to keep the choices low, never give too many options to a buyer. That is why I chose to make a top 5 dslr cameras 3m.

The content:

Since I am making a review site, I just googled for some articles that I could use, that reviewed DSLR cameras. I happened to find this article, http://www.mademan.com/top-5-dslr-cameras-summer that is perfect for the job. In other circumstances, I would just gather some reviews and combine them.
Since I am using amazon, and I now have the products that I will review, I just go to amazon.com while logged in to amazon assosiates and open up each of the five product pages. Amazon gives me a fast way to make a deeplink through the toolbar above, so I just click link to this page and then choose my tracking id. Then I choose text only, and copy the deeplink code that looks like this

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00267S7TQ?ie=UTF8&tag=glowleaf-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00267S7TQ

I gather all five of my dslr models, the Nikon D500, the Canon EOS etc and I put them in a notepad file along with their respective reviews from the article.
I also go to the product pages and gather a few of the customer reviews from Amazon, and put them in text file as well.

I also gather the product images that I need, and put them in a folder with the rest of the content.

The set-up:

For this step, I will assume that you already have hosting, and that you have a domain registrar that you prefer. If not, I suggest you get this hosting package from Fatcow, that comes with a 30% discount, a free domain, and free coupons for ppc advertising. For newbies, this is the best package right now, and the ppc coupons are perfect for the minisite we are building.
In the example I actually did use Fatcow hosting, so I just went to this offer, put in the domain name top5dslrcameras.com and clicked next. I then purchased the hosting for only 44$, and got to the control panel (after I verified my email and changed my password). I clicked Install Central, and then chose Wordpress. I put in the blog name and the admin password, clicked on “yes install to this directory even if it already exists” and clicked install now.

The blog is installed, but the domain still needs to shift and wordpress might take some time to show up, so I leave the site for now and get on to find the other pieces.

WFreview, which you can get from here, is the perfect solution to the 3m concept. In a single plugin you get the review engine, free wordpress templates that are perfect for the job and a tool that does most of the work for you.

I got wfreview, and I went inside my member account to download the theme and get the plugin. I just clicked the download link on the line WFreview 4.0 and put in my domain, top5dslrcameras.com in the box on the right. Then clicked download, and got the plugin activated for my domain. You can add as many domains as you like by the way. I also clicked the download link on the theme Side by side. The others are good also, but I prefer this one.

Ok, now with all the files gathered I go to my wordpress installation, and login as admin. From the plugins tab, I click new, upload, and I select the zip file that contains wfreview. I activate the plugin and move on to the theme. As before, from the new theme, upload page I select my theme zip file and activate it after it gets uploaded.

Most of the set-up is done, but I still need to go to wfreview categories tab. I put in the categories:

1. Price
2. Features
3. Picture quality

And click save.

At this stage, I just need to add the content.

I open up my content files, the text file, the pictures etc. I go to new post in wordpress, put the model name in the title, paste the review text and add some tags. I also upload the image of the camera, and link the image to the affiliate link I gathered earlier.
One more step, I need to go down the page, on Custom fields, and I need to add a new custom field with the name
URL
and the affiliate code for its value. I click “add custom field” and I am done. I only need to do this for the first time, for the next posts I just select the URL from the custom fields dropdown and paste the new link.

I add all 5 posts to my site, and there is one last step for the site to be ready. The 3m looks a bit weird right now, because the reviews are missing.
Again on wfreview, I go to the Generate reviews tab, and set it to generate between 3-7 reviews on all categories, and rate posts with less than 1 review.
I click Generate, and now my 3m site is ready. It looks like http://top5dslrcameras.com

Twitter:

I am going to use twitter as one of the two ways to market this 3m, so I need a twitter account by the name top5dslrcameras
I put an avatar to the account, a background and a bio. I do some fast searching for “dslr” and follow some people, just to get started.
I then close the twitter page, because I have a much better tool, called tweetadder.

This little tool is great for automating a lot of the tedious tasks in twitter marketing. With it, I can manage and automate multiple accounts. I will use it for my 3m, at first to get a lot of followers, and then to market my minisite to them.

Tweetadder is easy to learn and has a tutorial, so I will just talk about the basics here. Once I add the twitter account top5dslrcameras, I have it search for “dslr” and save all accounts to the “to be followed” database. I also manually find 2-3 twitter accounts that have a lot of followers and search for their followers in tweetadder. I add all those accounts, and then have tweetadder follow about 500 people. Then I set it up to tweet the following tweets automatically, pulled from a text file:

I leave it aside for now, but I will have tweetadder follow about 300 people every day automatically from now on.

Mailing list:

I am going to gather a mailing list for my 3m, and I am going to make it good. It might seem as too much trouble for a minisite, but it is not. The list will be small, but it will be super targeted to the niche. I will also provide more value per visitor for my ppc campaign, because I will be able to reach that visitor again in the future with new offers. A tight list works amazingly well, even a 500 person list can get you more than 30 sales.

Aweber is the perfect tool for this job, because we don’t want to get bothered much with the mailing list itself, we need a set it and forget it method. Also, the lists are small so aweber’s costs are minimal.

Now, I am going to cheat a little. I go to CJ.com and look for the software offers. I know that every serious photographer uses Adobe Lightroom, and the CS5 suite recently came out. That means that not all photographers have made the move yet. I am going to give them an incentive to make the move, a 30% discount link. But, I am going to give them the coupon after they subscribe to my mailing list. Bear in mind, that you can find discount offers on almost every software, and you can find software that suits every niche. That is the idea here.

So, I set up a new aweber list, and create a lightbox form. I write on the form something like “Get a 30% discount on Adobe Lightroom. Put your email here to receive the coupon (you will need to confirm your email)”

Then I just set the autoresponder to email the link back.

I install the email form on my theme, I just paste the code at the file home.php, after the body tag.

PPC:

Now that my site is ready, I will make a ppc campaign for it. If you got the hosting from the link above, you will also get advertising coupons. You can use those coupons to drive some traffic to the 3m and see which source converts the best.

The only advice here is to take it slow, use low budgets until you know what you are doing but the most important thing is to keep it narrow. For example, my keyword list for the top5dslrcameras.com is this:

After trying for months with adwords campaigns and struggling with quality scores, I found out how to get impossible QS.

The trick is simple, make a video ad and promote it on youtube. The ad will get 7/10 and above in QS, with many keywords being perfect 10.

Making a video ad is a bit tricky, you need to click on “New ad”, then “Display ad builder”. Then you click audio and video and search for your promo video, or you can make one ad using the templates shown in the ad builder. It is soooo easy, don’t be intimidated. Then you can select placement targeting youtube.com and throw in your normal keywords.

The video ad needs to be short in length, and of course it will not perform as well as a text ad targeted directly to your page, but the QS tradeoff will make it worthwhile in most campaigns.

I am such an idiot for not thinking of this before. Fuck!

This is a worldwide event that is comparable to Christmas concerning us affiliates.

Now, my hot tip is this:
Promote Unibet. Hard.

Why is Unibet perfect for promotion?

• They have an amazing website. It is fast too.
• The site is multilingual. Screw the overpriced English speaking traffic, the world is your oyster.
• The customer is hooked. If he won’t bet, he will play Blackjack. If he gets tired of that, there are games to pass the time, etc etc.
• You get 30% lifetime, up to 40% with enough volume. It adds up longterm into some serious income.
• They are not that well known yet. Bwin, the leader in the niche, has saturated the target group regarding new signups. People who bet usually have multiple accounts in all companies. Unibet is as good as Bwin, but not that saturated yet.
• They will be releasing a great tool during the World Soccer Cup, with built in viral features and a great design. It will also be multilingual. It will be a hit, and it is coming in less than a month.

Let me repeat myself:

Promote Unibet. Hard.

It looks like this:

and you can get it from the Facebook developer pages here. Customize it the way you want it and voila! It is ready to get slapped in your pages.

