Mar 28

Minisites

Blogs, Doodling, Feed the Spiders, Fire and Forget, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, RGBhat, Techniques 6 Comments »

Lately I have been spending my time creating minisites. Through a lot of trial and error, I have gathered some tools that I prefer and some setups that work for me.

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 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.

Popularity: 1% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , ,

Mar 27

Taking WFReview to the next level

Blogs, Fire and Forget, Heavy construction, Techniques 1 Comment »

Today I am going to talk about a premium wordpress plugin, called WFReview.

Since most of my readers are also Wickedfire members, you probably know of WFReview already. Whether you already own WFReview or not, I suggest you read on. There are plenty of tips.

WFReview is rather simple, it enables you to import csv files into templated posts, and adds a rating feature. Yes, the five star thingie.

What is so great about this plugin, is that when used right, it can supercharge an otherwise crawling site. How? I will show you.

First of all, the import function works great. I have never had a problem even with huge csv files, and even when I did, it proved out to be my fault. The csv import can be automated, to keep a site such as a niche store up to date. WFReview can be set up via a cron job to fetch an updated csv file from FTP. That csv file could be an auto updated product export from Commission Junction for example (it can be found under Account-Services-Create product export in your CJ panel).

Most sites will have no need for that, but automation is always good to have.

WFReview can also be used as a massive site generator. With the right csv data, you can generate a blog thousands of pages long in no time. It will also look good if you dedicate enough time to it… The custom template for the posts is where you need to put most of your attention. Make a test csv file 2-3 rows high and test and re-test the template until you get it right. Don’t forget that this is plain html, which means you can add whatever you like, clickable product thumbnails, buttons, similar posts code etc. Just do it right, its the most important step.

Now, how do you get those csv’s?

There are plenty of options:

  • Google them. You can search for filetypes you know.
  • Generate them at google squared. Here is the square for “space shuttles” for example. The squares can be cleaned up manually, then exported as csv files. I suggest similar categories, e.g. horror movies, action movies, comedy movies.
  • Get them at factual. It is still in beta, but there is a wealth of data in there.

Ok, then. Lets say you generated a couple of those massive post blogs. What now. How do you monetize them?

WFReview makes it easy. There is a keyword rewrite function, which lets you automatically rewrite any keyword to a link. It is under the “Affiliate links” tab. Yes, fill it up with your aff links. I told you it rocks. But don’t use it only like that. Use it to link to your moneysite’s posts, deeplinking with nice anchor text while keeping it clean.

Another cool feature of WFReview is the “Generate reviews” function. It basically creates fake reviews, randomly votes of stars in your posts. It is really good, but you need to keep a few things in mind:

  • It doesn’t comment. Of course, a rating looks ok by itself.
  • Put a small number of ratings, like 3-17. The problem is that the randomizer ends up averaging the ratings, and if you put too many, you end up with 2000 posts all with 2,5 rating. It doesn’t look natural, and it defeats its original purpose.
  • Voter’s names are pulled from two files, one for male names and one for female. The files are plain text, firstname_female.txt and firstname_male.txt. The problem is that noone on the internet actually signs with their first name. Just check out WOW, for all those druuuids and Gand@lfs and Legolasses. Instead, I created a username list that I use, that I feel is more realistic. You can download it here.
  • The autogenerated comments are great, but what is really great is that rating forces interactivity in your site. Make sure to put a “Recent comments” widget in your sidebar, and fine-tune the rating classes and the whole layout to provoke rating from the real visitors. Auto comments are fine, but their real purpose is to kick-start the site. Remember that.

To summarise, WFReview is an amazingly powerful tool. It enables you to make great affiliate sites. I strongly encourage you to buy it, but only if you are willing to take the time and utilize this powerhouse to its fullest.

Did I mention that all future updates are free?

Click here to Buy WFReview

Popularity: 2% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , , ,