I have to warn you though. I haven’t quite mastered the art of building mini sites but I hope that this article will still prove useful to you.

For everyone who thinks about creating a mini site I can only say: Simply try it. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot of things while creating these mini sites and that’s why I will keep on creating more of them. The most important thing you shouldn’t underestimate with building mini sites is that you gain lots of experience especially concerning SEO.

My Experiment

I created my two first mini sites 2-3 months ago and simply wanted to see whether it would be worth it and whether it’s easy to make money through them.

Travel Mini Site

My first mini site is a travel related site. On it I simply offer information on traveling. This includes pictures from trips I did and lots of other things. With my travel mini site I haven’t tried too much out yet and to be honest the only way I am trying to make money through it is by using Adsense in combination with Amazon’s affiliate network.

To say the least I haven’t made any money through it. Not through Adsense and also not through Amazon’s program. The reason might be one of very obvious thing: Not enough traffic.

I haven’t really put much effort into building links for this web site. The funny thing was that the mini site immediately started ranking number one on Yahoo, probably because of the domain name. Still this doesn’t mean anything since I haven’t really gotten a lot of traffic from Yahoo and other search engines.

Here are some details about the site:
Backlinks: 9
PR: 0

So you can see that I haven’t really created a lot of links back to the site. Thus the traffic is … well you can’t really call it traffic Here are the analytics stats:

You can see that there is not a lot going on. Still I think it’s a great way to see that the visitors are highly interested in the content because of the high Avg. Time on Site and Pages/Visit. Note that you have to take into account that this mini site has only around 6 webpages.

Public Speaking Mini Site

I create this mini site because I wanted to create a site where I would simply focus on promoting a product. Much like Glen has done it with his Bookmarking Demon mini site.

My site is solely focused on selling a product within the public speaking niche. The website itself only has two pages and the main page solely focuses on getting people to want to buy the product.

I haven’t made money through that site either (seems like I am not very good at). Again the reason can be multiple things. Maybe the people I am driving to my website aren’t really interested in buying the product. On the other hand it could still be the problem with the low traffic. The last excuse I know of is that I am doing a poor job of selling the product.

The reason why I haven’t done anything about it is that I wanted it to rank well in Google before doing any major testing or changes. That way I would get enough traffic to be sure that the data I am collecting is reliable. That’s why I have done some more link building for this website:
Backlinks: 50
PR: 0

As you can see from below the website gets around 150-200 pageviews per month. This is not much but again I am not promoting this website and all this traffic is solely coming through my link building efforts.

The interesting thing to see here is that this mini site differs completely from the other one. You can immediately see that the Avg. Time on Site and Pages/Visit are way lower than the ones of my travel mini site. The reason is of course is that it’s built to sell a product. Keep in mind that this mini site has only two pages so the maximum Pages/Visit would be 2.

So this is all I can really tell you by now about my mini sites. As you can see I haven’t been that successful but that doesn’t matter that much to me because I have learned so much along the way.

What do you think about this experiment? Do you think it’s worth it to build mini sites? Was this useful to you?

A web site isn’t worth anything without traffic. And because of that people have developed different strategies to generate more traffic.

Link building is one of them. As the name implies, it’s a way of getting links back to your web site. This will ultimately lead to more people visiting your web site.

This article will cover the art of link building through forums. It further talks about hidden problems that you will eventually encounter and more importantly about how to avoid them.

The first and essential part of link building is choosing a relevant web site from which to get links. In our case we are going to look at forums.

Choosing Relevant Forums

The first key aspect to successful link building is choosing a forum that is relevant to the topics you talk about on your web site. If you are writing about blogging then a forum which contains information about blogging would be suitable.

For every topic that exists, there are forums readily available on the Internet, even if you write about uncommon topics. To find these forums you could simply use Google. Enter something like yourtopic forum and off you go. You should be able to find at least 3 different forums. Now that you got forums to choose from simply decide on which forum would suit the best. We can than work on creating links.

Our Strategy

Before jumping ahead and creating lots of links, let me say a few things concerning our strategy: We want our link building efforts to look natural and legitimate since that’s what they are. Strategies such as spamming forums will cause more harm than good to your web site.

If 90% of your links come only from forums then this just looks wrong. Do not only use forums to create links to your web site, it will look artificial. You also have to avoid to always use the anchor text to link back to your web site. If you are not sure what the anchor text is than take a look at the picture below. In the signature are 3 links (they are underlined). In the first case the anchor text of the link is Experiment Garden.

Now that we got the basics let’s move on to the actual link building.

Forum Signatures

Throughout forums signatures are used. These signatures are a way of telling other people what web sites you own and how people can contact you. It is basically the forum version of a business card.

The Troubling Signature

As seen in the picture, people use this signature to link back to their web site. There is just one problem: The signature never changes. If the signature never changes then that means that will have lots of links back to your web site with the same anchor, which is what we originally wanted to avoid.

We have to change the anchor text from time to time in order to look genuine. If you want to change your signature in your profile page of the forum it will be changed  in every thread you have written on. Then you would only have a different signature but one that is still the same in every post. Therefore this doesn’t help.

Using Custom Signatures

Instead of using always the same signature, there are people out there that use a custom signature, meaning one that changes all the time but that is not really a signature after all.
In forums it is common to use a long line to indicate the end of the post and the beginning of the author’s signature. Instead of using your default signature you can create your own one different for every post. All you really need to do is just copy the line, that indicates the beginning of the signature. Then you add a new line below it and enter your custom link with custom keywords. The next step is to simply paste it into the message you are posting in the forum. And you are done.
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My Custom Signature

The great advantage of a custom signature is that you are always able to change it. Also keep in mind that in order to make it work, you need to uncheck the box which says to add your default signature as otherwise you would have two signatures below each other.

The next time you post something to the forum you just follow the steps mentioned above but use a different signature. That way you will have lots of links pointing to your web site.

Embedding Links into Your Forum Content

A better way to generate links and also traffic is to add links to the words you post on forums. If someone needs help with building a blog, why not give him some good advice containing links, one of which is pointing to an article of yours that talks about how to build a blog. This is the best way to gain links and also traffic through forums, because search engines also look at the context of the link to determine whether it’s important. A forum signature then is not as important as a link embedded in the post you just created.

It is further more natural for people to follow links that are embedded in content.

Conclusion

The best way to truly generate relevant links from forums is to use a mixture of both strategies I talked about. Just keep in mind that the relevancy of the links is very important.

What do you think of the strategies? Have they worked for you?

Link Building Strategy

The strategy is pretty simple.

1. buy advertisement on a web site for a low price (it probably works better on blogs)
2. renew the ad purchase every month
3. repeat step 1 and 2 until your web site’s ranking has increased

Well, where is the strategy? The strategy is as simple as that but it’s a trick that makes it worth using

The Trick

The problem with Text-Link-Ads is that the price for an ad region is automatically calculated based on a special algorithm. If you build content on your web site or blog the price for your ad region will automatically increase over time.

But the advertiser, once he keeps renewing his advertisement placing, has to only pay the price which he paid for at the beginning.

For example my initial ad region price was around $15 in the early days, per text link per month.
After a while advertisers started to sign up for $15 and paid this price every month. In the meantime the price of my ad region had eventually gone up because more and more advertisers purchased a text link. Two months later my price was around $20 but the advertisers still paid $15.

This strategy allows advertisers to pay relatively little money and in turn also profit from the boost in PageRank and traffic the publisher’s web sites gets over time.

What do you know for link building strategies?