I love this little piece of code for many reasons.

1. It is minimal, and it fits every website. You cannot possibly argue with your designer about integrating this widget. I mean, come on. Even the background is transparent.
2. It shows pictures of people’s friends. I can’t even begin to talk about how awesome that is. Instead of those ugly boxes for facebook pages that show a bunch of strangers, this widget shows the users friends faces. People just want to click it.
3. It shows a count of people who liked this. Crowd mentality here, if people see that 100 others liked it, they will like it too.
4. The code geolocates to the user’s native language setting on facebook. Yea, awesome.
5. Facebook has made the “Like” feature a reflex to all casual facebook users. Put the code in the right position and visitors will like it on autopilot.
6. It actually brings traffic.
7. Sneezers (see Seth Godin) who like your page are going to bring their pack. And a pack’s interests are usually common amongst its members.
8. It is a one click deal. Even though Facebook share is optimized to the heavens for fast sharing of internet goodyness, it is still 2-3 clicks too long. This little baby is ONE CLICK. ONE.

Seriously, just try it.

Feedburner has recently added a “post to twitter” feature. It is under your feed’s Publisize, Socialize.

Not a groundbreaking feature really, but what I love about it is that there is an option to pull the post’s tags and generate hashtags. Yeah, that is one nifty little feature that makes your tweets pop up in twittersearch. That of course, if you use real tags, and not the tags I use on this blog that suck…

Aweber has recently added a new form generator, with some really cool options. Time to update those crappy forms and get  web2.0

I know all you IM gurus have put the dollar sign form. Don’t. Please don’t. It is a cliche before it even got posted.

Since we are talking about forms, I am going to repeat an opinion that I wrote about a long time ago:

Your contact form only needs name, email and comment.

If you ask for more, fuck you. A few days ago I tried to contact an affiliate company I work with, and their only means was through a contact form. And that contact form required (REQUIRED) my affiliate ID and my contact details, WHILE I WAS STILL LOGGED IN THEIR SYSTEM. For fucks sake, get a programmer will ya? Needless to say, I closed the page and they never got my feedback.

Make it easy for people to reach you. Their time is precious.

One other thing I am happy with, is the new Wordpress 3. It is still in beta, so no live application of it yet, but it rocks. It simply rocks.

• It is finally a usable CMS. You can finally manage your menu easily, not jerk around with page orders and parents and css tricks.
• They finally removed that stupid random admin password during installation. I remember that this was the issue with automatic mass wordpress installations, maybe now it will become a breeze.
• There is a new theme. Who gives a shit.
• You can change headers and background pics for that new theme. Could be useful for seasonal stuff, or sponsored backgrounds?
• And there is a custom post feature, that enables you to get posting the way you want to. Nice one.
• They also say that Wordpress 3 is integrated with MU, and that from now on they will be developed in parallel. No more plugin issues? I doubt it, but we will see.

After all, code is poetry.

In the beta, you just switch a few domains from your standard parked domain portfolio over to Fastpark. You add their keywords and categories, as normal. And then you hit “publish”.

After a few minutes, the autosites go live and you can edit them and custom tailor them to what you want.

Here is a screenshot of the beta editing interface:

As you can clearly see from the screenshot (you have to click it, duh…), you can easily and quickly change colours, columns, widgets etc. On the optimize button you can add meta data for better seo.

The current widgets are fine by themselves:

• Text adds a text box that you specify, just like in wordpress
• Blog entries does not seem to work yet
• Image uploads an image from your drive
• Widget is for custom widgets, i.e. amazon?
• Affiliate code is where you put your affiliate codes directly in the page
• Bookmark just adds the well known widget bookmark everything
• CPC ads puts a box that pulls ads like Adsense
• Chat room adds a “room” with javascript IRC goodyness.
• News pulls news articles based on a keyword you specify.
• Photos adds photos from the web based on a keyword you specify.
• RSS feed is, yes! An RSS feed you specify. Propably the most powerful feature. You can put your own site’s feeds, or product feeds with affiliate codes, or whatever.
• Search box adds a redundant search box. There is another one on top.
• Full page widgets are very powerful, they are filled with pictures and article snippets and even ads. A single one of them makes the site look like a real one. Currently, there are only a few choices but this is still beta. The themes are Lottery, Horoscope, entertainment, stocks, swimsuit models (yes, babes), recipes, soccer, mortgages, MPG ratings,  sudoku (!), flight tracking, fitness videos. They are great so far, and I am sure that upon Fastpage’s launch there will be enough to feed the world.
• Flights shows up a flights search box, with aff links. You get a part of the payout.
• Hotels, same as above.
• Jobs shows job listings, you can put in a keyword, or leave it black and let it geolocate. Yup, awesome.
• Local directory, same as above.
• Products (affiliate) pulls product feeds based on keyword, with per sale commission where as,
• Products (CPC) does the same, but you earn per click. Pretty good if you ask me.
• And finally property listings pulls data based on zip code, or if left black it geolocates.

It generally is an awesome feature, but still in the early days of beta. The interface is simple yet powerful, and it enables you to manage, optimize and monetize a large portfolio of parked domains. Especially Fastpage is a true example of set-it-and-forget-it, you do the work once, you let it work forever.

It is still early to judge results, but I suggest that you add the RSS feeds to your fastpages so that they remain fresh to the bots.

Click this to Signup at Namedrive.

Of course there might be tools and plugins out there that perform better. These are just what I use.

First of all, lets talk about the concept. An affiliate minisite must:

• Be deployed in a narrow niche.
• Be automated.
• Provide revenue.
• Rank well inside its niche.

I always use wordpress, so I got the ranking a step higher right from the start. A narrow niche needs some keyword research and some planning, but in the end all you can do is to try it and see what happens.

I suggest that you get a juicy main keyword in your domain, it will help a ton with ranking.

Wordpress not only ranks well, but it also comes with a nice bunch of plugins for automating the minisite.

What I like to use are the following ones:

• Feedwordpress
• Tweet this
• Realvms
• Digg-digg
• Next gen gallery
• WP super cache
• WP e-commerce
• WFReview
• And Thesis theme, not a plugin, but it has so many abilities that it honestly counts as one. Make sure to get Thesis Open hook plugin if you use the theme, it will make your life a lot easier.

Feedwordpress syndicates RSS feeds to add to your minisite. But it is not only useful as a splog maker. It can also keep a minisite fresh with content, without looking spammy. How? By having it pull RSS feeds from social bookmarking sites. I suggest you use Digg search results RSS for juicy snippety action! And the best thing is, that it is all current and popular.

Tweet this can automatically tweet the post you publish. The newest version also auto-tweets scheduled posts, which is awesome. I use this in a technique I call, “crier”. It is simple really, you make a twitter account dedicated to your minisite. You setup the account, pic, link, background and add a few friends to it. Then you put Tweet this to tweet your new posts. That way, the twitter account acts as a crier for your minisite. It is simple, easy, and works fine.

RealVMS is one of the powerhouses. What it does, is automatically scrape youtube and embed videos in posts. All along with their comments and tags. How awesome is that? Yes, pretty awesome. Did I mention it can automatically bookmark the video to Delicious? Just add a new category, “keyword + videos” or something like that, and have the plugin add new vids daily.

Digg Digg is one of my favourite social bookmarking plugins, because of the large buttons that pull the bookmark count from the mothersite. I love it. Don’t overdo it, most sites are useless. Stick to the big ones.

Next gen gallery is well known to everyone. I use it as a little cheat, I always gather some pictures of the niche, and add them in the minisite’s gallery. I social bookmark them, and it pulls a nice bit of traffic that way, plus some image hotlinks. The fine touch is that this plugin’s widgets look amazing, I always add random thumbnails to the sidebar.

WP super cache is great for lifting the load off your server. If it works right off the bat, you are lucky. If something conflicts with this plugin, you are pretty much screwed. Everything seems to hate it. Nonetheless, it is worth trying to load it because it works amazingly well.

WP e-commerce is free, and has a premium for addons. In its basic use, it can be used to create minisites/ministores. Yes, they work great. It also has a buggy import feature, which means you can import a product feed from any affiliate network. If you pull it off, it will work like a charm. Your ministore can then be added here, which if approved, will bring a trickle of valuable traffic.

WFReview was discussed in the previous post. It is a powerhouse in regards to making minisites, and it synergises so well with the previous plugins. Trust me, if you see a minisite, with thumbnails on the sidebar, posted videos with today’s date, news snippets to Digg, and a bunch of ratings and comments on the posts you will doubt whether this is autogenerated or not. It is a premium plugin, but it is well worth it.

I know that the tricks I use are rather well known, or seem trivial. The thing is that when used all together, they amount to a nice sum of traffic and ranking to my minisite. Coupled with the right offer, the minisite is profitable.

Now, how to make the minisite profitable? Well, you really should not ask that. The monetization methods of a minisite should be made beforehand, while in the early stage of planning. Generally, I like to use 2 monetization methods, one being affiliate links, and the second being ppc, Adbrite or Adsense. If and when the minisite matures, I like to add a third monetization method, selling text links. Selling links is perfect, because it eliminates the upkeep cost of the minisite and is very stable.

The build I do to each of my minisites is rather complicated, but I will try and break it down here. This is an analysis of the points above, so I can’t help but repeat myself:

• Base articles.
• Sidebar widgets.
• Crier and auto-bookmark.
• Fresh videos.
• Fresh social news.
• PPC monetization.
• Aff text link monetization.
• Set it and forget it banners.
• Mailing list creation.
• SEO, by hotlinks, social bookmarks and tags.

Base articles, are usually 10-15 that I write or order related to the niche. They are my base SEO, and I carefully select titles, I post them with proper tags etc, and social bookmark them for the initial SEO boost. Then I just forget about them.

Sidebar widgets are the Next gen gallery thumbnail random preview, which looks very nice. Also, the recent comments widget, to show the site is active. WP-ecommerce can also show “products”, which looks very professional.

The crier is the twitter account that announces the new posts from the minisite. I sometimes add twitterfeed to this, and blend in affiliate links from some network’s RSS feed. The auto-bookmark is done by RealVMS, to delicious.

The fresh videos are put in a category, like “keyword+videos” by RealVMS.

Fresh news are usually found at http://digg.com/rss_search?s=keyword or any other social bookmarking site’s custom RSS feed.

For PPC monetization I use Adsense, a single ad space in the most prominent place, above the fold. Don’t overdo it.

Aff text link monetization is done either with:

• Hand-made pages linking to offers.
• Auto replaced keyword by WFReview to aff links.
• Product feeds turned into posts with their aff links.

Set it and forget it banners Amazon Omakase, product or category banner. I also love Unibet for casino, betting and poker banners. Their dynamic banners are constantly optimized and updated, so you don’t have to. Just add the code and let them do the rest.

Mailing list creation is done quite easily and automatically by Aweber. The lists are small, so the cost is negligible. Aweber has a signup form that is perfect for this job, the box popup that you also see on this blog. The minisite will slowly harvest those emails, and once they reach a respectable number you can blast some offers to the niche. Remember, the lists might be small, but they are targeted.

SEO is integrated in all parts of the minisite. The base articles make the foundation, the domain chosen is always with a juicy keyword in it. Auto-bookmark helps. The image gallery invites some hotlinks. The videos are embedded with their tags in the posts, which makes wordpress rank great. The RSS scrapes are relevant and have lots of variations. For the minisites that make consistent cash, I usually throw up a TNX campaign so it can rank for my keyword. That last thing works very well, but it is costly, so it is only viable on high-profit minisites.

Design tip: You can use Greenbox logo maker to make a cool looking logo for your minisite in no time. It will help sell it better.

As you can see, each minisite created that way takes a lot of thought and work to create. But you must see it as a long term investment, because each of these sites will create a revenue stream that is stable and long lasting.